A border lined with inequities

When author and journalist Tom Miller moved to a town on the frontier between the United States and Mexico in the late 1960s, he resolved to master Spanish. “I wandered into a bookstore and asked for something to get me started,” he recalls in the preface to “Writing on the Edge,” an anthology of what he calls “borderland literature.” “The clerk handed me ‘How to Speak Spanish With Your Servant.’ ”

With each of the 85 selections in “Writing on the Edge,” Miller allows us to see and feel the deep, sometimes bitter irony of his anecdote. Ranging from song lyrics to selections from novels and memoirs, from poetry to political manifestos -- and drawing on the work of writers as diverse in age, gender, style and sensibility as Sandra Cisneros and Joseph Wambaugh, Richard Rodriguez and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Woody Guthrie and Carlos Fuentes -- Miller’s anthology is extraordinarily rich, complex and unsettling.

“Just as no frontier exists similar to the border between the United States and Mexico, so too is there no other literature defined by such an international line,” explains Miller. “It captures the unadulterated awe of northbound travelers before incidents and circumstances can irreparably change them. For the southbound nomad, works from the border are filled with genuine curiosity and false bravado.”

The stubborn refusal of some contributors to recognize not only the legality but even the existence of the international border is symbolized in an excerpt from the novel “Floating Kingdom” by George Rabasa, the tale of a man whose cinderblock house sits on an abandoned island between Mexico and the United States. “Seguila liked to claim that he was his own territory,” writes Rabasa. “Not of the south or of the north, not of the Rio Grande or the Rio Bravo but floating ambiguously in the river, rising like a castle between the two countries, somehow independent of both.”

But others in the collection insist that the frontier is a fact, and they show how it insinuates itself into life as it is lived on both sides of the international border. “Our first exposure in America stays with me like a foul odor,” writes Luis J. Rodriguez in “This Memory Begins With Flight,” a short memoir of his father’s escape from political oppression in Juarez, Mexico, to a dubious refuge in Los Angeles. “It seemed a strange world, most of it spiteful to us, spitting and stepping on us, coughing us up, us immigrants, as if we were phlegm stuck in the collective throat of this country.”

Most of the selections were written in English, some have been translated from Spanish and a few are insistently and even transparently bilingual. “El Otro Lado” by Los Angeles poet and journalist Ruben Martinez, for example, is a poem fashioned from a phone call between two lovers on opposite sides of the frontier, “[f]ar from the mortars, / the hungry cities, / the false treaties.”

El otro lado,

The other side,

that’s where I’m from,

El otro lado,

that’s where you’re from, the other side.

* * *

¡Ay! Pero como te deseo,

aqui, desde este lado,

come, cruza la linea cruda,

veni, veni, come, come, how I want you on this side!

Let me suck your otherness!

Now, outside of history!

Miller allows us to see that, despite the best efforts of the authorities, La Frontera is and always has been a thoroughly permeable membrane. The traffic moves in both directions: “She who wasn’t even born in Mexico,” writes Norma Elia Cantu of her mother in “Canicula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera,” went there as a 10-year-old “knowing only to read and write in English because the nuns at Sacred Heart in San Antonio wouldn’t tolerate Spanish.” And the border crossers come in all colors. In a passage from “Frontera Dreams” by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (translated by Beth Henson), a Mexican private detective recalls the unlikely exploits of a man reputed to hold the record for crossing “that green fence” in defiance of the U.S. Border Patrol: “Seven jumps in one day, not even yours truly could fathom that.” The man, we are told, was Chinese.

The book includes some intriguing and illuminating items: A map of “The Literary Borderland” confirms the suggestion in some selections that the California towns of Bakersfield and Modesto may be far from the frontier in miles but not so far when measured in memory, and a roster linking the various contributors to towns about which they write reminds us that the border has attracted the attention of some surprising (and diverse) writers, poets and singers, including Stephen Crane, Jack Kerouac, John Reed, Marty Robbins and William Carlos Williams.

At moments, “Writing on the Edge” seems to celebrate the racial and cultural diversity that characterizes Mexico as much as the United States. The point is made in Gloria Anzaldua’s poem, “To Live in the Borderlands Means You ... “: “To live in the Borderlands means to / put chile in the borscht, / eat whole wheat tortillas, / speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent ...” But we are never allowed to forget the hurt and anger that persist in both memory and reality: “Every day I am deluged with reminders / that this is not / my land / and this is my land,” writes Lorna Dee Cervantes in “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races.”

In assembling this anthology, Miller acknowledges the tensions that prompt him to characterize the border between Mexico and the United States -- “a land two thousand miles long and only twenty miles wide” -- as “America’s third rail.” The borderland has always been seen by some observers as a place of picturesque squalor: “a foreign adventure,” as Maya Angelou writes in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and “a fiesta party.” But it is also one of the profound and enduring flash points in the making of American civilization: “It is North America’s Middle Passage,” concludes Miller, “and these writers are its witnesses.”