Tag Archives: Luis Alberto Urrea

December 5, 2011 · 8:47 am

Author Interview: Luis Alberto Urrea

Earlier this year at that sprawling, unnavigable, kvetchfest known as AWP – the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs – I got to introduce and moderate the very best panel of the long weekend (the title alone was the most memorable: “I Am Not a Terrorist: The Political Writer”), which included Luis Alberto Urrea. Of course, I ended up mispronouncing his first name – it’s Loo-ees, not Loo-isss – even though I knew so much better as I had just finished his addictive, disturbing three-part memoir known as the Border Trilogy, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996), and Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998), about being born and raised in Tijuana – the blonde and blue-eyed son of a Mexican father and an American mother – and the desperate work he later did as a young missionary amidst the Tijuana garbage dumps. He writes expressively, specifically about his name in Nobody’s Son … and I had to bungle it. Still, he merely graciously raised an eyebrow. Gawww.

Had I not been asked to participate on that panel, I might never have discovered Urrea, a multi-faceted poet-novelist-investigative journalist with many more books to his name. In the months since my nomenclature debacle, I’ve gladly done my penance by reading all but two of Urrea’s titles (which remain high on the must-read pile). His displays of literary versatility include his 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist nod for his epic work The Devil’s Highway (2004), about a brutal border crossing in 2001 that went wrong, to his lighthearted novel Into the Beautiful North (2009), to his collaborative forays into the graphic novel with Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2010) and poetry set to photographs with Vatos (2000).

I confess my literary heart beats fastest for The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), Urrea’s magnificent tome about a distant relative: “TERESA URREA WAS A REAL PERSON,” he writes in capitals in his author’s note. Although Urrea grew up believing she was his great-aunt, he would eventually learn that Teresa’s father was the first cousin of Urrea’s great-grandfather. As epic as Teresa’s story is, so, too, is Urrea’s goliath effort that lasted some twenty years to recreate his legendary ancestor on the printed page.

Born during the last decades of the nineteenth century to a 14-year-old servant impregnated by a wealthy philandering rancher, Don Tomás Urrea, Teresa is raised by Huila, a revered midwife and potent healer. As a teenager, Teresa is finally recognized by her father as his daughter, and she is duly trained in the ways of a proper young lady. When violence strikes Teresa’s young life, she reawakens with the power to heal. Her reputation grows as the Santa de Cabora, and as the pilgrims multiply seeking her wisdom and miracles, the nervous Mexican military accuses Teresa and Tomás of inciting seditious activities against the government. By novel’s end, father and daughter escape to the new world up north to start their lives anew…

Six years later, the Santa de Cabora’s story resumes with Queen of America. If glowing starred advance reviews are any indication, copies of the sequel should be flying off the shelves right about now. Father and daughter cross the border into the U.S. fleeing the Mexican officials, but the tenacious assassins and the endless followers prove more difficult to outrun. As Teresa grows exhausted administering to the troubled and diseased, Tomás is merely weary with their peripatetic existence. He finally insists on putting down stakes and establishes his northern homestead far away from the detractors and the damaged. Teresa is not so easily contented even after the family is reunited el norte… and a doomed, violent love affair sets in motion her new life as a traveling saint across all of waiting America. Let the mythic journey commence.

How did you “meet” your Great-Aunt Teresa? Did you always know this historical, mystical figure was your relative? 
I first heard about her in family stories in Tijuana when I was a little guy. But you have to understand that my family was prone to bullshit. They were fabulous, to put it politely, but they were also given to making up unbelievable whoppers at any second. Within that matrix, I heard this story of an aunt who could fly, talk to spirits, raise the dead – part of me believed because I was a gullible little kid, but some part of me knew better. But she kept resurfacing. During my boyhood going back and forth over the border, whenever I came back to Tijuana, stories about my great-aunt would come back, but I just blew them off.

Then I began working in the Chicano Studies department at [University of California] San Diego, and found out she was real person! It was 1978, and I found her in a chapter of Carey McWilliams’s book, North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States. My relatives hadn’t realized anything had ever been written about her. That she had historical weight was a total shock. I didn’t do anything then, I just knew I had this information. But as soon as I started reading more things about her, really weird things began to happen to me. Suddenly people I didn’t know wanted to talk to me about her. These desert types – the kind I just assumed ate peyote, saw visions – had stories to share with me.

