Photo by Nathan Gibbs/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A family looks north into the United States from Playas de Tijuana, January 2009
Flying to Chicago for the Latinos in Social Media (#LATISM) conference this week involved, as usual, a good book – one I’ll be reading again tonight on my flight home. So allow me to share a bit of my airplane reading, the novel “Into the Beautiful North” by Luis Alberto Urrea.
Urrea, a Tijuanense by birth, is one of my favorite authors on all things related to the border and Mexico. In 2004, just as I was taking a job covering immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border, I was inspired by the remarkable narrative storytelling of his nonfiction “The Devil’s Highway.” The book pieced together the last, desperate days of a group of men who perished in the dessert near Yuma, Arizona. Urrea retraced their journey via court documents, survivors’ accounts and time spent with the Border Patrol, filling in the blanks with the imagined conversations of their final hours. The book also provided a glimpse of the difficult work done by agents who patrol the border desert.
“Into the Beautiful North” is less tragic but equally poignant. It also involves a group of young Mexicans heading north, this time four fictional young friends who aren’t looking to migrate, but rather to bring back a few men to a town whose male adults have left for the U.S., leaving the few residents left vulnerable to a drug cartel. Innocents abroad in every sense, the foursome make it from tiny Tres Camarones (Three Shrimp) to the post-9/11 border and beyond in a narrative that’s often laced with humor, but incisive in a way that you’re laughing and grimacing at the same time.
In this excerpt, protagonists Nayeli, Yolo, Vampi (a goth girl) and Tacho are about to be repatriated to Tijuana after being caught crossing the border. Tacho, who runs a taqueria in Tres Camarones called La Mano Caída, is looking forward to going home – until he says absolutely the wrong thing.
It was so noisy. Fences were clanking. People shuffled, muttered. The buses pulled up and the agents were yelling and the pneumatic doors were pulling open and the chain link was rattling. Migra agents moved through, telling them it was time to go home. The friends had to yell to be heard.
“What?” Yolo shouted.
“Home!” Tacho yelled. It was so absurd he started to grin. He yelled as loud as he could: “Think about home!
“What about home?” Vampi called.
“I think about La Mano Caida!” Tacho yelled.
“Que?”
“LA MANO CAIDA!”
“Que?”
Instantly, the Border Patrol agents froze.
“Al Qaeda?” the nearest one said.
“What?” said Tacho.
“Did you say Al Qaeda?”
“No! Dije ‘La Mano Caida!’ “ Tacho shouted a little too loud.
The agents jumped on his, wrestling him to the ground.
“This guy’s Al Qaeda!”
