The "Yuma 14" ~ Author Luis Alberto Urrea Tells Their Story In His New Book: The Devil's Highway

I heard about this story back in 2001 when it happened ~ 14 Mexicans died tragically in the Arizona desert, after their "coyote" abandoned them. Sadly, as is so often the case with the types of tragedies suffered by immigrants trying to enter the United States, I forgot about it after a while, preoccupied with my own existence. Now, I am excited to see this book has been written by acclaimed writer Luis Albert Urrea ~ half-Mexican/half-White, raised in California, por supuesto. You must check out his website, here. Equally important, the movie rights have been optioned and will be a joint U.S./Mexico production, with a Mexican director, scheduled to begin filming in October 2004. Below is the review and article in today's San Francisco Chronicle. After reading the review, I am especially interested in how the book will affect or change my reactions to the INS and Border Patrol Agents. I wish I could write more but I want to attend his book reading tonight at Cody's Books in Berkeley so I gotta go! YOU SHOULD BUY THIS BOOK!
________________________________________________________________________
From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 1, 2004: Author breaks barriers with Border Patrol agents

Death is frequent on the Devil's Highway, a section of Arizona desert where Mexican immigrants make the illegal trek into the United States. Walkers bake under a pitiless sun that sometimes reaches 130 degrees by day -- and doesn't drop below 98 by night.

On May 19, 2001, 26 men, mostly from the southern state of Veracruz, crossed the border and entered a hell they couldn't have imagined. Lied to, robbed and abandoned by the coyote who smuggled them across, the men ran out of water, got lost in the burning sand and waited -- panting like dogs -- for rescue.

When five stumbled out of a mountain pass four days later, Luis Alberto Urrea writes in his startling account, "The Devil's Highway" (Little, Brown; $24.95), "they were burned black, their lips huge and cracking. Their eyes were cloudy with dust, almost too dry to blink up a tear. They were seeing gods and devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine."

From the original 26, 14 men died. A father, Reymundo Barreda, perished in the desert, along with his 15-year-old soccer-star son, Reymundo Jr. Another casualty, Edgar Martinez, was 16: He had gone to the border, lured by enchantments and false promises, to earn enough to build his girlfriend a house.

It was the single largest tragedy in the growing exodus of Mexican immigrants into the United States -- and it marked the first time that mainstream media had taken notice of escalating border fatalities.

"You shake your head with rue and sorrow," says Urrea, 48, "because this is an ongoing horror. This tragedy happens every day -- an average of a death a day." According to Humane Borders, a philanthropist group that offers aid to illegal entrants on the Arizona-Mexico border, 250 will die by October -- including women and children.

Urrea, an award-winning poet and essayist, is an upbeat, good-natured man who says he went through heartache and depression while writing his tale of death "on the hot griddle of the earth." Born in Tijuana to an Anglo mother and Mexican father, he had already written a trilogy of border tales, including the memoir "Nobody's Son," when Geoff Shandler, executive editor at Little, Brown, suggested a book on the men known as the Yuma 14.

"At first I was a little resistant," Urrea (oo-RAY-uh) says by phone from his home in Naperville, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. "I thought, 'Well, I'm done with that.' And then I realized, in the end, that all I have to offer is art. I've done missionary work -- I can wash feet and feed people -- but when I realized this was a chance to use my art to address these issues, I was excited to do it."

Urrea's book is a work of courage, and it's winning him the best reviews of his career. Steeped in compassion and a sense of alarm, it's also rich in physical texture: the six stages of death by hyperthermia; the fearsome desert with its scrubby mesquite, its rattlers, buzzards and scorpions; the triple- digit temperatures that turn drinking water "as hot as coffee" and make a man's mouth "as dry as the soles of his feet"; the stillness so immense that it feels "as if the sounds of the world had failed to enter the land."

"The Devil's Highway" is surprising in its evenhanded regard for the Border Patrol -- the Migra detested by illegal immigrants -- whose presence will expand as the result of the $10 million Arizona Border Control Initiative. The plan, announced in March by the Department of Homeland Security, will add 200 additional agents to monitor drug smuggling and illegal immigration.

Before writing the book, Urrea says, "I had a classic Latino, liberal view of those guys as fascists and oppressors of my people. I think they make everybody a little nervous. Even people who support them, I think, feel odd on some level about their mandate to hunt humans."

