January 2009 Archives

Of course, he’ll tell you up front that half plus one died.

But you need not wait for his report: the back cover will supply the same one before you read a single page.

That the number of Mexicans crossing the border illegally continues to soar is an understatement. That 26 attempted to do so in 2001 is not news. That 14 of them failed as a result not of deportation but of death is not a surprise—a tragedy, but not a surprise.

No reader should approach Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway in order to discover those facts for the first time. Yes, those facts matter. Of course they matter. They are the first heartbreaking answer to a series of complicated questions.

Yet those questions—the to whom did this happen, how did this happen, why did this happen and how can we keep this from happening again—as well as the corresponding responses they elicit, matter as much as that initial answer does itself.

It is to those questions, those deceptively simple queries that consume every journalist out on assignment and every reader who later looks it through, that Urrea devotes his novel.

And that novel is a fantastic achievement.

The Devil’s Highway follows 26 men through their agonizing journey north from southern Mexico up through the U.S.’ back door, the searing wastes of Arizona’s desert.

Known to the Wellton Border Patrol who rescued them as the “Wellton 26,” or to most others as the “Yuma 14” for the party’s 14 who died in Yuma sector, these men endure one ordeal after the other in the hope that their efforts will allow their sweethearts or children to eat better (or at all), live under stronger roofs and attend school with the funds earned in a richer country.

Stunningly thorough, Urrea admits that in reporting the story, he filled five journals (144 pages each) with notes. And it shows. He weaves bits of history into a narrative that shifts back and forth in point of view as well as from the distant past to the present, to the events leading up to the voyage and to the catastrophic journey itself.

In a literary move equally agile, he visits Veracruz on one page, reaching Altar or Tuscon, San Luis or the desert, on the next.

Urrea writes with such terrifyingly vivid detail that with it, he shuttles the reader to the times and places he has described. Moreover, never does the reader feel that Urrea is judging these individuals, the people who have become characters in his story.

That seeming lack of judgment manifests itself not as a neutral portrayal of folk for which he apologizes, but as ruthless accounts of the actions of the entrants and the Border Patrol, the two governments and the coyotes, bigoted minutemen and crime lords.

Because he baldly presents chronological facts and physical descriptions while infusing those passages with inherited thoughts, impressions and quotes, he manages to cast even those most flawed or potentially reprehensible in a human light.

We cannot sympathize with an adolescent dealing in human traffic, who can lead those smuggled to death while leaving them to face it alone. But with the aid of details and letters, we can almost empathize with the kind of desperation wrought from living in a country that has forsaken him, adjacent to another for which he does not exist.

Rare are those who look on the Border Patrol with friendly eyes. But Urrea, who has no stake in their reputation, allows the reader a different glimpse into their monotonous existence, their lonely worlds, their rough compassion and their endearing idiosyncrasies.

Though he often writes with a dry tongue-in-cheek that irreverently mocks both governmental hypocrisy and Mexican machismo alike, his prose also reads like poetry.

At one instance he sums up the desert’s equal opportunity danger to and derision for its visitors by saying that “in the desert, we are all illegal aliens.”

In a later vignette, he poignantly portrays the 26 as they sit on the bus en route to the border, and for some to their burning death:

They utter “some small prayers, muttered in discreet whispers, the sign of the cross ending in kissed crossed fingers. ‘Journey mercies. Let us arrive safely. We need to get to the border. Help get us into the desert. Make us strong.’ It was more comfortable than the chairs in their homes, but the air conditioning was too cold.”

Urrea loses no opportunity to highlight the painful irony behind finding that AC uncomfortable not long before cooking in the cruel, unforgiving sun of the States’ southern desert.

And that desert is in this case an enemy. It destroys all who outstay their brief welcome. Urrea makes us viscerally aware of the effects of that prolonged stay. Clinically, he outlines the manner in which those caught there can for awhile subsist on their urine until that too will poison them.

He personifies the desert, calling it, like others before him, “Desolation,” running through the ways in which that spirit makes men crazy before gruesomely baking them in six separate stages.

While his chronology is, at times, confusing, and the end, the devastating “so what now” epilogue is slightly truncated and hard to follow, those shortcomings appear minimal in the face of this literary feat.

Yes, we understand from the outset that only 12 of the 26 will survive. But as we read about a father dying next to his young son, or the fictional thoughts projected onto the dead by Urrea, illuminating the Mexican’s ethos, that each man would be so insulted at the indignity of smelling—even in death—or the manner in which those harboring hyperthermic hallucinations would stumble to oblivion naked, having first neatly stripped and taken the time to fold their clothes, we begin to see those numbers as individuals, as human beings.

Half plus one died. But the novel allows us to understand how something so loathsome could have transpired. We experience, by proxy of Urreas words, the hell of that highway, and the more we learn, the more we can honor those 14 as more than simply coordinates on a map, or look for recourses to help the many others stumbling through Desolation each day.

