A line in the sand

Romero's goal is not simply to document present conditions but also to strategize for the future. He dreams up 38 prophecies in a playful folio of fake news articles. Dry objectivity suddenly becomes border science fiction: Mexico will be the capital of nursing homes for Americans. It will feed a black market for water. The United States, Canada and Mexico will form a union. The Silicon Valley will be replaced by the Nano Valley in Baja California. The most sought-after college graduates will come from "bi-cultural universities." Speaking fluent Spanish will be a prerequisite for the U.S. presidency in 2020.

Like all good science fiction, Romero's scenarios are born of current realities, and for him -- despite massive inequities -- the key reality is interdependence, so much so that "one nation's future depends on the other," he argues. More Coca-Cola is consumed per capita in Mexico than in any other country; money sent home from the U.S. exceeds local incomes in five Mexican states, and Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in both countries.

Romero's statistics could be lines from "Mexican Similarities, Mexican Differences," a poem that opens Juan Felipe Herrera's "187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border," a ferocious collection of the veteran Chicano poet and activist's work from the past 30 years. "You eat lettuce we irrigate lettuce," writes Herrera, who spent most of his childhood traveling the fields of California with his migrant worker parents. "You watch Oprah we watch Oprah."

These poems trade Romero's hyperborder for the human border, splintering his headlines and policy reports into broken lines of finger-snapped, conga-popped verse that reacts to the 2006 May Day immigration march in downtown Los Angeles, the mounting murders of women in Juarez and the thousands of "desert warriors" who've lost their lives trying to cross the line, "so numerous they seemed / like the desert itself / busted black the color of smoke."

Herrera crosses generations and borderlines, bouncing between English and Spanish, between El Paso and Taos, Chiapas and Santa Monica, San Diego and Tijuana. Whereas "Hyperborder" relies on official data, "187 Reasons" is a dispatch from the people's border, an anthology of a life lived by a "migrant homelander" with "a triple landscape in my head."