On the Margins - Us Americans in a Border Town to Mexico

Johannes Wilm an organizer and activist from Oslo Norway goes off to live in and study Douglas AZ a border town to Mexico for half a year. At first sight Douglas looks like nothing but a run down company town - after the Phelps Dodge smelter left in the 1980s. Interestingly though Wilm discovers that old modes of social stratification disappeared together with the jobs. This book has to be seen as a tribute to the progressive sides of the lumpenproletariat. This is a well written experience-near ethnography of marginality in every sense of the word: Douglas is literally on the margins between the USA and Mexico it is geographically marginal economically marginal and culturally marginal in the US context. Wilm weaves a convincing and compelling picture of the precarious reckless and often paradoxical lives led by people in Douglas. --Thomas Hylland Eriksen Professor of Social Anthropology (Oslo/Amsterdam)