Death’s desert trek

The Devil’s Highway is a path that cuts through the desert wilderness on the border between Arizona and Mexico, a hellish track over which men, women and children -- hopeful at first but ultimately reduced to desperation -- make their way in search of a paying job, no matter how humble. As we discover in Luis Alberto Urrea’s superb but also harrowing new book, it is a trek that costs them their last pesos and, sometimes, their lives.

Urrea, born in Tijuana to a Latino father and an Anglo mother, is an award-winning novelist, poet, memoirist and essayist who brings the considerable powers of a verse maker and a storyteller to what is essentially a courageous work of investigative journalism. The experience of those he calls the “illegals,” including one ill-fated party known as the “Yuma 14,” is depicted in “The Devil’s Highway” as nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion -- “a savage gospel of the crossing,” as Urrea puts it.

“They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine,” he writes of one nameless group of “walkers” who staggered through the Granite Mountains of southern Arizona. “They were walking now for water, not salvation.”

To paint a picture of this vast, waterless terrain, Urrea reaches all the way back to creation myths of the Native Americans who believed that it was the habitat of demons, a notion shared by all who came after: “Mexico’s oldest hoodoo, La Llorona, the wailing ghost, has been heard rushing down nearby creek beds,” he explains. “And its newest hoodoo, the dread Chupacabras (the Goat Sucker), has been seen ... lurking in outhouses and even jumping in bedroom windows to munch on sleeping children.”

But the unembellished perils of a landscape infested with sidewinders, scorpions, tarantulas and Gila monsters are real enough. Over the centuries, conquistadors, missionaries and pioneers struggled through the same wilderness, many of them failing in the effort. By 1850, the Devil’s Highway was already being described as “a vast graveyard of unknown dead.” Even now, Urrea insists, the border wilderness is a place apart: “Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here.”

Nowadays, as Urrea shows us, the wasteland through which the Devil’s Highway passes is populated by a strange cast of characters -- smugglers, “narco mules,” cactus thieves, vigilantes, prospectors, outlaw bikers and a few hardy souls who hope to live out what he calls “some Ed Abbey desert fantasy.” Against these predators and interlopers are arrayed the agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, which Urrea likens to both a “mechanized hunt squad” and the saviors of the illegal immigrants who have been left to die in the desert by the “coyotes” they have paid to bring them safely and secretly into the United States: “If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and dying.”

Although Urrea focuses on the story of the Yuma 14, who perished in May 2001, he shows us that migrants suffer and die by the thousands: “Death by sunlight, hyperthermia, was the main culprit. But illegals drowned, froze, committed suicide, were murdered, were hit by trains and trucks, were bitten by rattlesnakes, had heart attacks.” Significantly, the harvest season is known as “death season” in Border Patrol circles precisely because the availability of fieldwork attracts so many border-crossers. Ironically, a walker who makes it across the desert might be so befuddled by his thirst and exhaustion that he falls into the first irrigation canal and drowns in the water he has struggled to reach: “It seems to be one of the cruel tricks of the Desolation spirits,” Urrea writes, “but it makes brutal sense.”

The story is brightened by moments of simple decency. Train crews carry bottles of water to drop out of the locomotives that cross the desert, and self-appointed Good Samaritans place marked caches of food and water along the trails. Border Patrol agents stock their vehicles with rolls of toilet paper, a precious commodity when the only available foliage is cactus. The luckiest walkers may stumble across rescue towers that enable them to summon help from the Border Patrol, and the most dire cases may be airlifted out of the desert by the helicopters of the Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue unit.

Indeed, Urrea finds Border Patrol agents who understand that the migrants are guilty of no crime other than entering the United States without papers so they can find a job and send money to the folks back home. (“Western Union became so much a part of the folklore that it had its own nickname, ‘La Western,’ ” he writes.) And yet, for that crime, they are at risk of being arrested and deported if they do not die on the way. “All of them are victims,” one Border Patrol agent tells him, “even the live ones.”

Urrea reports with interest and compassion on the workaday lives of the agents, who rely on ancient tracking skills (or “signcutting”) as well as the latest global positioning satellite hardware to detect the presence of migrants. They carry handcuffs, pepper spray and .40-caliber side arms loaded with hollow-point bullets -- “You shoot a guy to kill him,” one explains -- but their Explorers are also equipped with water jugs and air-conditioning to sustain the life of a migrant who might otherwise die of thirst and exposure.

The real villains, Urrea says, are “the gangsters who call themselves Coyotes,” including the memorable malefactors who were responsible for the tragic fate of the Yuma 14. “Coyotes hawk destinations like crack dealers in the Bronx sell drugs: voices murmur options from a memorized menu, ‘Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida.’ ” The job title of the man who solicits paying customers, known as pollos (cooked chickens), is enganchador -- a “hooker.” And the guides who lead their trusting charges into the desert are known as “Los polleros,” or “chicken wranglers.”

“Each one has a code name, so the chickens cannot later identify him,” Urrea explains. “And each one wears bad clothes so he blends in, should the group be apprehended. An army of border trash.”

Urrea ventured into the world of pollos and polleros, and his book rings with the authenticity and authority of an eyewitness. At the same time, he writes with empathy and insight about the migrants and the agents he accompanied into the wilderness. Above all, the tale he tells in “The Devil’s Highway” comes vividly alive with a richness of language and a mastery of narrative detail that only the most gifted of writers are able to achieve. *