The Devil's Highway, El Camino del Diablo, lies sere, bleak, arid and forbidding, a calescent trail across the Mexican-US border for illegals seeking salvation and opportunity in the north.
The Devil's Highway is the true story of a group of 26 Mexican illegals who crossed the US-Mexican border heading through the desert for Ajo, Arizona on May 19th, 2001. By May 25th, only 12 came out.
Luis Alberto Urrea's book is a powerful piece of work. Urrea can sling a phrase with the best of them, weaving politics, desert myth, history and culture in an evocative, poetic style that captures both the facts and the heavy weight of the heart.
The author paints a horrifying and vivid portrayal of the events on the border, putting names, and faces in place behind the walkers, outlining the hidden necessities and motivations behind the illegal trek north. Urrea puts a human face on both the 400 dead illegals that the border claims annually, and on the Border Patrol officers who stem the illegal flood of "tonks"—a name derived from the distinctive sound a flashlight makes when busted over an illegal's head)—sometimes hunting them down, sometimes rescuing them and sometimes burying them.
The Devil's Highway looks at the practices of the smugglers, who for an usurious fee take the illegals over the border to their low-wage jobs in the north, and in the case of the Yuma 14 (the dead out of the 26), abandoned their charges to their fate—first taking all of their customer's cash with them. Urrea also examines the politics and practices of the border (what he terms "the politics of stupidity"), the Border Patrol's approaches and attitudes towards their role (a blend of weary cynicism, professionalism and humanity) and, among other things, what it is like to die of hyperthermia.
Urrea excels in detailing the presence of the Devil's Highway, a bleak and searing hot stretch of forbidding desert that stretches across 250 miles, painting a lasting picture of the character of the land the walkers tried to cross—a desert littered with the bleached bones of countless travelers lured into a quicker route to California. Here's a brief excerpt:
As long as there have been people, there have been deaths in the western desert. When the Devil's Highway was a faint scratch of desert bighorn hoof marks, and the first hunters ran along it, someone died. But the brown and red men who ran the paths left no record outside of faded songs and rock paintings we still don't understand.Continued on the next page Page 1 — Page 2
Article comments
1 - DrPat
Nice one, Deano! I have been 4-wheeling in the area (though not in the monuments, of course), and seen first-hand some of the discarded stuff that people brought part-way with them, only to abandon it later.
The clarion call of El Norte is strong enough to overcome the knowledge that somewhere around a third to a half of your companions will die on such a trek. And such is hope that they still set out...