Luis Alberto Urrea's Border

Earlier this year at that sprawling, unnavigable, kvetchfest known as AWP -- the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs -- I got to introduce and moderate the very best panel of the long weekend (the title alone was the most memorable: "I Am Not a Terrorist: The Political Writer"), which included Luis Alberto Urrea. Of course, I ended up mispronouncing his first name -- it's Loo-ees, not Loo-isss -- even though I knew so much better as I had just finished his addictive, disturbing three-part memoir known as the Border Trilogy, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996),and Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life (1998), about being born and raised in Tijuana -- the blonde and blue-eyed son of a Mexican father and an American mother -- and the desperate work he later did as a young missionary amidst the Tijuana garbage dumps. He writes expressively, specifically about his name in Nobody's Son... and I had to bungle it. Still, he merely graciously raised an eyebrow. Gawww.