Below is a reprise of my 2011 post on Luis Alberto Urrea's book, which impacted me deeply.
The book affected me so much, I uploaded the stories of the volunteers who delivered water to the desert into my brain's cloud storage, knowing that some day - some day - I would be one of those volunteers. And so I was, when I took up my tourist-in-residency in Tucson in 2019-2020.
Rootless Lit: The Devil's Highway: A True Story
Rootless lit book review: The Devil's Highway: A True Story, by Luis Alberto Urrea
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| Credit: Amazon |
This is the story of the desert passage undocumented immigrants make
between Mexico and the U.S. Many die en route because of lack of water
and the heat. More specifically, it is the story of the Yuma 14, when fourteen men from one group died in 2001.
There were parts of this book, especially at the end, where it was
painful to read. Mr. Urrea described the final hours of the dead in
vivid, personal detail. One description particularly stands out for its
horrific sadness. A survivor reported: "One of the boys went crazy
and started jumping up and down. He started screaming, 'Mama! Mama! I
don't want to die!' He ran up to a big cactus and started smashing his
face against it. I don't know what his name was." The boy was 16 years old.
About another who died, Mr. Urrea wrote: "Nobody knows the name of
the man who took off all his clothes. It was madness, surely. He removed
his slacks, folded them, and put them on the ground. Then he took off
his underwear, laid it neatly on the pants. He removed his shirt and
undershirt and squared them away with the pants. As if he didn't want to
leave a mess. ...He lay on his back and stared into the sun until he
died."
I like how Mr. Urrea spoke for the dead as they rode in their body bags in the air-conditioned hearses.
Mr. Urrea's description of the Border Patrol's activities seemed
nuanced and even-handed to me. He offers thoughtful notes in the last
chapter regarding the financial costs and benefits of undocumented
immigrants, of other violences perpetrated in and around the desert
border.
It's difficult to describe Mr. Urrea's writing style other than to say
it is personal, often in second person narrative. His portrayal of
almost all of the players in the undocumented migrant universe is
empathetic. Exceptions are the drug gangsters and the coyotes they run,
plus certain aspects of the Mexican government machine.
Whatever one's position on migration, this book forces the reader to
acknowledge the immigrants' humanity. At least for a day or two.
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