Review Of The Devil's Highway By Luis Alberto Urrea

The Devil’s Highway is a book authored by Luis Alberto Urrea. Urrea is a journalist, poet and American ward-winning writer. This book features a true story on the Mexican’s migration into the U.S. The book narrates a tragic story that starts in the May of 2001 as a group consisting of 26 men tried to cross the Mexican border into the United States to seek for job opportunities in America (Urrea, 2008). Those men started their journey and enterd the Arizona desert where they endure the travel through a deadly region in North America known as the Devils Highway. The Devil’s Highway is such a dangerous region, which even the border patrol does not dare travel through. The fact that this is region is dangerous and less travelled by the border patrol

Many readers of this story can understand that life may be across the border into the United States, but they fail to comprehend to what extent the life is better and Urrea gives a detailed narration that tries to show the difference. Urrea does this well by giving brief overviews of the lives of these men in their home country and what they expect to get once they cross the border. The desperation of the men seeking to cross the border can be quantified in pesos and the men find that they cannot earn enough to cater for their basic needs such as shelter, food and clothing (Urrea, 2008). With the lack of such basic needs the men even find that catering for their children’s need for education is far beyond their reach. Urrea highlights the desperation of families in Mexico and how not only the old suffer, but also the young who miss opportunities because their poor societies have little to offer them. Both the young and the old seem to be desperation to the extent that elderly persons seek to have large families to act as a form of retirement plan (Urrea,

Urrea introduces immigrants and invests his readership in their dreams and hopes. He reaches back to Mexican roots and highlights stories about the coming of the missionaries and Spanish explorers (Urrea, 2008). In his bid to make the background of the story understood, Urrea also focuses on highlighting about Native American tribes, the human traffickers and smugglers that operate on the Devil’s highway. All the highlighted entities and groups represent a complicated set of values including money, religion, superstition and even black magic and Native Indian culture. This widespread highlight gives the book more focus than just looking at the main problem of immigration. Urrea endeavors to show the complex and dynamic factors that make the interplay, which leads to the problem of immigration. As such, the work highlights more than just immigration. Above all, Urrea focuses more on drawing attention guides or Coyotes that work in a gang-like manner to ferry immigrants for a pay. The groups immigrants or walkers put their fate in the hands of the guides after paying a fee that will guarantee their safe transit, but as they later realize the transit is never any safe, but a rather a journey of many challenges. In the case highlighted by Urrea, the Coyotes lead the group of walkers to a trail