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Because I Don't Have Wings: Stories of Mexican Immigrant Life

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, © 2006
Descript: 149 p
ISBN 0874805171 (cloth : alk. paper); 087480518X (pbk. : alk. paper)
SUBJECT: West (U.S.) -- Biography; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel; Honduras -- Description and travel; Mexico -- Description and travel

This book is stong and bold . . . and undeniably strange. The details of lives played out in the shadows are surreal, sometimes haunting, often deeply moving. It's an eye-opener that all Americans should read."

--- Luis Urrea, author of Nobody's Son

"In this brilliant , original, and astonishingly intimate book, Garrison eloquently shows us that borders are not always where we think they are. Every page is both a pleasure and a surprise."

--- C.M. Mayo, author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico

For Mexican workers, the agricultural valleys of the Inland Northwest are a long way from home. But there they have established communities, settlements recent enough that it feels like these newly arrived immigrant mexicanos are pioneers, still getting used to the Anglos and to each other.

Written with irony but bursting with compassion, Because I Don't Have Wings features vivid characters, telling anecdoes, and poignant reflecions on life, unfolding an immigrant's world strikingly different from the one we usually read about. Adaptation, persistence, and survival, we learn, are traits that mexicano culture values. We also learn that, over time, mexicano immigrants don't merely adapt to the culture of el norte, they transform it.