A classic account of life on the Texas-Mexico border, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados offers the fullest portrait currently available of the people of the South Texas/Northern Mexico borderlands. First published in 1999, the book is now extensively revised and updated throughout to cover developments since 2000, including undocumented immigration, the drug wars, race relations, growing social inequality, and the socioeconomic gap between Latinos and the rest of American society—issues of vital and continuing national importance.

An outgrowth of the Borderlife Research Project conducted at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados uses the voices of several hundred Valley residents, collected by embedded student researchers and backed by the findings of sociological surveys, to describe the lives of migrant farmworkers, colonia residents, undocumented domestic servants, maquiladora workers, and Mexican street children. Likewise, it explores social, racial, and ethnic relations in South Texas among groups such as Latinos, Mexican immigrants, wealthy Mexican visitors, Anglo residents or tourists, and Asian and African American residents of South Texas. With this firsthand material and an explanatory focus that utilizes and applies social-science theoretical concepts, the book thoroughly addresses the future composition and integration of Latinos into the society and culture of the United States.

Much has been debated about the presence of undocumented workers along the South Texas border, but these debates often overlook the more complete dimension: the region’s longstanding, undocumented economies as a whole. Borderlands commerce that evades government scrutiny can be categorized into informal economies (the unreported exchange of legal goods and services) or underground economies (criminal economic activities that, obviously, occur without government oversight). Examining long-term study, observation, and participation in the border region, with the assistance of hundreds of locally embedded informants, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border presents unique insights into the causes and ramifications of these economic channels.

The third volume in UT–Pan American’s Borderlife Project, this eye-opening investigation draws on vivid ethnographic interviews, bolstered by decades of supplemental data, to reveal a culture where divided loyalties, paired with a lack of access to protection under the law and other forms of state-sponsored recourse, have given rise to social spectra that often defy stereotypes. A cornerstone of the authors’ findings is that these economic activities increase when citizens perceive the state’s intervention as illegitimate, whether in the form of fees, taxes, or regulation. From living conditions in the impoverished colonias to President Felipe Calderón’s futile attempts to eradicate police corruption in Mexico, this book is a riveting portrait of benefit versus risk in the wake of a “no-man’s-land” legacy.