The Devils Highway: A True Story (22 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of several widely acclaimed and prizewinning books. His nonfiction works include
The Devil’s Highway,
a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction;
Across the Wire,
winner of the Christopher Award; and
By the Lake of Sleeping Children.
His celebrated fiction includes the novels
The Hummingbird’s Daughter
and
In Search of Snow,
as well as the collection
Six Kinds of Sky,
which won the 2002
ForeWord Magazine
Book of the Year Award, Editor’s Choice for Fiction. Urrea is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, and a Colorado Book Award, and he has been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. His poetry has appeared in
The Best American Poetry.
He teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Back Bay Readers’ Pick

Reading Group Guide

THE
DEVIL’S HIGHWAY

A TRUE STORY

BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA

A conversation with Luis Alberto Urrea

Why is the story you tell in
The Devil’s Highway
important beyond the border regions of the United States?

The simplest answer to that question is to say that, at the time, this tragedy was the most notorious border incident and the largest Border Patrol manhunt. It captured the imagination of the world press and it led to many potential border reforms. These reforms were sidetracked after September 11, 2001. However, on a deeper level, I think the border question is one that will never go away.

The book is important to me because it attempts to reveal the many layers of complicity in the border chaos. Americans are being fed a bill of goods: Mexicans are invading our country. The facts are more complex and the players are many. Writing
The Devil’s Highway
seemed like a chance to show Americans the face of the undocumented. But it also was a chance to introduce Americans to the Border Patrol agent—a law enforcement officer who is disrespected, insulted, and demeaned by both the right and the left. Finally, it was a chance to reveal the complexities of the international crime syndicates that are now selling human flesh as if it were bags of marijuana.

The Border Patrol agent who first stumbled across the lost walkers is identified only as Mike F. in your book. Why is his identity concealed?

Mike F. is truly the hero of this story. When I began interviewing Border Patrol agents, they closed ranks on the subject of this particular agent. I believe they were trying to protect his privacy. Since the book has come out, however, I have been in contact with him. He is now with Canine Corps and his name is Dave Phagan. I was able to cobble together a sketchy version of his experience through the testimony of his brother officers. But Phagan’s story is much more amazing, complex, and shocking than what I could capture in the book. I hope to find a way to tell his complete story in the near future.

Coming to this story as a Mexican American, did you feel you brought any bias to how you researched or wrote
The Devil’s Highway?
And do you feel that your perspective changed at all during the writing process?

Yes. My missionary background made me deeply sympathetic to the undocumented. My Mexican-American background made me feel antagonistic toward the Border Patrol.

I found that my sympathy for the undocumented deepened the more I looked into their struggle. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the sense of alarm Americans feel over the porous border. I share a deep sense of dismay after watching what’s happening there. And, of course, the greatest surprise for me was in discovering the humanity in the Border Patrol agents I got to know. My perspective has continued to evolve since the book has been published, since I regularly hear from Border Patrol and Homeland Security agents in response to what I wrote.

The Devil’s Highway
seems to present all sides fairly. Were you deliberately trying not to advocate a particular point of view when you started this project? Or was that something that developed in the course of writing the book?

When the research began, Jesus Lopez Ramos 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, considers the “illegals” the “bad guys.” It was my field experience with supervisory agent Ken Smith that led to the epiphany. If I was going to write a book hoping to deal with this 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.

You’ve talked a lot about the response from the Border Patrol, but how have Mexican Americans responded to your book?

I think that my own standing in the community affects how people respond to the book. Illegal immigration is much more complex for us Mexican Americans than the dominant culture realizes. Feelings about coyotes are complicated. Feelings about the Border Patrol are complicated. All of those elements went into the writing of
The Devil’s Highway,
but also go into the Mexican-American readers’ response to the book. For example, I, like many of my readers, am very close to a number of undocumented entrants into the United States. As a writer, I want to represent their humanity and let the facts speak for themselves.

One example of an uncomfortable response to my book is something that happened in Seattle. A Chicana in the audience told me she was deeply concerned that I had revealed walking paths of the undocumented in my text and that as a result the Border Patrol could now catch people on these paths. This was a funny moment for me because I had to tell her that it was the Border Patrol who taught me about those very paths. Over all, people have been very positive about the book. No matter their personal views.

In your earlier books about the border
(Across the Wire
and
By the Lake of Sleeping Children),
you illuminated what life is like for those who live along the Mexican border. Was
The Devil’s Highway
intended to show a natural progression for these people?

When I began, I didn’t have a plan. I certainly didn’t expect to be the voice of the border. The natural progression I have seen is from obscure writer to talking head. That being said,
Across the Wire
was intended as an introduction to the human face of the invisible. I wanted Americans to understand what might drive someone to cross that line.
The Devil’s Highway
moves the focus ahead to the actual crossing. I suppose if I were going to commit fully to this border chronicle, I could write a book about the lives of the undocumented in the shadows of the U.S. In a way, I guess I started that process in an op-ed piece I wrote for the
New York Times
at Christmas 2004.

