24. Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story (2004, with an afterword from 2014) (9/17/2020)
The story begins with five men stumbling "out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn't know their own names, couldn't remember where they'd come from, had forgotten how long they'd been lost." The scene is fully, viscerally imagined and described: the ferociously shimmering heat; the men's black-burnt skin and lips, their hair hardened from dried sweat; their hallucinations, their desperation.
We then learn a bit about the history of the "white man" in this region, a bit about native myths, a bit about natural history—stories that come almost as welcome relief from the men's suffering.
And then another key player is introduced: the Border Patrol, in the form of an agent, "Mike F.," who finds these five wandering souls, and then learns that there are up to 21 more whose fate is unknown. Immediately, an all-out search & rescue operation is mounted.
The story told is experiential, sometimes slowing down to a walking pace as we follow the migrants (or as the BP calls them, "undocumented entrants") on their journey, one that starts out hopeful and ends up horrific. But it also delves deeply into structural components of this complicated drama that plays out every day along our southern border: the wants and needs and dreams of the walkers themselves; the convoluted society of the smugglers; the Border Patrol's dedication to their task. No one is a hero, or a villain, exactly. It is, unfortunately, just the way things go in a world out of balance.
As Luis explains in his 2014 afterword,
When the research began, Jesús Lopez Ramos [the guide] was presented to me as the "bad guy." Soon his defenders made a strong case for the Border Patrol being the "bad guy." Law enforcement made a strong case for the smugglers being the "bad guys." And I knew that popular culture, as expressed in talk radio for example, considered the "illegals" the "bad guys." It was my field experience with [BP] supervisory agent Ken Smith that led to the epiphany. If I was going to write a book hoping to deal with the issue fairly, how could I write it with a prejudice toward Ken and his brothers in forest green? Once that key turned in the lock, the tone of the narrative opened for me. I have to trust my readers to make up their own minds. Even if that means reaching decisions I didn't intend for them to reach.
The writing is lyrical, full of sensuous detail. We are introduced to the desert itself as geography becomes a character in the story. And even before we get to the desert:
They saw many wonders as they traveled north. In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there. They went from jungle to rain forest to pine forest, from pines to plains, and from plains to desert and volcanoes.
They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. They stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were—the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent....
Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from Veracruz.
Luis is a master of lists. There is an amazing section midway where he outlines in excrutiating detail the six stages of heat death. "They are the same for everyone. It doesn't matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways": heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.
But most remarkable is the humanity in this book, something that is hardly surprising if you've read other books by Urrea, or heard him do a reading, or workshopped with him, or interact with him on Facebook. (He is the instigator of Operation Uplift, which I've written about a couple of times, as here.) And so, one final passage; this takes place after Mendez, the guide, has left the group, ostensibly to find water and help:
The day tormented them. Thirst. Pain. Men crawled under creosotes, under the scant shade of scraggly mesquites. It was a dull repetition of the entire walk. As rote as factory work. Their hours clanged by like machines. They were in the dirt like animals.
Six o'clock in the morning took ten hours to become seven o'clock.
A week later, it was eight o'clock.
The temperature screamed into the nineties before nine o'clock.
They waited. They couldn't even talk. They panted like dogs, groaned. Men put their hands to their chests, almost delicately, as if checking their own pulses. But they were barely awake. They were half in dreams and half in the day, and the day itself was a bad dream. Dry wings swished in the air around them. Voices, coughing. Far above, the ice silver chips of airplanes cut the blue. Out of reach.
It's an amazing book. And it reinforces a sense of the humanity that is trapped today at our border, in detention camps, and the inhumanity of our current administration, and, I would add, of the higher-up smugglers, sex traffickers, and drug lords on the Mexican side. I was heartened, though, not to emerge from this reading experience with a negative view of the Border Patrol. Theirs is a difficult job. They, too, are human beings. Sure, there are certainly bad eggs, as in any police force. But the ones that Urrea introduces us to seem like people I wouldn't mind knowing.
As for the Yuma 14: May they rest in peace. And their families not suffer. And I pray that the migrants currently incarcerated are soon, soon, able to find a better life. I do not understand how human can turn against human so easily. Maybe I'm naive. But I think we all deserve a decent shot at life. It doesn't last all that long, after all.
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Today's stats for Covid-19: 9,550 confirmed cases (up 789 since Friday, September 11); 553 hospitalizations (up 31); and 67 deaths (up 3). At least deaths don't seem to be rising too fast. But still the cases mount. When will we get a day without any change? Soon?
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