The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

The communities along the Mexico-USA border are caught in the crosshairs of immigration policy created far away. The borders were once quite porous, with families spanning both sides. People would freely cross the borders. There were no quotas on Mexican immigrants, and various iterations of guest worker programs. However, changes to increase "fairness" of immigration policy opened up immigration from other countries, but ended up reducing Mexican quotas. Then the country clamped down on the border. Soon organized crime became involved in getting people (and drugs) illegally across the border. This lead to more border security. The US has now spent a huge amount on securing the border, yet there are still huge numbers of illegal immigrants. There are also many industries that rely on the immigrants. 

This book focuses on one of those immigrants, Aida Hernandez. She was born in Mexico and had family on both sides of the border. There was a history of domestic violence in her family. (Undocumented immigrants are reluctant to report violence for fear of being reported - especially if he perpetrator is a citizen.) She had a boyfriend she met at school in Douglas, Arizona. As a teenager, she had a son in the US, however, she still liked to party and went with friends to Mexico. She got caught on the border trying to return and was stuck in Mexico. Since she grew up mostly in the US, she did not have a Mexican ID and had difficulty getting a job. She worked a bar job that would get her some money. However, after work, somebody tried to rape her and ended up stabbing her. She was treated in a Mexican hospital, then rushed to a US hospital under a special treatment program. She was given special time to stay in the US to get better. She overstayed it and then was caught by immigration after trying to steal a lego set at Walmart. She was then in detention for about a year before finally getting resident status under an "abused spouse" provision. She was not an "upstanding citizen". However, she does have some positive attributes.

The book is not sure what it want to be. At times it is a history of the Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Mexico. At other times it is a Mexican immigration history. While the "title track" is the history of Aida Hernandez and her family. It also has a digression to the life of a woman that Aida would meet in the detention center and with whom she would enter and leave a relationship. The book could be more concisely written to bring out its main points.