Wednesday, August 5th: William Vollmann
Born in 1959, William T. Vollmann is a graduate of Cornell University. He was a recipient of a 1988 Whiting Writers Award, and in 1999 the New Yorker named him one of the twenty best writers in America under forty. He is the author of nine novels (including Europe Central, which won the 2005 National Book Award), three collections of stories, a memoir, three works of nonfiction, and a seven-volume meditation on nonviolence in history, which was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. Vollmann's journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Granta, Grand Street and Outside Magazine.
For over ten years, Vollmann has spent much of his time in the area he dubs "Imperial," which sprawls across a stinking artificial sea, across the deserts, date groves, and labor camps of extreme southeastern California, and over the Mexican border into the areas south of Tijuana and Mexicali. Imperial County in California was a vast, arid wasteland until the early twentieth century, when water was diverted from the Colorado River into the county in an attempt to create a new agricultural paradise. By the early 1930s Imperial was producing record breaking quantities of cotton, cantaloupes, and other crops, and boomers and boosters of the region blithely assumed that their lands would get "better and better as the years go by." By the end of the twentieth century, however, Imperial had not only become one of the poorest counties in the nation, it was also beset by troubles involving migrant labor and illegal immigration.
Vollmann has doggedly investigated every facet of this binational locus, raiding archives, exploring polluted rivers and Chinese tunnels that were rumored to connect Mexico and the U.S., using spy cameras to infiltrate the notorious maquiladora factories of Mexico, talking with everyone from farmers to border patrolmen to prostitutes in his search for the fading American dream and its Mexican equivalent. In this brilliant work of investigative journalism, Vollmann uses all the resources of persuasion, bribery, book study, press access, imagination, patience, and chance to get his story. The result is a majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America's identity in the twenty-first century. |
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