In my post from last week, I mentioned Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2004 book The Devil’s Highway. The book is a work of creative nonfiction, a genre that takes the results of journalistic research and presents them in a literary way. As this was my first encounter with the genre, I spent the first chapter or so of the book rather confused, despite my love of both history and literature. My historical sensibilities reacted to the stories as too dramatic or untrustworthy while at the same time as my literary sensibilities were annoyed by the streams of information that did not yet connect to the stories. Ultimately, however, I found myself appreciating the style and content of the book. I’d even say that I liked and enjoyed it – inasmuch as anyone can like or enjoy hearing about poverty, organized crime, exploitation, warped systems of justice, ignorant bureaucracies, misinformed people, and slow, torturous death by heat and thirst.
There’s a saying that “fiction is a lie that tells the truth.” Being that The Devil’s Highway tells the story the death of 14 men attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert, it is easy to see the unworldly setting and horrifying events can come off as over dramatized or overemotional. Not because horrible things don’t happen, but because gruesome deaths are so frequent a subject in many forms of fiction - crime shows, thriller novels, horror movies, violent video games, and so on. While the events described in The Devil’s Highway do seem as if they were they could only exist in a fictional realm, Urrea manages to balance out the seemingly over-dramatic with harsh but effective reminders that the events are indeed real.
At first I felt like it was too factual, but soon enough characters came along to illustrate the situation and give faces to concepts – no longer just “the illegal immigrant” or “the coyote” or “the Border Guard,” but very human people. Stories developed and Urrea’s poet-nature displayed itself and I got drawn in. As the stories developed, however, I was always prevented from viewing it as fiction. Any time something seemed outlandish or overly sentimental, Urrea would pull back and describe the broader context in all its researched glory to remind the reader that what he is describing is real, and that it goes beyond the crossing attempt of 26 and the death of 14 or them to a much larger picture. But after descriptions of the broader systems that influence migration, Urrea returns to the characters lest his readers forget that these policies do affect lives, and that those lives matter. Urrea’s way of dealing with creative nonfiction ensures that the history does not forget its purpose and relevance, while the story is shown to go beyond the imagined into the real and something we can do something about. It’s an admirable blend of nonfiction and literary techniques that I think brings two very needed elements together for a much better overall understanding of the situation.
Great job of describing your response to reading this book. I found it a lot of hard work to connect with the first section--almost as though adjusting my eyes to the "pointillism" of Urrea's style: there were so many details and perspectives gathered here. But as I read on I found myself gripped by the book as the perspectives began to coalesce, the characters gathered at the border, and we gained a bit of sympathy with even the Coyotes, whose despicable abandonment of the travelers became at least humanly understandable. Your describe well how the techniques of fiction can serve creative nonfiction.
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ReplyDeleteYou seemed as if you had to wrestle a lot with this unit of literature; I did too. I couldn't help but not feel empathy for all of these characters just in the literature, but for the author to take the emotions on step further and to provide statistical evidence was too much. I consider myself a very empathetic person and I could "feel" the dehydration process and the dying process as well as the heat in the texts.
I enjoyed Urrea's humanization he used in the books, namely his creating the border patrol guards as sympathetic human beings who willingly risked their lives to go out into the wilderness to collect undocumented immigrants and haul them back to the hospital. I think Urrea paints an angelic portrayal of the border patrol guards. Are there other areas in the text where you see Urrea creating "villified" characters as angelic (e.g. border patrol guards)?
It took me awhile to connect with the text as well. At first, I was confused on what the author was talking about. I couldn't grasp what he was saying because I assumed it was entirely about the 26 immigrants who crossed. As I finished the read, I realized that the way Urrea set this novel up was great at showing the entire issue of the border at the desert. He included parts of the border and desert problems that made this story so detailed in my head. He also did a great job of creating an emotional connection to the text. The deaths of the immigrants was definitely a powerful scene and his description of the heat process helped paint the emotional scene of the deaths. Urrea had a good mix of facts and writing style to make this novel a powerful read. Through this creative nonfiction, I have a better understanding of the border problems.
ReplyDeleteWhen I began reading the book, I assumed that the story told was true to an extent, because I knew it was both true and false at the same time. I knew that the story Urrea presented was based on an actual event, but the way he wrote the story of that event was in a fictitious manner. There is much that he didn't know about the actual happenings in the desert, so he had to describe it based on the discussions and research he did to write the book. One statement that you said and that I noticed right away is Urrea makes the characters in the book actual people. They are not just the Yuma 14 or the coyote, they are Reymundo Sr. and Jr., as well as Mendez, the coyote I'm still not sure is the bad guy. The Devil's Highway shines a light on Mendez especially that makes him seem just as much the victim as the other men that died or almost died out in the desert.
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