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Leigh Binford, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier By Gilberto Rosas Duke University Press. 2012. 188 pages. $23.95 cloth, Social Forces, Volume 93, Issue 4, June 2015, Page e105, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sot004
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This short book—the main text sans endnotes is 146 pages—treats a shifting group of Mexican adolescents and teenagers who reside most of the time in Nogales, Sonora, but traverse a sewer system shared with the twin city of Nogales, Arizona to “freedom” there and farther afield in Tucson, Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, where they work, rest and relax. Barrio Libre, which the author translates as “Free Hood,” is the youths' self-imposed name for themselves and wherever they happen to be at the time. They are Barrio Libre and Barrio Libre is with them always. Rosas encountered the youth of Barrio Libre while directing a halfway house in Nogales, Sonora, Mi Nueva Casa, which closed in November of 2001. While he occasionally entered the complex of tunnels, most of this compelling ethnography is based on conversations that unfolded between Rosas and the youth over meals, games of foosball and during timeouts from informal economic activities. Particular subjects appear and disappear, as they visit family in other parts of Mexico, disappear into Barrio Libre in the United States or pass time incarcerated in youth facilities to which they have been consigned by U.S. immigration agents after their apprehension.