#97: Aidas Story
Aaron Bobrow-Strain is a politics professor at Whitman College with decades of history working on the U.S.-Mexico Border. His new book, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez, mixes nonfiction and novel, ethnography and essay, to tell the tale of a single woman as she\u2019s pulled back and forth across this imaginary line. Aida Hernandez\u2014which is not her real name\u2014was brought to the United States when she was in elementary school, ferried across the border from the Mexican town of Agua Prieta to its other half: Douglas, Arizona. She grew up there and had an American son, but she was deported\u2014without him\u2014and only made it back to Douglas after enduring immigration court, for-profit detention, family separation, gendered violence, and a host of attendant traumas. Aida\u2019s is not a Cinderella story, and she\u2019s not a bootstrap immigrant fantasy. Bobrow-Strain joins us on the podcast to talk about how Aida\u2019s life illuminates the everyday consequences of our immigration policy.
Go beyond the episode:
- Aaron Bobrow-Strain\u2019s The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez
- Looking to support groups doing work on the border? Bobrow-Strain offers a list of worthy organizations
- \u201cRape Trees and Rosary Beads,\u201d by Brendan Linehan, a former Border Patrol agent and current civil rights attorney
- \u201cPaying to Be Locked Up,\u201d by Keramet Reiter, about the criminalization of uncharged detainees
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