RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : An Interview with Novelist and Immigrant Rights Activist David McCabe

Novelist and immigrant rights activist David McCabe at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, March 8, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Novelist and immigrant rights activist 
David McCabe, author of 'Without Sin'

"When love for family is stronger than fear /
when the desperation sets in /
A man will cross any line that is drawn, /
and who's to say it's a sin?"
-- Slaid Cleaves from "Borderline," epigraph in Without Sin

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 18, 2013

Novelist and immigrant rights activist David McCabe was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 8, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with David McCabe here:


David McCabe is the author of Without Sin, a novel inspired by actual events in Oceanside, California, where federal and county officials shut down a sex trafficking ring that exploited young, undocumented women. The novel chronicles the exploits of a young border patrol agent and a 17-year-old Mexican prostitute as they struggle to come to terms with the increasing violence and changing politics that govern the borderlands dividing their countries.

David is also an educator and an activist in the immigrants rights movement.

Without Sin won the Book to Action award from the California State Library and the California Center for the Book, and was a semifinalist in the New Orleans Faulkner Society's William Faulkner-Wisdom Competition.

From left: Thorne Dreyer, David
McCabe, and Tracey Schulz.

Marisa Ugarte wrote that in Without Sin, David McCabe "renders personal the horror that thousands of young undocumented women experience daily," and Rosemary James of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, called it "a must read for all who would understand the complexities, as well as horrors, of the lives of undocumented immigrants in the United States."

McCabe, who lives with his wife and son and a menagerie of animals on a small ranch in Southern California, has worked in public education for over 20 years -- as an elementary school teacher and a principal -- and currently serves as a school board trustee at the Nuview Union School District and as an associate professor of education and coordinator of the Teacher Preparation Program at Pasadena City College.

McCabe, who has also written and spoken extensively on education-related issues, is the author of Toward a More Perfect Union: Creating Democratic Classroom Communities. He recently spoke at St. Edward's University in Austin and at Texas A&M University about human trafficking, xenophobia, immigration, and the abuse and sexual exploitation of children.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Friday, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.

The Rag Blog