Homelands

June 1, 2018

Corchado, Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News and author of Midnight in Mexico, has spent his career shedding light on Mexican Americans caught between their two homelands. Now, the author tells the stories of four friends: Alfredo, David, Ken, and Primo. Ken is a high-flying lawyer who nearly becomes mayor of Philadelphia. David is a restaurateur determined to discover the finest tequila in the world. Primo is a human-rights activist, sporting a beret to signal his leftist politics. Alfredo is a reporter and homesick Texas transplant to Philadelphia. A chance meeting at David's tequila bar becomes a 30-year friendship, over the course of which the four men wrestle with their transnational identities. This personal side of history plays out amid increasingly strict U.S. immigration policies and drug war-fueled turmoil in Mexico. The four friends are college-educated and middle-class, while women play only bit parts in the men's self-discovery. Corchado and his friends are not representative of all Mexican Americans, but in terms of humanizing Mexican immigration and exploring Mexican American "in-betweenness," this work is successful and necessary. VERDICT A sensitive, thought-provoking self-portrait of Mexican Americans who, wherever they go, call the borderlands home.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 12, 2018
Dallas Morning News correspondent Corchado draws in this multilayered chronicle of Mexican migration over the past three decades from the perspective of four Mexican-Americans living in Philadelphia in the 1980s. The book opens with a scene from the winter of 1987, inside a newly opened Mexican restaurant, where Corchado, then a young reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and his human rights activist friend Primo strike up a conversation about what it means to be Mexican-American with the restaurant owner, David Suro-Piñera, and Ken Trujillo, another patron, who was raised in New Mexico. That conversation has lasted more than 30 years, Corchado writes. The perspectives of these men in the decades since provide the framework for Corchado’s book as each man seeks a connection to his heritage through his life in America. David goes on to develop his own brand of tequila; Ken runs for mayor of Philadelphia and leads a successful career as a litigator; and Primo fights for causes on both sides of the border. Corchado tells his own story of working as a journalist covering the border region, and he also ruminates on the juxtaposition of acceptance and rejection that his fellow Mexican immigrants are shown by individuals, industries, and the government. In addition to providing historical context for the current debate on immigration, this book is a timely and personal meditation on the concept of “migrant” in the United States.

March 1, 2018
A mix of memoir and deep research into various Mexican and American political immigration issues, exploring complications of life on both sides of the border.Although the narrative is wide-ranging, Corchado (Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness, 2013), the Border-Mexico correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, organizes it loosely around the "four friends" of the title: the author, a Mexican-born, mostly U.S.-educated journalist; a Mexican-born immigrant owner of a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia; a Mexican-born political activist splitting time between the neighboring nations; and a politically connected lawyer born as a U.S. citizen in the state of New Mexico. In 1987, during the early years of their careers, the four men, feeling isolated in Philadelphia, met and discussed their life situations, and they never lost touch. The saga of each man is intriguing, but the narrative is least compelling when Corchado devotes too much space to his companions. The book is most compelling when he focuses on the memoir part of the story, including how his parents reluctantly departed Mexico hoping to find a richer life north of the border. A secondary, equally compelling narrative involves Corchado's evolution as a journalist. Studying the subject at a geographically remote university in El Paso, Texas, the author never dreamed that his talent and ethnic diversity would lead to employment at the Philadelphia bureau of the Wall Street Journal. Because Corchado's professional passion centered on illuminating life along the U.S.-Mexico border, he left the Journal for his dream assignment at the Morning News. (He would go on to earn multiple prizes and fellowships for his work.) Naturally, given the devastating narcotics-related violence in both nations, the author offers insights into drug policy, which is intimately tied into border security and both legal and illegal immigration.An affecting, timely book that would have benefited from tighter editing and a less scattered narrative structure.

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