Once he penetrated their protective shield and started hanging out with agents as they "cut sign" (tracked) across the desert in their Ford Expeditions, "I understood that they were essentially beat cops on a dangerous beat: very insular, very paranoid, attacked by the left but also vilified by the right."

Urrea was surprised when he formed a tight bond with Kenny Smith, a big, soft-spoken 27-year military and Border Patrol vet whom he calls "a kind of patriarch of the wasteland." It was Smith who explained to him that border agents, rather than viewing themselves as victimizing the helpless, are committed to saving lives.

"Without him," Urrea says, "it would have been the Yuma 26 (who died on the Devil's Highway) instead of the Yuma 14."

There was a moment, after a couple of days of hanging out with Smith, Urrea says, "that we were just sitting in the dark at the Border Patrol office, talking. And I realized that somewhere in my heart I loved him. That threw me. I thought, 'No, no, wait a minute. I cannot love this guy. All my unwritten rules dictated that I may not love a Border Patrol agent.' ''

When Urrea came home, he says, "By God, he wrote me an e-mail and said, 'Your wild heart has touched me.' And I thought, 'If that guy and I can cut through all the intermediary bull**** and look each other in the eye and care for each other, then what?' It was a transformative moment, and I think it made this a better book when I realized that."

Urrea never met the survivors of the doomed Devil's Highway odyssey, most of whom work now in a meatpacking plant near Phoenix. Material witnesses in a criminal investigation, they've been told by lawyers to avoid the author. Luckily, Urrea developed a strong relationship with Gerald Williams, the attorney defending their nemesis, Jesus Lopez Ramos. Known by his gangster name "Mendez," he was the 19-year-old, punk-haired guia(guide) who got lost on the desert and betrayed the Mexican illegals, or pollos (cooked chickens), who paid to be smuggled across the border.

Williams denied Urrea access to records at first but ended up photocopying more than 200 pages of unsealed documents. He handed over the Yuma, Ariz., Sheriff's Department videos of the survivors, taped just minutes after their rescue by Border Patrol helicopters. Crazed, connected to oxygen hoses and IV bottles, their lips so swollen and cracked they can barely speak, the men try to describe their ordeal.

It's chilling -- an authentic man-versus-the-elements yarn. "The Perfect Dust Storm," Urrea jokes. So it's no surprise that "The Devil's Highway" is set to be a movie. Rudy Joffroy (hoe-FROY), a young Mexican filmmaker, will shoot it on a $3.5 million budget in October, with money provided by Grupo Voy, a Latino production company out of Los Angeles. Big-name Latino actors -- Benjamin Bratt, Edward James Olmos -- are being considered.

Urrea is taking a proprietary interest, saying he doesn't want the movie to "sell out" or minimize the suffering of those who inspired his book. "I feel very close to them," he says, "particularly the dead men. I'm trying to represent them as best I can."

If the work on "Devil's Highway" was emotionally taxing, Urrea's wife of seven years, Cindy, did her part to alleviate the burden. A former investigative reporter who met Urrea when she interviewed him for the Tucson Citizen, she accompanied him on several interviews for the book and gave him pointers on research and dogged persistence. They have a daughter, 4, and are raising a daughter and son, 12 and 14, from her previous marriage.

When Urrea reads from "The Devil's Highway" at bookstores, he says, "it's amazing. People cry. They always want to talk. Invariably, at every reading, some (undocumented) Mexican guy will come up to me and whisper, 'I'm here from Jalisco' or 'I came from Michoacan,' and then we shake hands. Sometimes Border Patrol guys are there, sometimes their children."

A few nights ago, he says, "Someone approached me and said, 'I feel like we've been in church.' And I thought that was kinda cool, 'cause I'm asking them to listen to some very harsh stuff, and I'm talking to them about stuff that many of them are feeling kind of mixed about to begin with. And I'm asking them to have compassion for people that a lot of my audience considers criminals.

"If you're not there as an anti-immigrant guy, then you're probably a liberal and have a real anti-Border Patrol bias. So I'm asking a lot of people in every direction."

Comments

[Stan]

I just finished reading the The Devils Highway.....excellent!

[Stella Chavez]

My brother is a professor at Mesa College in San Diego, CA. His friend, who is also a professor there, had Mr. Urrea as a student in his class. My brother told me about Mr. Urrea and his book, "The Devil's Highway." I'm so very glad he did!