What Side Are You On?

“Wilson’s commitment inspires, and the account is enriched by Lucero’s meditations on history and sovereignty, including passages exploring how the U.S. draws and enforces physical and metaphorical boundaries between its “ ‘civilization’ and [the] ‘merciless savagery’” of both Mexico and Native lands. It’s a rewarding chronicle of a remarkable life.”—Publishers Weekly

“Illuminating . . . . shed[s] valuable light on the deep roots of the violence and injustice that reflect and fuel border militarization and the fight against criminalized immigration . . . . [helps] readers to see beyond mainstream framings of migration and border politics, provoking important questions about international mobility, humanitarianism, and solidarity, while pointing the way toward a more just world.”—NACLA Report on the Americas

“As a collaboration,…[t]his book represents a gold standard in the field. I predict it will find itself on many graduate and undergraduate method course syllabi alongside classics such as Decolonizing Methodologies.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“What Side Are You On? offers a remarkable model for cross-cultural collaboration and knowledge production. . . . This decolonizing approach yields an engaging account of Wilson’s impressive life, which provides a window onto the transformation of the borderlands over the past four decades.”—Native American and Indigenous Studies

“Brilliant, moving, and wholly unique.... Wilson and Lucero have produced a groundbreaking book that mixes memoir, testimonio, political science, and history to tell the complex story of an Indigenous man’s journey through the civil rights era, the Cold War, and America’s war on undocumented migrants along the US-Mexico border.”—Jason De León, author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling

“Mike Wilson’s life history and varied experiences reveal that Native lives are complex, adaptive, and entirely modern. Wilson and Lucero’s unique dual-story approach is extremely effective. I can’t think of another book quite like this one.”—K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Arizona State University

“An engaging and valuable book. By tacking between Wilson’s first-person life history and Lucero’s contextual 'interludes,' this collaborative work provides both an intimate account of lived experience and a historical analysis of the larger structures of power that have a hand in shaping life as an Indigenous person along the US-Mexico border.”—Shannon Speed, University of California, Los Angeles