Then in 1985 when I was living in Boston, I discovered that Teresita’s story was actually very well documented. And that’s when I began collecting those stories as a hobby. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Luis Alberto Urrea,” Bookslut.com, December 2011

Readers: Adult

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October 13, 2011 · 9:23 am

The Devil’s Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea‘s 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction reads like a heart-thumping thriller, complete with big cars and big guns, desperate men and boys, waiting women, and an enormous body count. That the story is true instantly turns it into a modern tragedy of epic proportions: keep in mind as you read about what happened in May 2001 that the border wars continue and the death toll keeps ratcheting up and up and up …

With a year’s worth of exhaustive research that filled “four leather-bound notebooks of about 144 pages each,” Urrea reconstructs the brutal odyssey of 26 Mexican men and boys who crossed the border into southern Arizona and got lost in the worst desert region possible. So deadly is the stretch mythologized as the Devil’s Highway that Urrea includes 500 years of its horrific history. Of the original 26, 12 survived (barely).

Detail by gory detail, step by excruciating step, Urrea carefully explains how these 26 sojourners decided to leave their homeland, by what means they arrived at the border, what they sacrificed to get there, the inexperienced still-teenager they relied on to lead their journey, and how they each became a statistic – both dead and alive.

Urrea trails the Coyotes and rides with “La Migra” Border Patrol in their air-conditioned oases through their inferno jurisdiction. He tracks the bodies to the morgue, hospital, prison, and courts. He follows the 14 body bags home – “their first and last trip by airplane” – welcomed with surreal fanfare as returning martyred heroes. He quotes the U.S.-based Mexican consul who accompanies the grisly delivery as she calculates the real cost of the $68,000 spent on the 14 one-way tickets: “What if … somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?”

Urrea’s startling etymology lessons alone are a must-read. In Border Patrol lingo, “wets” are “[i]llegal aliens, dying of thirst,” while “tonk” is derived from “calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.” How about “pollo” as in “has been cooked” – by the brutal conditions of illegal crossing? Plus, you’ll probably never think of “hilarious Chi-Cago” – as in “”‘Piss.’ And ‘I Sh*t’” – quite the same way again. Leave it to Urrea to entertain, even as he shocks and exposes.

For the full Urrea experience, the audible version is without parallel: Urrea himself reads his revelations, plus you get an additional Q&A with Urrea not available in print. With Urrea turning the harrowing pages, the effect proves ever more eerily absorbing.

For other Luis Alberto Urrea titles posted on BookDragon, click here.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2004

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May 28, 2011 · 9:53 am

Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush by Luis Alberto Urrea, artwork by Christopher Cardinale

Fact: Luis Alberto Urrea‘s creativity is limitless. Lest you cast doubt about quantity vs. quality, rest assured: Urrea’s got BOTH.He’s done the award-winning, list-making, bestselling memoirs, novels, short stories, poetry collections, anthologies, and provided the thousand words for others’ pictures … so, of course, he’s got to try the graphic novel, too …

Meet the mysterious Mr. Mendoza, the self-proclaimed “graffiti king of Mexico.” Told through the memories of a young boy growing up in small-town Rosario, Mr. Mendoza is an enigmatic figure whose magic paintbrush, I must admit, conjures images from that delightful childhood classic, Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Rather than paint pictures like wide-eyed young Harold, the crafty Mr. Mendoza leaves behind powerful words in some of the most unexpected places … from a desiccated monk’s corpse to a donkey’s behind, no blank space can escape Mr. Mendoza’s revealing fanciful script.

The church is marked for its shallow pomp, the brothel and its next-door cemetery are both shamed and shunned, and even the boy narrator and his friend are branded on their foreheads and bare bottoms after getting caught ogling bathing schoolgirls. Mr. Mendoza has no patience and shows no mercy.

Eventually, the hard-working Mr. Mendoza grows exhausted with his disgust for his fellow townspeople. He announces his departure … and amidst a growing audience, he draws his own escape, Harold style! Where he goes, no one can follow …

Artist Christopher Cardinale imbues Urrea’s story with supernatural energy, every panel somehow a snapshot of movement-in-progress, whether shatteringly monumental like the thunderclap hitting the clock tower, or quietly subtle as a student raising a knowing hand. Combined with the chameleon Urrea’s story, the result is an imaginative revelation.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2010

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May 22, 2011 · 2:02 pm

Vatos | poem by Luis Alberto Urrea, photographs by José Galvez

Luis Alberto Urrea‘s “hymn to vatos who will never be in a poem” provides the lyrical frame onto which Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer José Galvez showcases the everyday challenges and celebrations of the Latino experience. This slightly sepia-ed homage to masculinity-on-the-fringe was a 2002 Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) of the American Library Association.

