Tunnel Kids

Meh. In short, this book is a true story about people who went to the border to observe Latino children. The story overall is interesting but the delivery did not captivate me. To be honest is was boring. I did connect with some of the people in the book but found myself falling asleep a lot.

"tunnel kids" is a mediocre book... the authors' direct and personal accounting of glue-sniffin', gang-bangin', abject poverty-stricken border children with little or no hope for their future.

Lawrence Taylor, an anthropologist, and photographer Maeve Hickey, spent two summers living among an unimaginably poor group of street teenagers in Nogales, Mexico. TUNNEL KIDS is the result.The children involved, ranging in age from 12 to 18, more boys than girls, are "cholos", small-time street gangsters, who struggle every day for their survival, an essentially aimless and unsupervised struggle blunted or soothed or both, depending on your point of view, by heavy drug use including marijuana, some heroin, and unfortunately widespread huffing of aerosol paint.But while this describes what they are, it does not describe ALL that they are. The authors humanize them to the point that they cease to be simply stereotypes.Taylor and Hickey became comfortable with a number of the cholos, and vice versa, and were then made privy to the daily details of their lives, as well as to their histories to a certain extent. Taylor writes intelligently and sympathetically about his interactions which included numerous tours of the underbelly of Nogales (which seems to be largely underbelly) without seeming gullible or ludicrous, and he is smart enough to understand that not everything he is told can be taken at face value.Hickey's photos are solely portraits of the young subjects and the subtleties she captures are exceptional.There will be people who might read this book and categorize the subjects as criminals and criminals only, stereotyping them rather than seeing them, for better or worse, also as humans, in this case lost children without money or education forced to survive as best they can on mean streets. These people will feel safer by denying humanity to those who make them uncomfortable. And if it makes them feel better, so be it. I write this as a heads-up to people who prefer to think like this (street prostitutes are another favorite target group), as they will not want to read this book.As a point of reference, anyone who has read and really felt Trevor Greene's BLIND DATE will want to read TUNNEL KIDS. In my opinion, as a work of personal sociology, without the distance that word often implies, TUNNEL KIDS is simply outstanding.

If you are looking for books about what life is like on the border, this is a good one. Written in an engaging style, it tells the story of a group of teenagers, most of whom are gang members (although, the book certainly describes it more as a family), and are habitual drug users (especially, inhaling paint fumes). Most interesting for me is that most of these teenagers have family that is nearby, or otherwise accessible. The author even takes some on trips to their homes; however, few of them choose to stay with their families. It seems, despite the lack of future in the Barrio, it is the family they prefer. The children, who we might suppose are innocent victims, are also depicted as the criminals, robbing entrants in the tunnel of everything they own. This book provides a very different context to the places than the one I and so many living on the American side of the border know and understand.

- (Planeta.com Journal) The creative team behind the wonderful book The Road to Mexico return to the border to sketch an intimate portrait of street kids who work and live in the drainage tunnels that connect the cities of Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona. "It is their story of themselves and of the border, and it is our story of them -- of getting to them -- and of the border as it appeared to us through their lives."