The border between the United States and Mexico has created separate cultures, separate histories, even for towns that are seemingly contiguous. The bordertowns of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora-sister cities severed at birth-share a common place in the land, but there the similarities end. However on one fateful day in 1918, the two towns were joined through violence as a border skirmish broke out and bullets were exchanged across the artificial frontier. Hock's intricate La Mera Frontera tracks the truth of this clash, now irredeemably altered in the haze we call memory. As he interviews a band of elder citizens from both sides of the border, we hear differing accounts as numerous as the rounds that cracked the air some eighty years earlier. Among the border inhabitants who died during the fatal fray, Maria Esquivel is an unsettled soul, unacknowledged, unmourned. Resolute, Esquivel "returns" to the present, seeking recognition for her tragic place in this last battle between the U.S. and Mexico. Luxuriantly rendered, profusely nuanced, La Mera Frontera suggests that history is what you make it.-Steve Seid