Luis Alberto Urrea On Our Belonging to Each Other
b'We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders \\u2014 what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. \\n\\nThe Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up \\u2014 an apt expression of his parents\\u2019 turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, "migrants" \\u2014 and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that \\u201cwe miss each other.\\u201d He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of \\u201cus." And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required.'