I’d like to share a story that might illuminate some of this process: For me, like the walkers in my book, this has been a journey across unexpected terrain. One revelation came near the Badlands of South Dakota. We were driving cross-country and we saw signs advertising a preserved sodbuster’s hut. We thought it would be interesting to learn how the heroic American pioneers had lived. Imagine my shock when we pushed into the hut and I discovered the familiar dirty-paper-wall, improvised-furnishings of a garbage picker’s hut in the Tijuana dump. I stood there in stunned silence, realizing that I had eaten rancid beans and old tortillas in virtually the same structure. I saw those western pioneers as if they were ghosts passing through the two rooms and here’s where it hit me: These brave people heading west, imposing themselves on a population that didn’t want them there, forced to live in dire straits, were our heroes because they were part of our myth. But those pioneers heading north, imposing themselves on a population that doesn’t want them, living in dire straits, are our pariahs because they are not part of our noble myth. Back home, however, they might just be Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett to the popular mind.

Is there a solution to what’s happening along the border?

Of course there’s a solution. There are any number of solutions. That doesn’t mean I know what they are. The
New York Times
has been doing an incredible job lately of revealing some of the economic realities behind the United States’ semi-secret welcoming of undocumented workers. You could begin by studying their coverage. Clearly, the Mexican government is culpable. Bring them to account. United States corporate bosses are culpable. Border enforcement policy is out of date and unworkable.

It seems evident at this point that the promised benefits of NAFTA have moved on to benefit China and the Indian subcontinent. I could go on with this litany of woes. Everybody knows that there’s trouble on the border.

However, we must look at the thousands of visionary localized efforts on both sides of the border to change the paradigm. I’ve already pointed out in
The Devil’s Highway
how the Wellton Border Patrol station has erected life-saving towers. Such groups as Tucson’s Humane Borders save lives. Think what you will of the Minutemen, whether they are patriots or racist stooges, they give evidence that Americans are deeply concerned, even if their government doesn’t seem to be. What I wish is that these citizens could learn about the sources of this biblical exodus north. As one Border Patrol agent said to me, “If I had my way, I wouldn’t patrol the border. I’d patrol corporate headquarters of [insert your favorite fast food chain restaurant here].”

The immense flow of remittance money to Mexico from the United States is transforming myriad communities almost overnight. It turns out we have an overwhelmingly generous foreign aid policy to Mexico: it’s just filtered through Burger King. Groups of investment bankers across the U.S. Border are creating micro-economic zones in mainland Mexico. These small, intense investment zones support localized industries in the hopes that they can reach critical mass and begin to network into a new economy. Along with the financial investment into Mexico, you cannot discount the effect of the Americanized Mexican who will vote in Mexican elections and who is now indoctrinated with certain truths that we hold dear. You will see an era, if we play this right, of border perestroika.

The arts are flourishing. Music, film, and literature flow back and forth across the border. Human information flows more than ever. It seems incredible, but there is an Internet café at the site of the Tijuana municipal garbage dump. People who pick the trash have teenagers who can surf the ’net. The era of cell phones, satellite dishes, the Internet is not only affecting the Middle East. Democracy
is
on a roll south of the border.

Finally, in a small—and I find humorous—way, change is afoot in my old homeland of Baja California. Not only is the vast Fox movie studio south of Tijuana, and Cabo-mania at the far tip of the state, but, in between, Baja is changing into a mecca for American retirees. Certain projections suggest that within the decade, there will be more than one million white North Americans living permanently in Baja California. I suggest that when you have one million American retirees somewhere, it is no longer Mexico, it is Iowa.

Questions and topics for discussion

1. At its heart,
The Devil’s Highway
is the story of a journey in the hope of starting a better life. Every family in the United States arrived here from somewhere else. What is your family’s story?

2.
The Devil’s Highway
is the story of the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is also about many other invisible borders. Aside from the physical border itself, what other borders separate the people in this story?

3. What borders separate all of us as people? If these borders exist, is there any way to bridge them? Or do we need these borders?

4. Is Jesus Antonio Lopez Ramos, aka Mendez, the villain of the story? Did he get what he deserved?

5. The theme of survival may be evident for the walkers, but how does it also apply to the Border Patrol and the smugglers themselves? To what lengths would you go to feed your family?

6. There seems to be a theme of occult and spiritual forces behind the scenes in the Arizona desert. Are these references offered symbolically, or are these presences an actual reality?

7. Luis Alberto Urrea writes that some of the Yuma 14/Wellton 26 were “aliens before they ever crossed the line.” What does this statement mean?

8. In the opening pages of
The Devil’s Highway,
the author draws a parallel between the issues of today’s border and the United States’ treatment of Chinese “coolies” in the nineteenth century. Can you think of historical parallels to any other current hot-button issues?

9.
The Devil’s Highway
examines the border from many different points of view. Do you think the author approached the topic with a truly objective eye?

10. Imagine that you have been granted the ultimate power to set border policy. What would you do? Why would your solution work? Why might it not?

Luis Alberto Urrea’s suggestions for further reading

Dead in Their Tracks
by John Annerino

This is the bible for anyone interested in the long dark history of the Camino del Diablo.

Down by the River
by Charles Bowden

Many sources cite this book as the best document of border drug smuggling. You can’t analyze the border and its immigration woes without looking at its evil twin, narco-trafficking.

Coyotes
by Ted Conover

I’m happy to say Ted’s a friend of mine. However, I would suggest this book even if he were not. It’s a wonderful example of participatory journalism.

Border
by Lila Downs

All right, I’ll admit it, this isn’t a book. It’s a CD. But Downs, the goddess, can show you more of the border soul in one song than many of us can capture in an entire book.

Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S-Mexican Border
by Ken Ellingwood

In some ways, this book has been competition for
The Devil’s Highway,
but Mr. Ellingwood was the go-to guy on the Border Patrol and immigration enforcement issues for the last ten years while working for the
Los Angeles Times.