Border Lit: Fiction Highlighting the US-Mexico Border

Caramba!: A Tale Told in Turns of the Card / by Nina Marie Martinez
Plenty more is going on in Lava Landing, CA than most people know about. The small border town is home to a dormant volcano, a beauty pageant which crowns a Miss Magma each year, and some of the best sounding mariachi music ever played. It’s also where two bosom buddies Natalie and Consuelo are planning a strange trip into Mexico, one which aims to cross dimensions as well as borders. (FIC MARTINEZ)
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The Creed of Violence / by Boston Teran
In 1910, the Mexican Revolution is in full swing and arms smuggler named Rawbone is in the thick of it. A man who deals in guns as well as lives (he’s also an assassin-for-hire), Rawbone lives the cutthroat life until he’s caught by US authorities. When his only way out is to inform on some of his cronies, Rawbone relents and is escorted back across the border to help infiltrate a very violent world of treachery and betrayal. (FIC TERAN)
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Crossers: A Novel / by Philip Caputo
Devastated following the death of his wife, Gil Castle leaves his posh Manhattan surroundings for his family’s ranch in Arizona. The land, which straddles the Mexican border, is definitely not as peaceful as it looks. A fact which is evidenced almost immediately when Gil discovers a badly beaten, left-for-dead Mexican illegal on the property. This episode is only the beginning as Gil soon butts heads with the ruthless owner of a local drug cartel along with some far worse characters. (FIC CAPUTO)
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No Country For Old Men / by Cormac McCarthy
While hunting for antelope near the Texas-Mexico border, Llewellyn Moss comes across a mutilated band of Mexican drug traffickers, all of them dead or dying after a drug deal gone bad. Llewellyn steals away with the over $2 million loot found on the scene only to be pursued by members of the Mexican cartel, DEA officials, local police and one particularly dangerous sociopath named Anton Chigurh. (FIC MCCARTHY)
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Far Bright Star: A Novel / by Robert Olmstead

Napoleon Childs is an aging professional soldier in 1916 when he’s sent in search of the Mexican renegade Pancho Villa. When he and his platoon of troops lose track of the elusive Pancho, they become disoriented and are attacked by a gang of marauding bandits who kill most of the party, leaving only Napoleon to die alone in the desert. (FIC OLMSTEAD)
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The River Flows North: A Novel / by Graciela Limon
A small band of Mexicans seeking to cross the Sonora desert into the US mutually hire a "coyote", or escort for the purpose. Though they’re facilitated with the necessary means and proper guidance to make it into Arizona, feelings of anxiety, suspicion and impending doom creep into the atmosphere as the party nears their destination. (FIC LIMON)

Literature of South Africa (RSA)

Blood Safari / by Deon Meyer; trans. from Afrikaans by K.L. Seegers

Emma Le Roux must hire a private bodyguard after her brother, still missing and presumed dead, is named a suspect in a string of murders. When Emma herself is linked to one of the murders, her situation becomes even more hair-raising at every turn..
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Other Lives: A Novel in Three Parts / by André Brink

Brink’s tripartite novel looks into the lives of three Cape Town men, all artists who vaguely know each other and who are preoccupied with their own problems, but whose lives are, never the less, peculiarly headed in the same direction, literally and figuratively..
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Summertime / by J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Laureate, is a world-renowned author and scholar hailing from Cape Town, RSA, and has recently published his third in a series of self-fictionalized memoirs. Summertime is a complex novel of self-examination and reflection, exploring the life of a recently deceased author whose somewhat prominent literary career is being researched by a young journalist.
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Beethoven Was One-sixteenth Black: And Other Stories / by Nadine Gordimer
South African Nobel prize-winner Gordimer involves all aspects of her homeland in this compilation, including a British social activist whose South African lineage includes both blacks and whites, a Johannesburg woman searching for her dead husband’s lover, and a young Hungarian couple who’ve just emigrated to Cape Town.

Dirty Pretty Things (2002) DVD / w/ Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tatou, Sergi Lopez, Sophie Okonedo, et. al.

"I'm here to pick up those the system has left behind..."

On a night like any other, Okwe, a clerk at a ritzy hotel, is summoned to a room with an overflowing toilet only to discover a human heart as the obstruction. Deeply disturbed, his report of the incident goes unheeded; the night boss telling him to forget about it. Other problems demand his attention anyway. An illegal in a foreign country, Okwe and his roommate Senay, another illegal, barely make enough--both working two jobs--to eat their one meal a day. Not that there's much time for liesure, what with immigration services constantly at their heels.

After saving the life of a man with a mysterious wound near his ribcage, Okwe’s true identity as a doctor is unraveled by the worst person possible: his same night boss, Juan. Things soon turn diabolical when Okwe and Senay are blackmailed into Juan's lucrative side business...a most 'inhumane' enterprise. Now Okwe must navigate not only his own fate but that of refugees just like himself.

For all the lamentable cinematic drivel pumped out today, it’s rare to find a movie that surpasses even the lowest expectations and be deemed worthy of universal esteem. ‘Things’, whether because of creativity, luck in casting before-they-were-stars stars, or cosmic alignment, manages this; a movie where you don’t think “I’m watching a movie.”, you just flow with the story. Granted, the premise is sympathetic; the characters admirable. But the appeal remains subtle, wielding interest through motives and gestures rather than overt action or dialogue. Throw in two actors acting in a language other than their native tongue and you have a remarkable achievement.