NONFICTION - Feb. 27, 1994

CUTTING FOR SIGN by William Langewiesche (Pantheon: $23; 247 pp.). “Cutting for sign,” as the phrase is used by trackers, describes the act of following quarry--searching the land for footprints, tire treads, unsettled vegetation and other spoor left by the pursued. William Langewiesche, a correspondent for the Atlantic, in this skillfully written book, cuts for sign along the U.S.-Mexican border, looking to understand how it affects those who live along it. The volume is dominated by immigration, jobs and drug-smuggling, issues that highlight and in many ways define the uneasy and unequal relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. In San Ysidro, California, Langewiesche spends an evening with a Border Patrol supervisor--like the author, the son of immigrants--who says, “If you want action, this job’s better than the E ticket at Disneyland”; more than a million people are apprehended crossing the border illegally every year, swamping every conceivable effort to stop them. In Fort Huachuca, Ariz., Langewiesche (a pilot himself) flies with the U.S. Customs Service and learns similar things about the drug trade: A series of enormous tethered surveillance balloons helps Customs spot suspicious aircraft, but most of the smugglers get through nonetheless--with those that don’t occasionally mooning the agency’s pilots, knowing that even caught red-handed they can fly unimpeded back to Mexico. In Matamoros and Nogales, the Mexican cities twinning Brownsville, Tex., and Nogales, Ariz., respectively, Langewiesche explores the maquiladoras , the assembly factories set up by non-Mexican companies to take advantage not only of low wages but unenforced environmental standards and uncomplaining, uneducated workers; the Mexicans often can’t read warning signs written in English. “Cutting for Sign” is difficult to define, being travelogue, memoir, reportage and analysis rolled into one, but that ultimately proves to be a major strength--that the book is as unpredictable and elusive as its subject.