The Border Chronicle’s Fourth Annual Summer Reading List
We're taking a short break, but in the meantime we have a great summer reading list for you. Also, send your comments to CBP about new border wall. And stay cool!
It’s been an intense six months covering the border, as the Trump administration has “flooded the zone” with chaotic policy changes.
With Trump 2.0, it’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint. So, The Border Chronicle staff are taking a short summer break. We’ll be back July 22, newly energized and with a fascinating piece by Caroline Tracey from Mexicali, Baja California. We’ll also have more in depth reporting for you on Trump’s militarized national defense areas at the border, and the expanding role of the military in immigration enforcement. Plus, more on Elon Musk’s Starbase, Texas.
In the meantime, let us know what’s happening in your border community that needs coverage in The Border Chronicle. Drop us a line!
And, before we go…
There are only a few days left to register your comment with Customs and Border Protection about the construction of new border wall in the ecologically critical San Rafael Valley in southern Arizona, and through the iconic Mount Cristo Rey in Sunland Park, New Mexico.
Speaking out for border communities, endangered wildlife, and the environment are more vital now than ever. So do it today!
Register your concerns about San Rafael Valley with CBP and your elected officials by July 7 via this link from the environmental nonprofit Sky Island Alliance.
Register your concerns about Mount Cristo Rey here by July 3rd.
Also, another note on two critical events currently unfolding.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last week on birthright citizenship is creating a lot of confusion and misinformation. Here are links with credible information that we found helpful in explaining what will happen next and what’s at stake:
What does the Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship mean? American Immigration Council
What the Supreme Court’s ruling means for birthright citizenship The Washington Post (gift link)
Another topic that’s generating confusion is Trump’s expansion of national defense areas along the border. This is where public land has been transferred to the military and is now considered to be a military installation, which means that anyone who trespasses in these zones can be detained by the military and charged with a felony.
The Border Chronicle has been covering the expansion of the NDAs since the first one was created in April. Following are links with context, analysis from experts, and reporting from one of the national defense areas in New Mexico. Normally, our articles go behind a paywall after a month and are only accessible to paid subscribers, but we have made these links public so that anyone can read them. You can also watch Todd’s discussion with expert Timothy Dunn on the ramifications of these new NDAs
· Watch Todd’s video Q&A with sociologist Timothy Dunn, one of the top experts on border militarization in the United States.
· A New Phase in Border Militarization: Trump’s “National Defense Areas”
· “None of These People Are from the Border”: A Dispatch from the National Defense Area in New Mexico
· Trump Authorizes Military to Take Over Federal Land at the U.S.-Mexico Border
The Border Chronicle’s Fourth Annual Summer Reading List
Hopefully, you’re visiting cooler climes or hanging out by the ocean or a pool during these hot summer months. As the summer unfolds, we’ve got some great book recommendations for you. Each book was featured in The Border Chronicle this year, so there’s a written review or podcast interview with the author to accompany each of our book recommends. Enjoy!
Valleyesque by Fernando A. Flores (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2022) Flores’s short story collection contains deadpan narrations of a world just a few degrees off-kilter … like George Saunders’s Pastoralia but set in the very specific terrain of South Texas. In one three-page story, possums write best-selling tell-alls and plot to take political control of the Rio Grande Valley; in another, the composer Frédéric Chopin lives in Ciudad Juárez, and his piano has been detained in customs. Flores’ stories are darkly hilarious and absurd. Perfect for our times. His new book Brother Brönte will be released in February 2026. Read our full review here.
Dora: A Daughter of Unforgiving Terrain by Dora Rodriguez and Abbey Carpenter (Resiliencia Publishing, July 2025) Dora Rodriguez is a national treasure. A former asylum seeker who fled the death squads in El Salvador, Rodriguez nearly died crossing the Sonoran Desert in 1980 but was miraculously saved. She went on to devote her life to good works, human rights and helping other immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her memoir will be released on July 5 — the same day she was saved in the desert 45 years ago. You can listen to our podcast interview with Rodriguez about her new memoir here.
The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia (Penguin Random House, June 2025). Alix Dick arrived in the U.S. more than a decade ago, fleeing violence in Sinaloa, Mexico. The impact of living without legal status in the United States has been almost as brutal as the violence she fled. In her new memoir, cowritten with Stanford University sociology professor Antero Garcia, Alix Dick tallies the costs—spiritual, mental, physical, and economic—of being undocumented in the United States, especially as the Trump administration escalates its cruelty and persecution of people living without legal status. Listen to our podcast with Alix Dick and Antero Garcia about Dick’s new memoir here.
The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, by Alma Guillermoprieto (Duke University Press, April 2025) Mexican journalist, Alma Guillermoprieto, is a journalism legend, from breaking the story of the El Mozote massacre, committed by state forces in El Salvador in 1981 to the Ayotzinapa massacre in Mexico, Guillermoprieto has witnessed and documented countless revolutions, dictatorships and budding democracies throughout her long career in Latin America. Her latest book brings together dispatches from 2002–21, featuring characters such as gang members from El Salvador, a licentious Mexican priest, and female lucha libre fighters in Bolivia. Read our Q&A with Alma Guillermoprieto about reporting from Latin America then, now, and into the future.
Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance by Gary Paul Nabhan (University of New Mexico Press, October 2024) Gary Paul Nabhan is a prolific author and preeminent thinker and documenter of borderlands history, and indigenous and resistance movements. A cultural ecologist, environmental historian and poet, Nabhan recounts consequential (yet not mainstream) historical events spurred by musicians, and spiritual and community leaders including Teresita de Cabora, Coyote Iguana and Woody Guthrie. Nabhan’s opening chapter describing the Yaqui’s resistance to Spanish colonizers in the 16th century — complete with a showdown in the Sonoran Desert that includes eye-stinging chile powder, flower petals and wild animals accompanying Yaqui warriors into battle— is simply breathtaking. This book gives you hope and reminds us that cultural resistance has always existed in the borderlands. Listen to our live podcast with Nabhan and another literary master Luis Alberto Urrea recorded in Patagonia, Arizona in March.
You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism and Bloodshed in Greece by Patrick Strickland (Penguin Random House, April 2025) If fascism can take hold in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, then it can take root here. Strickland, an American journalist, first traveled to Greece in 2015 to cover the refugee crisis in Europe, just as a neo-Nazi group called Golden Dawn ramped up its campaign of terror against immigrants. The brutal and bloody campaign helped Golden Dawn members win seats in Greece’s parliament, an antecedent for numerous other countries where politicians have used anti-immigrant, xenophobic platforms to consolidate power. Strickland details the rise of Golden Dawn, and the economic and political conditions that allowed it to happen in chilling detail. He also provides hope in the portraits of refugees and activists who have fought effectively against the rise of the far-right, and he gives a deeper understanding of the rapidly changing politics of migration in Europe, which have much in common with the United States. Read an article by Strickland about his book here.
What Side Are You On?: A Tohono O’odham Life Across Borders by Michael Steven Wilson and José Antonio Lucero (The University of North Carolina Press, June 2024) This is a fascinating book by Michael "Mike" Wilson, a Tohono O’odham human rights activist, whose story begins with growing up indigenous in the segregated mining town of Ajo, Arizona in the mid-20th century, to the grave consequences of U.S. foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s. He also writes about the militarization of the border in the 1990s and 2000s, and the humanitarian aid work that he still does to this day. The book is co-written with José Antonio Lucero, chair of the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas Department. Listen to our podcast with Wilson and Lucero here.