The Devil's Highway: A True Story

From Barnes & Noble

In 2001, 26 men slipped across the Mexican border, traveling on foot across Arizona's deadly clandestine "Devil's Highway." Fewer than half of these hapless migrants would survive the scorching passage. In this gripping book, American Book Award winner Luis Alberto Urrea tells the story of the deadly trek, the hapless immigrants, and the Border Patrol units who hunt them.

The Washington Post

Urrea, a poet and novelist who is also a dogged reporter on the border wars, is keenly attuned to such eloquent and awful ironies and uses them to punctuate the The Devil's Highway, a painstaking, unsentimental and oddly lyrical chronology of the traveling party's horrific trek through the Sonora. — Chris Lehmann

Publishers Weekly

In May 2001, 26 Mexican men scrambled across the border and into an area of the Arizona desert known as the Devil's Highway. Only 12 made it safely across. American Book Award-winning writer and poet Urrea (Across the Wire; Six Kinds of Sky; etc.), who was born in Tijuana and now lives outside Chicago, tracks the paths those men took from their home state of Veracruz all the way norte. Their enemies were many: the U.S. Border Patrol ("La Migra"); gung-ho gringo vigilantes bent on taking the law into their own hands; the Mexican Federales; rattlesnakes; severe hypothermia and the remorseless sun, a "110 degree nightmare" that dried their bodies and pounded their brains. In artful yet uncomplicated prose, Urrea captivatingly tells how a dozen men squeezed by to safety, and how 14 others whom the media labeled the Yuma 14 did not. But while many point to the group's smugglers (known as coyotes) as the prime villains of the tragedy, Urrea unloads on, in the words of one Mexican consul, "the politics of stupidity that rules both sides of the border." Mexican and U.S. border policy is backward, Urrea finds, and it does little to stem the flow of immigrants. Since the policy results in Mexicans making the crossing in increasingly forbidding areas, it contributes to the conditions that kill those who attempt it. Confident and full of righteous rage, Urrea's story is a well-crafted m lange of first-person testimony, geographic history, cultural and economic analysis, poetry and an indictment of immigration policy. It may not directly influence the forces behind the U.S.'s southern border travesties, but it does give names and identities to the faceless and maligned "wetbacks" and "pollos," and highlights the brutality and unsustainable nature of the many walls separating the two countries. Maps not seen by PW. (Apr. 2) Forecast: Urrea has received coverage for his previous writing projects in numerous arts-related publications and has a loyal fan base. A six-city author tour and radio interviews will expand his audience further. The book has been optioned as the debut movie of Tucson-based Creative Dreams Inc. and is scheduled to begin filming in October 2004. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In May 2001, 26 Mexican men died in a section of the Arizona desert dubbed the Devil's Highway. Urrea, employing some journalistic license, paints a grim picture of the deadly struggle of those trying to enter the United States illegally and those working equally hard to secure the borders. This cat-and-mouse game between smugglers ("coyotes") and the U.S. Border Patrol ("La Migra") requires intelligence, creativity, endurance, experience, and luck. As the borders in urban areas became harder to cross, those sneaking illegals into "El Norte" have gone farther into the remote desert. The research here is excellent, and Urrea's narration is impressive. The story unfolds in a way that is fascinating to the listener—you can almost feel the heat and smell the desperation. A complex issue is covered with style, making this a recommended title for true crime collections and those interested in immigration. [The Little, Brown hc was a national best seller.—Ed.]—Scott R. DiMarco, Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.

Kirkus Reviews

The rueful, fate-wracked tale of 26 men who tried to cross into the US from Mexico but chose the wrong time, place, and guide. More than half would die, turned to cinder in the sun-blasted desert of southern Arizona. American Book Award-winner Urrea (Wandering Time, 1999, etc.) tells this grim story wonderfully; like the Border Patrol's trackers, he cuts back and forth, looking for signs, following tracks wherever they might lead. This means relating the various biographies of the "walkers" themselves and discovering what drove them north, from the desire for a new life to a season's work in the orange groves to a job putting a new roof on a house. It means delving into the disastrous Mexican state, with its "catastrophic political malfeasance that forced the walkers to flee their homes and bake to death in the western desert." Urrea notes the shift in tactics, thanks to the Border Patrol's extremely effective interdiction and prevention policies, which now compel guides to take walkers over the most remote and dangerous routes. They will often be abandoned if the going gets too tough, as happened here. Urrea spends time in the ratty border hotels and towns ("Sonoita smells like bad fruit and sewage. Blue clouds of exhaust leak from the dying cars"), and he spends time with the Patrol, especially the trackers, who can read so much from a footprint that it's scary. But not as scary as hyperthermia and its ugly progress: the first stages of stress and fatigue, on through syncope and cramps, to the dreadful sludge of exhaustion and stroke. This is not the peaceful sleep-death brought on by freezing; it's reeling and raging, and when a man's son dies in his arms, "the father lurched away intothe desert, away from the trees, crying out in despair." A horrendous story told with bitter skill, highlighting the whole sordid, greedy mess that attends illegal broader crossings. Agent: Sandy Dijkstra/Sandra Dijkstra Agency