“Vatos,” Urrea explains, “– street slang for dude, guy, pal, brother– sprang from the highly stylized language of the Pachucos (los chukotes) in the ’50. It’s a Chicano term derived from the once-common friendly insult chivato, or goat. It had a slightly unacceptable air to it, which the Locos and Weesas of the Chico world enjoyed. They were able to take the sting out of racism by calling themselves a bunch of names assimilated ‘good Mexicans’ didn’t like.”

Here are the vatos: young and old, with their mothers, wives, girlfriends, and daughters, surrounded by their friends and rivals, fleeing and getting caught, working and waiting, singing and praying. Dressed up, dressed down, tattooed, uniformed, riding bikes and cars, the men and their families here are caught forever … never-changing, never wavering, the music always playing, the bodies smoothly swaying, the children forever playing.

Urrea’s hymn is a lulling chant, drawing you into a vast vato world, offering glimpses of solidarity and exclusion, struggle and joy. Each page is a near-wordless story, sometimes warm – “All the vatos and their abuelitos,” with a grandfather safely snuggling his sleeping grandchild in his arms – and sometimes mournful – “All the vatos sure that no one sees them,” sleeping off late night reveries sprawled across the front steps of a closed bar, a “Welcome Home!” sign ironically painted on the bar’s entrance doors.

For all the forgotten Latino men, Urrea rhythmically chants them back into existence. And page by page, with Galvez’s surprising, poignant, revealing photographs, the invisible men appear, ready to be recognized and ultimately remembered.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2000

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May 8, 2011 · 10:11 am

Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea

Having read Luis Alberto Urrea‘s unforgettable Border Trilogy, I began the audible version of this novel that highlights illegal immigration with some trepidation. Alas, Urrea doesn’t narrate this title; and although it’s read with effective gusto by Susan Ericksen, I’ve gotten used to Urrea’s flow, having recently spent almost 20 aural hours listening to The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Based on previous experience with Urrea’s disturbing border stories, I also thought I had to be ready for more nightmares.

Certainly difficult issues including deadly crossings, border skirmishes, racist violence are all found here. The novel even begins with impending menace: bandidos and narcos threaten the tiny town of Tres Camarones in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, where most of the good men have long gone missing, leaving the women and children to fend for themselves. And yet in spite of the ominous opening, North is actually more fable, more fairy tale, even telenovela-like than savage realism.

Inspired by the mythic figures of “Estip” (yes, Steve) McQueen and Yul Brynner, and the swashbuckling heroism of films like The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli and her friends devise an unlikely plan to bring back the good Mexican men who will surely reclaim and protect their town. With the supportive blessing of Nayeli’s Aunt Irma – better known as “La Osa – the She-Bear,” and now the town’s newly-elected mayor – Nayeli, Yolo, and Vampi, chaperoned by the town’s one gay man, Tacho, set out for points north to wrangle their own magnificent seven. Nayeli hopes one of the returnees might even be her own father.

The foursome begin their quest with seemingly impossible dreams: Nayeli’s last name isn’t Cervantes for nothing, even if she ends up leaving her gift copy of Don Quixote on the bus ride to Tijuana. The foursome’s quixotic adventures include picking up a guardian angel named Atómiko in the dompe, multiple crossings, getting arrested for a ridiculous mistaken affiliation with Al Qaeda, serendipitously tracking down a former missionary surfer dude with Tres Camarones history, reuniting Aunt Irma with the love of her life, and inspiring a growing wave of reverse immigrant-wannabes.

Urrea’s story effortlessly flows between an absurdly hopeful road trip of quattro amigas, and the jarring reminders of the illegal immigrant’s life-on-the-run. While cheering for Nayeli’s charmed successes, the sharp reminders of the disparate life between the have-papers and the have-nots are never far. Be warned, be ready: North is thinking entertainment with a bittersweet edge.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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April 18, 2011 · 12:12 pm

The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea

If I hadn’t had Luis Alberto Urrea himself read the majority of his novel to me via iPod, I would never have known the proper pronunciation of Parangarícutirimícuaro, not to mention a few choice insults! Good thing I also bought the book, because I wouldn’t have known how to reproduce such lyrical vocabulary!

Daughter is my fourth Urrea title, and my first novel by him. His Border Trilogy was so additive, I read them all in less than a week. This book was no different. When I didn’t have the headset on during my training runs, I made up some of the 18.5 audible hours with the actual book, especially when I was just too impatient to find out what happened next!

At the center of this magnificent tome is an Urrea relative: “TERESA URREA WAS A REAL PERSON,” writes Urrea in capitals in his “Author’s Note.” Although he grew up believing she was his aunt, he would later learn that Teresa’s father was the first cousin of Urrea’s great-grandfather. As epic as Teresa’s story is, so, too, is Urrea’s 20-year effort to recreate his legendary ancestor on the printed page.

