The Devil's Highway: A True Story
By Luis Alberto Urrea
Available for $21.65, including shipping from Luther Seminary Bookstore
     In May 200 1, 26 men attempted to cross the border into the desert of southern Arizona. This region, the deadliest on the continent, is aptly called the Devil's Highway. Of the 26, only twelve survived the Devil's Highway. In the book by the same name, dedicated to the dead and those who rescue the living, Luis Urrea puts a face on the 26. We also are introduced to those smugglers, who by their sinister promises, invite people onto the Highway and to those in the Border Patrol whose job is to prevent that journey from being completed. The Devil's Highway is a stunning book: powerful, poetic, and passionate, yet even more deeply moving.

     In Veracruz, Don Moi met with individuals and small groups. Things can be arranged. But they're complicated. You see it's expensive.
     Expensive?
     I'm a professional. My services are the best. So I charge for them.
     How expensive?
     It's sixteen thousand pesos (at the time $1,600) to cross into the Us. And it's 3,000 more for your bus trip and food and lodging to get to the border. Let's say, 20,000 pesos. Each. Of course, if you're men enough to walk in the desert, I can get you there for 13,000.

     Reymundo Barreda was a soda bottler by trade when he wasn't tending his land. He had resolved to go north to expand and reroof his small house as a gift for his wife. A summer of orange picking was all he had in mind. He had already figured out the cost of cement block and aluminum roofing and a couple bags of cement.
     In a surprise gesture of loyalty to his father, Reymundo Jr., 15, asked to go along. He convinced his father that the two of them working like burros all summer might be able to earn enough to buy his mother furniture to go into the new room. For father and son, the trip was a gesture of love.
     How will you pay?
     We don't know.
     Get a loan.
     And they did. The going interest rate from local loan sharks for money lent against a plot of land was 15 percent, compounded monthly.
     The guide for the group was a nineteen-year-old boy from Guadalajara. If he hadn't inadvertently killed his clients, he would have made about three thousand dollars for the walk. He was exactly like the walkers he would lead. Poor, looking for a better life, willing to do what it takes. Like them, he was recruited.
     Border Patrol agent Mike F., at the end of a dull day, was driving his Explorer at a leisurely pace. He was about to pull a U and head back. He looked up, and beheld the men as they walked out of the light. The five were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking. Their eyes almost too dry to blink up a tear. Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, old sweat because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were beyond rational thought. They had cactus spines in their faces and hands. Their wasn't enough fluid left in them to bleed.
     The Devil's Highway takes this single incident and illuminates the nature of human beings at their most desperate, their most devious, and their most courageous. It is superb.
Sadly, however, the geopolitics, the policies, the poverty, and the personalities are all in place to reproduce the tragedy that gave rise to the book.

Reviewed by Wayne Kendrick, Pastor Peace Lutheran Church, El Paso, TX

Uncomfortable Neighbors/Vecinos Incomodos
Cultural Collisions between Mexicans and Americans/Choques Culturales entre Mexicanos y Americanos by James V. Tiffany is a bilingual book taken from essays published in El Mundo, A Spanish language weekly newspaper in Washington state. The essays contribute to understanding some of the issues between the "uncomfortable neighbors." The essays are written at the "grass roots" level, where a common belief may not be recognized as an inaccurate stereotype. Each section is brief and can stimulate helpful cross-cultural conversation about such things as family, respect, and getting along. The book may be ordered from El Mundo Communications, Inc. P.O. Box 2231, Wenatchee, WA 98807, 509 663 5737 or elmunco1@nwi.net. Cost is $12.95.

Reviewed by Madelyn Herman Busse, DM - Assistant to the Bishop