“A profound meditation on the existential, geopolitical, and metaphysical implications of the United States–Mexico border, Passing is a work of startling originality and literary verve. For Yeh, the practice of border crossing is a singular, fetishized imperative of our time. The border makes concrete a terrible, modern duality: being at once a line of impregnable difference and a promise of passage, it has the awful power to make, and also to nullify, the integrity of selfhood, status, race, nation, empire.”
— Jean Comaroff, coauthor of The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order
“Passing is a rich ethnography of social lives in Tijuana, the Mexico–United States border city, which are profoundly complicated and fractured by global capitalism, class relations, and nationalism. Yeh writes with a creative and poetic combination of rigor and playfulness; her narrative voice is intimate and personal and yet avoids sentimentality. Her work is also imbued with a deep sense of sobriety that powerfully captures the everyday precariousness of people on the border, for whom ‘passing’ shapes their mode of being.”
— Miyako Inoue, Stanford University