As the cliché says, walk a mile in someone’s shoes to better understand their perspective in life. The book "Puro Border" takes a 5-mile hike in torn and tattered shoes in order to bring a powerful perspective all too familiar to many border-town residents.

These shoes, like the people that wear them, are subjected to the harsh conditions of La Frontera, or the frontier, as the editors and authors of the book like to call it in reference to the U.S.-Mexico border.

"Puro Border" is an engaging collection of articles, essays, fiction, photo packages, corridos (a form of traditional Mexican music) and other literature about life on the border. While there are many stories of violence and tragedy--one of the most compelling being about the deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez--there are also tales of childhood experiences and fond remembrances of family.

“Old ladies swept tides of dust off sidewalks. The mailman walked sharply from yard to yard blowing his whistle. Brilliant kites rattled in the phone lines like slaughtered pterodactyls. The hill was jumpin.’” This description of Tijuana is a childhood memory recounted by author Luis Alberto Urrea . The excerpt is titled “Tijuana Wonderland,” and is a portion from his 1998 book, Nobody’s Son.

Urrea is one of several notable authors who make up this collection. Fellow award-winner Juan Villoro makes an appearance (with an editor’s note explaining his inclusion in the book even though he is not a border-town resident), to tell us more about Tijuana, a city that is part of “the most-crossed border in the world, where the city limits of the Global Village change landscape as if by remote control.”

Authors Leslie Marmon Silko and Julian Cardona make contributions, as well as photographers Dennis Daily and James H. Evans. The collection’s editors, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, John William Byrd and Bobby Byrd have their fair share of accolades as well. In comparison to books of similar genres, the editors made an effort to only include works from people directly connected to the border regions, be it through work or family.

This seemingly unilateral perspective of the border doesn't translate in the overall message of the text. In fact, the book feels a bit discombobulated from one piece to the next, almost as if it is missing some linking element.

Whether or not it was an intentional tactic employed by the editors to more fully display the “discombobulated” lifestyles of residents on the U.S.- Mexico border is arguable.

More than stories about the towns are the stories of the pollos, those who wish to leave their towns to find work in the U.S. Immigration, one of today’s most controversial debates, is a necessity for many characters at play in this collection.

In one excerpt, author Francisco Vasquez Mendoza shared a detail about the place in Tijuana that thrives economically on finding pollos to move across the border. He referred to that place as “a republic where the government is the underworld and its citizens are those looking for the hope of a better life in exile.” In this passage, the situation of these individuals is conveyed as horribly desperate, shedding light on why many illegally crossing the border.

On top of seeking collaborators from border areas, the authors also used another tactic to add authenticity to the book. To keep in the tone and style used by regular people on the border, the editors decided to keep many of the Spanish references and provided a glossary of terms for clarification. This gives the reader the sense that the author was actually writing from a street corner in Juarez and jotting down the varying conversations of real people on the street.

Overall, "Puro Border," a book from Cinco Punto Press, captures some of the harsh realities of what life on the border is like. More importantly, it gives the reader a sense of the kind of person it takes to live in those places, and that kind of knowledge is irreplaceable.