Luis Alberto Urrea's journey following 26 Mexican men through the treacherous stretch of Arizona desert was a harsh glimpse into the reality of attempting to immigrate into the U.S. His book, The Devil's Highway, portrays these men as they begin walking in May of 2001 and through a series of missteps and poor leadership, 14 of them literally melt away in the desert.

His writing is graphic and unmerciful in its description of their struggle and many of their deaths. Although I believe the brutality in his writing is far more effective than subtlety. When Urrea goes through the six stages of hyperthermia, for example, this may seem excessive to the faint of heart but I rather enjoyed the brutal honesty and tell-all candor of his writing.

I thought it was important that while he humanized their story, he also made the men anonymous bodies lying in a bag somewhere. This dichotomy is powerful. It is the reality of how many people see these men, and at the same time, how we all strive not to see them. For instance, Urrea names the men as they are found in the desert, identifying them by their longitude and latitude coordinates. "Enrique Landeros. N. 32.23.17/W. 113.19.54. Blue underpants. Deceased."

 He tells how border crossers like this become a foul-smelling case file in an office somewhere, which is a reminder of how insignificant they are. Also, many times the extra paperwork each man accumulates is a motivator for authorities to just let them go unreported. "Each corpse generates a case file. Every unidentified corpse represents one case forever left open...But uncollected--unreported--bones generate no files."

It's important for him to describe the men in this way, because it is how most people think of them--just another border crosser. Yet you can't forget that they are people, struggling to get somewhere better.

One point of criticism, the book really had a heavy dose of geographical descriptions that weighed down the fluidity of the writing. Although I understand the need to locate the men at each phase of their journey, and it certainly demonstrates Urrea's knowledge and reporting of the area, I got the feeling I needed an interactive map to keep up. (Or CNN's John King in my living room while I read.)

The story of the men's struggle was no doubt compelling and well written, but I felt after completing the book that the last two chapters were the most important. Urrea finally gave me the answers to the dreaded questions: "what does it all mean?" and "why should I care?" (In the sense of why does this story matters in the grand scheme of the U.S./Mexico border.) Here I finally began to feel how these men fit into the larger picture, and what changed, and didn't change, because of their death.

However, I still finished the book with a sense of loss as to what is being done, and what should be done, to solve the issue of the ever-increasing droves of people that cross the border illegally. Urrea offers this little gem that summed it up for me: "The Yuma 14 changed nothing, and they changed everything." This leaves me wondering what the book is supposed to teach me. In a way, the story has heightened my awareness of the perils of the border and the utter ridiculousness of the political rhetoric surrounding the issue. (It basically seems like the same argument politicians make about stopping the drug war by attacking "gateway drug" Marijuana--which is way off base.) 

Then I turn to what Consul Flores Vizcarra said, "What kills people is the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border."

But still I'm left with no sense of a solution, which may be the point. I felt like I finished with this overbearing Catch 22--in limbo between feeling empowered and completely helpless.

I walked away with a deeper understanding of the constant battle with border migration and the death toll it brings, but with an unsettling emotion as to how to apply what I had learned to analyze and form opinions on the issue. For many of these people I think this quote Urrea offers is the summation of their existence. "It was all suffering and waiting. Their whole lives."

I kept trying to decipher in the last two chapters, what Urrea ultimately thought of this problem. He is obviously an expert on this cross border migration, and yet he offers mixed feelings about whether it's simply Mexico that needs fixing, or whether it should be an open border, or if immigrants are really vital for the success of American society. He doesn't give a definitive answer, and maybe he doesn't have one. Which leads me to believe that is the point. There is no on answer to such a simple yet complex problem.

Turn down the heat. Open the windows. Grab a pint of water, or two, and prepare to wander the desert in the blistering heat. From page one of Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway, the ground aches with sunlight, searing tender feet as they travel across miles of nothingness with a group of desperate strangers. Throats tighten. Skin petrifies. Muscles swell and burn. The journey is painful, but the underlying reality is terrifying.

In an attempt to put the reader in the shoes (or shoe, or bare feet, as was the case with many of the Wellton 26) of millions of Mexican immigrants, Urrea dedicates much of his energy to re-creating the harsh environment of the desert crossing along the Mexico and Arizona border. When he sticks to descriptors and fact-sprinkling, Urrea succeeds in creating the immersive atmosphere akin to great fiction. But he also has an annoying tendency to negate his beautiful writing by going a sentence too far in the direction of cliché or unnecessary, off-tone commentary.

