Tunnel Kids

For more information or to purchase, please visit the University of Arizona Press website. Tunnel Kids is also available on Amazon.com.

Photographs by Maeve Hickey; Text by Lawrence J. Taylor

• Winner of the 2001 Southwest Book of the Year award
• NY Public Library Selection

About Tunnel Kids

Two parallel tunnels, each fourteen feet wide and several miles long, drain the summer rains from Mexico to the United States. On the Mexican side, groups of children call these tunnels home.

Maeve Hickey's stunning portraits provide a heart-stopping counterpoint to Lawrence Taylor's incisive prose. Story and photos together open a window into the life of the tunnel kids—a world like that of many homeless children, precarious and adaptive- but unique to the U.S.- Mexico border.

A compelling book for the classroom

Tunnel Kids is an powerful and compelling book that has been used in teaching courses across a variety of disciplines

• Download a course guide and comments from teachers who have used the book in their classes from the University of Arizona Press website!
  

Reviews

“Hickey’s spare photographs allow the fear, the hope, the strength, and the vulnerability of the tunnel kids to seep into our consciousness. “
- Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer José Galvez

"Taylor delivers unassuming, respectful and keen observations of the teens' lives, paired with Hickey's lovely photographs. They have produced a haunting, nuanced sketch of a world far outside the experience of most Americans and an important, unpretentious contribution to border literature."
- Publisher's Weekly

"A timeless, well-crafted ethnography...Tunnel Kids is not your typical detached academic treatise on human suffering. Its subtly reflexive commentary on ethnographic methods makes it much more than a purely emotional or voyeuristic indulgence."
- American Book Review

"Tunnel Kids is an excellent example of how a border ethnography should be done."
- New Mexico Historical Review