Born Niña García Nona María Rebecca Chávez in Sinhaloa, Mexico during the last decades of the 19th century to a 14-year-old servant girl impregnated by the wealthy philandering rancher Don Tomás Urrea, Teresa renames herself after Saint Teresa, predicting that “‘I am going to be her.’” Abandoned by her mother, Teresa is raised first by her abusive maternal aunt, then saved by Huila, the revered midwife and potent healer.

As a teenager, Teresa is finally recognized by her father as his daughter, and she is duly trained in the ways of a proper young lady. When violence strikes Teresa’s young life, she reawakens with the power to heal. Her reputation grows as the “Santa de Cabora,” and as the pilgrims multiply seeking her wisdom and miracles, the nervous Mexican military accuses Teresa and Tomás of inciting seditious activities against the government.

Surrounding father and daughter at the story’s center is a sprawling cast of characters, both major and minor, from a self-immolating Indian teacher to a worm-infested stranger to a bee whisperer to a putrid half-dead young boy who arrives in the night … to a vengeful first wife, two fighting half-brothers, and a dream-travelling sweetheart.

When the novel ends after some 500 pages, Teresa is just embarking on the next major part of her life. History shows that she has more than a decade and a half of adventures left before her final departure … dare we hope that the story will continue? Six years have passed since Urrea published this installment. Let’s hope he won’t take another 14 to finish the conclusion …?

Readers: Adult

Published: 2005

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February 15, 2011 · 7:45 pm

Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life by Luis Alberto Urrea

This third and final installment of Luis Alberto Urrea‘s Border Trilogy is unmistakably his most personal. His “good Republican” mother from Staten Island never accepted his Mexican identity. His “devil on the dance floor”-father was once on Mexico’s presidential staff, becoming a bowling alley janitor when he crossed the border; he was his son’s “hero and [his] greatest source of terror.”

His parents’ marriage eventually devolved into a “long chess game of hate,” with their only child stuck somewhere in between. He was not Mexican (“whatever Mexican is”) with his blond hair and blue eyes inherited from his immigrant father: “our Aryan looks are attributed to the Visigoths, when they entered Spain and generously dispersed gallons of genetic material in every burning village.” And in spite of his U.S. citizenship, with a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, he certainly could not be considered American.

As he examines the many permutations of his global heritage – Native American, various types of European, even Chinese – Urrea draws parallels to the amalgam that is the English language. Every chance he gets, he points out (with etymological roots glibly noted in parentheses) that the “official language of the United States” is hardly untainted: “Thank God so many people lent us [their words] or we’d be forced to point and grunt.”

With his blended background and his borrowed, adapted, stolen language, “America is home. It’s the only home I have. Both Americas. All three Americas, from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego.” Borders criss-cross his experience, yet Urrea remains fluid, refusing to succumb to “a nightmare of silence.” He shares his love of words openly, freely, hopefully and reveals glimpses of his family’s Tijuana tales, his southern California childhood trapped between his warring parents, and the temporary sanctuary he found in the home of an older couple who loved him most tenderly. He adds memories of whores and nuns, of a red Cadillac with literary history, and a Jeep with too many miles left to go.

“I’m not old enough to write my memoir,” Urrea insists. Instead, “I’ve offered here a few words about my part of the journey.” Still very much in his youth, he confesses, “I don’t know where I’m going.” No matter … empowered by his stories – soothing and disturbing, damning and enlightening – we readers are sure to follow along for the memorable literary ride.

Readers: Adult

Published: 1998

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January 31, 2011 · 5:23 pm

By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea, photographs by John Lueders-Booth

Once I opened this second volume in Luis Alberto Urrea‘s Border Trilogy, I simply couldn’t stop. So here’s the best thing I can say about Lake after reading his first border title, Across the Wire: Lake is more of the same … it’s another riveting must-read.

Urrea begins his “Introductory Matters” by debunking an American myth: ”In spite of what the anti-immigration proponents will tell you, Tijuana is NOT “a teeming staging area for a massive assault on America, [and] you might be surprised at how many people have no intention of ever crossing the border,” he insists. “No matter what anyone tells you, a population of more than a million people, living in one of the top money-making cities in Mexico, and the most visited city, and the most reviled city, and the most Disneyfied city, are not going to crunch through the fabulous fence we have erected. They aren’t going anywhere.”

