Precious Precarity

Borders are places of collision. People and politics, compassion and cruelty, law and lawlessness, hope and despair, idealism and ideology, life and death--all collide at the border. But these collisions have human faces. North and south, rich and poor, nuns and nones, desperation and courage--a spirit draws all these poles together and a spirituality animates their encounter.

Precious Precarity examines the spirituality that emerges between life and death, when vulnerable raced migrants must leave their homelands and traverse harsh environments to seek safety in an often-unwelcoming foreign land. The spirituality of displaced people mingles with that of volunteers, advocates, and environmentalists at the southwestern US-Mexico border, creating a unique and distinct spirituality in the borderlands. It's a spirituality shaped by the reality of death and the passionate quest for safety and for life.

Informed by interviews, activism, scholarship, original art, and a practiced compassion, Precious Precarity takes readers beyond the headlines, policy debates, good intentions, and bad faith that too often dominate our understanding of the borderlands to reveal the ways in which human experience endures life's travails, transcends its vagaries and vanities, and persists in the face of danger and even death.