From a distance, the border looks like a dividing line. Journalist Tyche Hendricks, MJ ’97, believes that it’s really a region: more borderlands than borderline.  In The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport, she captures the stories of American and Mexican ranchers, factory workers, police and doctors who inhabit one of the least understood places in either country.

A new picture of the borderlands emerges from her reporting — as a common ground alive with the energy of cultural exchange and international commerce, burdened with too-rapid growth and binational conflict, and underlain with a deep sense of history.

With a stalled immigration policy and a raging drug war, it’s the people who live in the borderlands who are bearing the brunt of the violence, the political friction and the pressures of the recession, Hendricks found. But a better understanding of the borderlands — and the way the United States and Mexico are connected — could help policymakers reach more lasting solutions that benefit both countries.

Hendricks is an editor at KQED Public Radio and a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. For many years she covered immigration and demographics at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her talk will be followed by a reception and book-signing.