Urrea reports how “young Mexican intellectuals with a slightly revolutionary bent have coined a pet name for Tijuana. They call it Palestijuas, Tijuana-Palestine.” The resemblance does not go unnoticed: the looming fence, the circling helicopters, the hordes of cramped people on one side, the threat of armed Border Patrols on the other. Even the land – as Tijuana’s citizens see it from thousands of miles away on salvaged televisions running on diverted electricity – is cause for “amazed” recognition: “the West Bank! Why, it looks exactly like Tijuana,” the crowds exclaim.

Amidst these teeming multitudes, Urrea shares the often unbearable stories of those who stay: “It’s a forum for the voiceless,” he describes his book, the fulfillment of a promise he made to a garbage dump dweller who insisted, “‘And nobody will ever know that I lived. So tell them about me. Tell them I was here.’”

Here the body count is gruesome … and high. Here Urrea exposes the sudden appearance of ‘a lake of sleeping children’ after a spontaneous flood, the tragic fate of four young boys deserted overnight by their parents, a disturbing glimpse into a less-than-well-run orphanage, and a heartfelt introduction to a beer-drinking nun who isn’t above ignoring ridiculous laws in order to protect orphan children. His most unforgettable piece examines 24 wrenching hours in the lives of three dump families trying to survive another day.

Urrea has a whole chapter to teach you how to curse, Tijuana style. He doesn’t flinch (although he warns you in case you might flinch, or worse …) when he recounts some of the mind-boggling horrors he’s witnessed against innocent animals; that chapter, “The Bald Monkey and Other Atrocities,” when first published in a newspaper, earned him not a few death threats. Ironic the lengths strangers will go to to express rage at abused animals … and yet what about the children … and the people …?

Once again, as in Wire, Urrea openly, honestly presents the overlooked humanity of voiceless lives … once more, his writing demands humane consideration and unflinching attention. You, we, all of us … should not, must not turn away.

Readers: Adult

Published: 1996

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January 27, 2011 · 2:58 pm

Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border by Luis Alberto Urrea, photographs by John Lueders-Booth

Thanks to a sudden snowstorm and ensuing power outage, I had every excuse to strap on my headband flashlight and read the first of Luis Alberto Urrea‘s Border Trilogy without pause. Given the sheer gawk-factor of these pages, any excuses were negligible: This is definitely a riveting, shocking must-read. Realizing that the book was published almost two decades old (!) and not nearly enough has changed is the biggest jaw-dropping, head-shaking, gawk-inducer of all.

Born in Tijuana just south of the California/Mexico border – Urrea is hapa: Mexican on his father’s side and U.S.-American on his mother’s side – Urrea never really left, even when living elsewhere. Check his blog: his entry for December 8th, 2010 has him back in Tijuana, reliving an experience almost straight out of Across the Wire. “Tijuana is Mexico’s cast-off child,” Urrea writes of his birthplace, where the tragedies, brutal crimes, murders, addictions, and the unimaginably difficult everyday lives in this collection take place.

In 1978, Urrea met “a remarkable preacher known as Pastor Von,” a 30-year-veteran of “slogging through the Borderlands mud”; this book is simply dedicated “For Von.” Into the bottomless depths of Tijuana’s poverty, Urrea followed Von to the garbage dumps and shanty villages, bearing food, water, medicine, building materials, and sometimes just a willingness to listen.

In the dumps, the Cheese Lady drags him to meet a newly arrived woman named Jesus and her large family, whose 13-year-old daughter must hide in the family shack as howling men circle trying to “break though the doors and walls to get to her.” He meets Pacha, a young mother of too many who loses another child, and Mrs. Serrano, a woman literally desiccated from lack of food and water, who miraculously delivers a healthy baby.

He meets and loses Negra, a little girl who will haunt him for years. He recalls the reed-thin, glue-sniffing addicts, a fire-blinded kitten whose gratitude lasts through its final purr, the careless inhumanity of a Tijuana policeman who insists he’s “‘a cop, not a monster,’” and his father’s own mysterious and violent death. He is remarkable in his ability to be unflinching at the horrors he witnesses, and yet never so distanced as to ever not be achingly, powerfully humane.

With the latest round of whose-side-of-the-border-are-you-on-headlines, sharing Urrea’s memories couldn’t be more timely. Beyond the “ambassadors of poverty” – as Urrea refers to scourges like lice and scabies, neverending diseases from diarrhea to chronic hernia, even madness and “‘demon possession’” – Urrea captures life just 20 minutes from and yet clearly a whole world away from San Diego. He repeatedly reminds us that these are our neighbors, no matter how easy to ignore and forget, invisible from San Diego’s sparkling skyline, which for most of the bordertown’s survivors remains forever out of reach.

Readers: Adult

Published: 1993

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