By: Kelly Malambri/Columnist
Between state roads E25 and E29 in Arizona lies “El Camino Del Diablo,” or the Devil’s Highway. The strip is known for obliterating almost every soul brave enough to venture out into it. According to Luis Urrea’s unidentified sources, many have seen the devil himself rise from the sand to look and mock them as they pass through the desert inferno.
Urrea’s nonfiction narrative, “The Devil’s Highway,” tells the story of the Yuma 14, a group of men who crossed through this Devil’s Highway in 2001 in hopes of illegally immigrating to the United States.
The group, which is believed to have started out with 26 fathers and sons, was diminished to 12 by the time they were found.
In “The Devil’s Highway,” Urrea tells a story of perseverance and horror based off of testimonials from many involved with the Yuma 14, including survivors and the patrol who found them. Although his sources could not be revealed, the Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor still tells their stories.
For example, Urrea writes, “The men had cactus spines in their faces, their hands. There wasn’t enough fluid left in them to bleed. They’d climbed peaks, hoping to find a town, or a river, had seen more landscape, and tumbled down the far side to keep walking. One of them said, ‘Too many damned rocks. Damned heat. Damned sun.’”
In his vivid descriptions of the agonizing pain and uncertain fate of the men who walked across the desolate land that is the Devil’s Highway, Urrea completely grabbed my attention.
Then, he found a way to hang on to it.
Instead of taking a static approach to the novel and flatly telling the story of the 26 Mexican men who crossed the border, Urrea presents the work in a dynamic fashion that explores the role of the patrolman, the immigrant, the coyote, the Devil’s Highway itself, as well as Texas law, politics and geography. By making his story so completely conclusive, the author delivers a captivating story to the reader that leaves no question unanswered.
An instance of this style adapted by Urrea occurs early on in the book, making it hard to put down from the start. Urrea begins to digress and tell the story of a local, who was unfamiliar with the Devil’s Highway, and wondered why a huge vacant lot in nearby Arizona is never used.
The master of the restaurant in which the local asks about the lot explains: “Nobody has ever dared build upon it, and the houses around the lot are plagued by ghosts and poltergeists. But they’re not really ghosts. Dude, they’re demons. It’s one of the seven gates of hell. A magus can sit in his pickup and summon the Beast while eating a teriyaki bowl and Diet Coke.”
As you can see, besides a great literary style, Urrea even manages to bring humor to the extremely gloomy book, making it that much easier to read and so much more well-rounded.
Through such humor and his dynamic story, this nonfiction narrative reads like fiction—Urrea makes the story so compelling that I forgot this horrific tale was nothing less than a harsh reality.
The book tells the story of the Yuma 14 in such a compelling way, which makes it one of the best nonfiction narratives of the previous decade that I have read.
Cover to Cover is a bi weekly book review column. Look for it every other Monday this fall.
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