Book Club: The Devil's Highway
When: Monday, October 23, 2006, 7:00 pm
Where: Mozart's :: 3825 Lake Austin Blvd.
Contact: Rob Crosnoe [crosnoe@mail.la.utexas.edu ...]
Come join the Future Forum Book Club for a discussion of The Devil's Highway.
In keeping with the Mayor's Book Club selection for 2006 (http://www.cityofaustin.org/library/mbc06.htm), we will be reading The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea. See below for the description on Amazon. It is a real page-turner - a non-fiction look at illegal immigration through the story of a group of Mexican men who get lost in the desert of Arizona.
From 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, 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 north.
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 mélange 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/. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. /--This text refers to the Hardcover edition./