Más, from the LA Times:

[...] Juan Felipe Herrera's "187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border," a ferocious collection of the veteran Chicano poet and activist's work from the past 30 years. "You eat lettuce we irrigate lettuce," writes Herrera, who spent most of his childhood traveling the fields of California with his migrant worker parents. "You watch Oprah we watch Oprah."

These poems trade Romero's hyperborder for the human border, splintering his headlines and policy reports into broken lines of finger-snapped, conga-popped verse that reacts to the 2006 May Day immigration march in downtown Los Angeles, the mounting murders of women in Juarez and the thousands of "desert warriors" who've lost their lives trying to cross the line, "so numerous they seemed / like the desert itself / busted black the color of smoke."

Herrera crosses generations and borderlines, bouncing between English and Spanish, between El Paso and Taos, Chiapas and Santa Monica, San Diego and Tijuana. Whereas "Hyperborder" relies on official data, "187 Reasons" is a dispatch from the people's border, an anthology of a life lived by a "migrant homelander" with "a triple landscape in my head."

Herrera's chapters open with free-form prose diaries he dubs the "Aztlan Chronicles," quick autobiographical impressions set in such places as a train stop in Riverside (where he now teaches at UC Riverside) and San Francisco's Mission District (where he wrote poems on an electric typewriter bought with a National Endowment for the Arts grant). He muses on the impact of remittances. "It all dawns on me," he confesses. "The migrante is the new double-headed warrior like the Sacred Eagle Girl maiz deity of the Huichol-Tatéi Werika Wimari -- a double-headed eagle, she refashions borders." These are new maps we're living, and Herrera is our poetic cartographer. And he positions his poems not as conventional texts, but as illicit missives, "undocuments" that breeze by checkpoints as fast as wired currency.

Herrera's take on the hyperborder has a different chronology; it goes back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico war of 1846-48 and the Chicano movement of the 1960s (when Herrera tossed a Molotov cocktail into a "no Zapatas allowed" UCLA frat house -- it didn't go off). His poems cast the border as a story with ancient echoes, overflowing with spilled blood ("blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard") and erased memory (a haunting chorus of "seed-voices").

He writes with a Beat-like torrent of sling-shots and trippy hallucination, equally at home watching Chicanos in "Toyota gangsta monsters" with "oye como va in the engines" as he is imagining himself as a punk half-panther. More than once in "187 Reasons," his poems read like border-blasted takes on Allen Ginsberg's epic American spew, "Howl." Except Herrera's America is "a grid of inverted serapes" where the best minds of his generation -- angel-headed hipsters in Indian drum circles high on Thelonious Monk and flush with "a Califas glow" -- have been driven mad by the Minutemen, Proposition 187 and miles of new border fencing.

Because Herrera has worked so long in the trenches of border art and politics, it's easy to imagine that his strategy for an interdependent future would be a lot like his 1968 vision: "a healing net across borders churned with brown clay, rain clouds, open arms, yerbas, a single leaf from the eucalyptus for each one of us. This is all you need. Breathe in, breathe out, this green wind makes you strong." We all need to take a deep breath. It may not heal the hyperborder, but our mingled breath will pass through it to the other side.

—'Hyperborder' by Fernando Romero and '187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border' by Juan Felipe Herrera