The Beloved Border

Journalist Miriam Davidson opens The Beloved Border with the hardest stories from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: children held in cages, families torn apart, thousands of deaths in the desert, police violence and corruption, and damage to the environment. This is original reporting, and it also looks at how people who live along the border are answering these problems with compassion and creativity.

Davidson draws on many kinds of sources to show how the border's separate problems connect. She argues that today's situation, though it worsened under the Trump administration, grew out of decades of prohibition, crackdowns and wall building. Her subjects include violence in Mexico, especially against journalists; gun smuggling across the border alongside legal gun sales; the rise in detentions, deportations and migrant deaths since the crackdown began; the dispute over humanitarian aid in the desert; crimes and abuses by the Border Patrol; and the legal, ethical and moral questions raised by a heavier police presence and the militarization of the border.

The book also covers the environmental cost of wall construction and of a planned copper mine near Tucson, with particular attention to the jaguar and other endangered species. Davidson traces the history of sanctuary and argues that this movement, along with others that began on the border, leads the way for wider global efforts against the mistreatment of migrant workers and refugees, police brutality, and other violations of human and natural rights.

She also gives concrete examples of border residents building local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art and music. Death and suffering continue, but she presents the border as a place that could be, and in some ways already is, a model of peaceful coexistence for the world.