Photojournalist and author John Annerino was born on the edge of the desert, where he still lives. An Arizona native, he has been working in the frontier of Old Mexico and the American West for the last twenty years, documenting its indigenous people, natural beauty, and political upheaval. Represented by Gamma Liaison, Annerino includes among his credits Life, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many publications worldwide. He is the author of eight books, among them People of Legend (Sierra Club Books, 1996) and Apache: The Sacred Path to Womanhood (Marlowe and Co., 1998) and is currently working on a book called American Cave Dwellers.

To order Annerino’s book go to:Four Walls Eight Windows

The group waits, and my legs and feet burn with each footstep as I struggle to reach them. And before I realize it, the communal water jug is thrust in my face by the same Mexicans who, others warned me, "will slit your throat for your water." A hot wind licks at us, wicking away what little moisture remains in our heat-ravaged bodies, as we continue staggering across the heart of this killing ground. We are out of water, and our deaths will be heinous.

It's all there in the incident reports, historic journals, eyewitness accounts, grisly polaroids - seventy-nine dead this year in Arizona alone, added to a staggering death toll of 736 in the past three years who have perished trying to cross the 1,952 mile U.S./Mexico border.One of us will have visions of water and choke on mouthfuls of hot sand. Someone else will strip and stare at the sun until it burns the eyes out of his head. And someone else will rip up the earth with his bloody fingertips in a deranged search for water. Those who escape the heat will be hunted down by vigilantes, tortured, or shot with high-powered rifles. The lucky one, though, if he doesn't hang himself from a mesquite tree, will lie down, make peace with Tata Dios, and wait for his scorched lungs to squeeze out his last breath. But the desert will claim each of us, far from our loved ones, and the tragic passing of my four companions will not raise the faintest blip on network news radar.

My head is spinning, my body is convulsing with chills and nausea, and the ground is heaving at me in dizzying waves of sand and rock, when Marcelino sees Interstate 8: "!Mira!!La carretera!" (Look! The highway!) I run forward, stumbling, hoping to capture their last punishing footsteps. I lie down. Dots whirl before my eyes. The heat sucks the air out of my chest, but the motor-drive whirs as these brave men finally escape the desert's clutches in their search for the American dream.

THE END

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