Cutting for Sign

by William Langewiesche

A portrait on the 1,951-mile border that divides Mexico and the United States shows how one line can divide the first and third worlds and can reflect the ideals and fears of two nations. 30,000 first printing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Politics, History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

William Archibald Langewiesche was an American author and journalist who was also a professional airplane pilot for many years. From 2019, he was a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he was a correspondent for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines for twenty-nine years. He was the author of nine books and the winner of two National Magazine Awards.
He wrote articles covering a wide range of topics from shipbreaking, wine critics, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, modern ocean piracy, nuclear proliferation, and the World Trade Center cleanup.

Reviews

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first week on the ranch, an ornery old cow with a cancerous face grazed in the pasture below the house. She spent her days quietly in the shade of the mesquite tree, chewing slowly, covered with flies. One afternoon I watched her die, standing ground against a cowboy. He was a short, potbellied Mexican riding a broad-chested sorrel in the full strength of life...For a quarter hour [the cow] kept her antagonists at bay with the threat of her twisted horns. The cowboy cursed her viciously. It was a stalemate, or a mockery of one, until she lost patience and charged. The horse sidestepped easily and shouldered her to her knees. For the first time in her long life, she couldn't find the strength to rise again...In the end she settled into the dirt with a groan and rolled onto her side, heaving. The flies settled onto her again. And the cowboy sat on the horse watching coldly. He stuck a pinch of tobacco under his lip and lifted a battered straw hat to let the wind cool his scalp. I thought he looked too satisfied: if this was a victory, it seemed a pointless one.

This is how masterful prose stylist William Langewiesche chose to start his first book, a nonfictional account of the US/Mexican border. We realize a few things right away:

1. Well-written prose is a joy to read. Each word is as precise and carries as much freight as it possibly can, and it's almost impossible to find a way to improve any of these sentences.
2. The border story is, at the end of the day, a conflict in which people are confronting people. This will not be a book about The Mexicans or The Americans but rather recognizes that this is simply a lot of individuals, many of whom are shitheads and many of whom (as we'll find out later) are exemplary and kind.
3. The author is keenly observant and not easily impressed.

Here we go again with the outstanding prose, after Langewiesche meets the cowboy's wife:

Later I learned Dora was terrified of me, the first white man she had come close to. Nonetheless, when [her husband] was home, she sometimes invited me to dinner. We ate outside in the dirt yard. One night I mentioned my amazement, still, that men had landed on the moon. Dora did not understand. She did not think of the moon as an object, or something that could be walked on, but knew it simply as a light in the sky. Her lack of curiosity disoriented me. Afterward I never knew quite what to say to her.

This is a travel book, more or less, focusing on the difficult lives of people living on both sides of the US/Mexican border. It is now out of date. It doesn't matter, because if you read it, you're reading it to see how well English can be written.