Urrea seems to suffer from a lack of confidence. The story itself is compelling without argument, engaging without decoration and moving without the need for external pressure. And yet the author insists on retreating to a place of safety after almost every paragraph. Afraid of the powerful words he has just written, Urrea undermines them with the jarring appearance of a casual, conversational narrator who likes to insert clichéd jokes and generally "lighten the mood." But the interior of this book is not the place for this comedian, who sounds more like an over-zealous publisher attempting to extend a hand to a larger, less intelligent audience and pull them inside.

The result is a schizophrenic voice that sounds more like the pages of a reporter's notebook than a carefully edited, unified piece of creative non-fiction. Urrea was either over-edited by a terrible editor, or under-edited by an even worse one. Some sentences and ideas seem to come straight from the many pages of his multiple note-pads, as if Urrea found every scribbled word to be sacred and refused to "kill his babies" by choosing only the parts of the puzzle that fit. After a year of reporting, he no doubt suffered from "information overload" and had a difficult time crafting his various thoughts and experiences into a unified whole. The content is there, and it is stunning, but the writer was confused when it came to identifying beginning, middle and end, and knowing how to move between them.

If he were to have treated this book as a single narrative, with a single voice, instead of a bucket for his experience and research to slosh around in, his writing talent would have been able to thrive in the areas that need it most. Instead, the beautiful, deep and complex moments come in fits and starts, while other parts of the narrative are left vacant and echoing with tinny descriptions or stereotypes. In severe cases, every other sentence is a nuisance to the one before:

Right near the Devil's Highway itself is a mutated saguaro that rises ten feet into the sky. Its main body is thick, and the top is a scarred, messed-up ball of tissue. It looks for all the world like an arm raising a fist. And wouldn't you know it, the "ears," or branches, that stick out form an index finger and a little finger. The Devil's Highway throws up a heavy metal devil sign to announce itself. The only thing missing is Ozzy Osbourne.

Left to its own devices, the image of the "mutated" heavy metal tree at the entrance to the Devil's Highway is entrancing. The description of its top as a "scarred, messed-up ball of tissue" is the perfect example of a deep, multi-faceted symbol that resonates with the reader. Yet Urrea drowns his absorbing words with cheap tricks. The light-hearted "and wouldn't you know it..." is an unnecessary preamble that takes away the interpretive power that should belong to the reader. The paragraph finishes with what is probably the worst sentence in the book - a completely clichéd statement that has little worth even in the dingy feature section of a bad, small-town newspaper: "The only thing missing is Ozzy Osbourne." Sounds of disgust echo from armchairs everywhere.

The problem with the writing consistency may stem from Urrea's own predicament as a journalist, using an omniscient narrator to write a long-form narrative about second-hand experiences. In order for this to be done well, the journalist must work at suspending the belief that this was a reported story and sculpt a coherent, creative non-fiction narrative (a good example of creative, factual non-fiction is the book Shadow Divers, by Robert Kurson). However, this poses a problem for journalists who are used to the constraints of factoids and verbatim quotes. Urrea slides in and out of a creative narrative, as if afraid that his work will become less significant the more fiction-like the writing style becomes. Ironically, his most powerful passages arise from the free exertion of his pen, and not from the journalist quoting a source.

To cover up his insecurity as a non-fiction writer, Urrea often resorts to stereotyping and bias. He speaks as if nurturing a quality he despises in the reader, and the effect is to create a condescending narrator who undermines and humiliates his audience. The coyotes dream of Cadillacs, the Mexicans idly worship American culture like the whole country is "Disneyland," and the border patrol treat everything as a big joke. "Somebody done snuck into the country," Urrea writes at one point, mimicking the stereotype of a red-neck conservative in an attempt to be whimsical while he introduces "the migra." References to "white" culture are thrown in at every chance, as if Urrea is trying to help his reader understand the subject matter by referencing Ozzy Osbourne, The Who, Clint Eastwood, James Bond, H.P. Lovecraft, Disneyland, and the Boy Scouts; or by making "ironic," repetitive generalizations ("These are the first portraits for which they had posed", "the boys had never been in a parade", "The dead were taking their first airplane trip"); or telling cheap, inappropriate, jokes ("journalists took them as the hottest story (no pun intended)" Yeah right.)

However, if the reader can recognize and overcome Urrea's attempts to undermine his audience's intelligence or interpretive abilities, The Devil's Highway can be an absorbing and fulfilling book. The desert is evoked so tangibly that it can suck the moisture from a room and leave the reader gasping for breath. Urrea's in-depth explanation of the process of heat death, from stress to fatigue to syncope to cramps to exhaustion to stroke to expiration, is dizzyingly vivid. His use of symbolic detail, when used humbly, is extremely effective, and the level of education that the book offers about the biggest cross-country exodus in history is commendable. Most importantly, the work succeeds in illuminating the border crisis from all sides - broadening perspectives, opening minds, and teaching the reader empathy for lives that are both alien and parallel to his own.