A second, similar book by this author called 'Sahara Unveiled' is nearly as good.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Cutting for Sign", his first book, William Langewiesche brought his gift for observation to the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the border before the wall was built (and no that is not a glib comment on my part, because despite the rhetoric of the election, a large portion of the wall has already been built--the easy part, of course, but because rivers in general and the Rio Grande in particular do not move in straight lines, it cuts through private ranches and public lands). Langewiesche traveled and interviewed along the length of the border. He writes with sympathy and a keen eye for detail (the West Texas town of Marfa, now an arts mecca, received its name from a servant in "The Brothers Karamazov" because that was the book an engineer's wife was reading as she rode the train through it) in all the ways in which the border struggles, economically, racially (including Native Americans), educationally, and, of course, politically. He has a gift for bringing out vastly different kinds of people--Mexican, American (Anglo and Hispanic), and O'odham (we call them Papago, and the border runs through their land), educated and barely literate, immigrants and Border Patrol, factory worker, visionary artist, activist, and old farmer. And that is precisely what it takes to write about the border, because it is really a series of regions that may be closer to the community on the other side of the river than to the part of its own country on the other side of the continent. One of the best parts of the book recounts Langewiesche talking to a Border Patrol agent about what it takes to track smugglers in such inhospitable country, at times following immigrants over bare rock. Once more, I am reminded of what a border really is: an edge, a periphery, a fringe, a place between two highly organized entities and generally where their organization and control fade. Think of the Himalayas, where the two most populous countries on earth meet, of how the populations of Brazil, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula hug the coast. Clearly, trading entrepots emerge, from San Diego and Tijuana (created to liquor up Americans during Prohibition) to Brownsville and Matamoros, but most of the borders of large nations look more like the United States and Canada. As a parting note, it has passed virtually unnoticed that this agitation for a fence has arisen at a time when apprehensions of illegal immigrants have fallen to the lowest point in several generations, and some researchers have argued that there is now a net outflow of Mexicans (reduced to some degree by the migration of Central American children to reunite with their families). I generally find it useful to learn something about a place before designing a policy for it. But then much of this language is not really about policy, I suppose. It is about the search for a convenient other to blame.

[John Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book in a used book store in Mankato, MN earlier this month. Written in 1993 about William Langwiesche's life and travels along the US/Mexico border, he gives a sense of some of the major issues affecting life along the border at that time. I lived in Laredo, Texas in the early 1980s and it was interesting to compare his impressions to what I remembered from my time there. While at times the book seems dated, as I read it 25 years later, he captures the people he talks with, the landscape and the issues he looks at so empathetically and honestly, that is still worth reading. I will continue reading him because he writes that way, giving a clear picture of a place and the people who live there.

[Ganjoo Girls · Rating 5 out of 5]

My series of love letters to William Langewiesche's books continues. Also, after you read this one, read Solito by Javier Zamora.

More than 30 years old, this book was way ahead of its time. This one was his first book, I believe. Published in 1993, Cutting for Sign traces the Mexican-American border. He observes San Diego/Tijuana, then moves over to Texas, where we truly get stories of the dynamic forces in the landscape that shape policy, culture, and the human condition. He was a bit of a geographer. I appreciate the maps on the inside of the book cover. I found myself looking up the cities on Google Maps (which didn't exist when this book was written). The sense of place he captures is first-rate. Just like Sahara Unveiled, I preferred reading this one in complete silence for maximum immersion.

Any American who wants to understand the underpinnings of immigration at our southern border ought to read this book. I kept magnifying and scaling the vignettes by 100X in today's world. Drug trafficking, escape from poverty, NAFTA, environmental pollution, corruption, and cultural clash. Then throw in Mexico as a backchannel for other immigration antics. He even brings up an example of US immigration probing the border for Libyans thought to be coming through Mexico. Not unheard of today, where many Asians also take the route to the US. Not to mention the varying personalities of border officials, which he depicts humorously at times. It's a great book.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

subtitle: The Border. It can be crossed, but never ignored.
promotional review: "William Langewiesche portrays not an imaginary line through the desert but two distrustful, hopelessly unequal, and increasingly xenophobic neighbor countries facing each other like wary predators. An I'll-take-you-there reporter whose graceful prose is punctuated with deadly irony and wit, he has produced as absorbing a book as one could hope for about our two nations' common border and mutual destiny." Marc Reisner

Very readable and interesting book with lots of true stories and live interviews.

[Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1993, an account of the author´s travels along the 2000+ mile US/Mexican border. He most engagingly and convincingly explains the drivers behind immigration, narco-trafficking and other smuggling, as well as trade and labour relations through interviews with Mexican workers in assembly plants, border patrol staff, ranch workers - to name a few. History and how it is remembered by people living on the border is weaved in well into the travelogue. I fear that many of the injustices and maltreatment of poor people has not changed.

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated for sure but still a great read about the border between Mexico and the uS

[Greg H · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.framingthedialogue.com/arc...