FEATURE STORY — January/February 2010

 

Tales from the Border

Best known for his award-winning book The Devil’s Highway, Professor Luis Alberto Urrea is an accomplished poet, novelist and journalist. But did you know he was once an extra in a Chuck Norris kung-fu movie?

By Jonathan Black
Photograph by Jeff Dahlgren

UIC professor Luis Alberto Urrea

It’s a barren, death-defying stretch of road that snakes through the desert north of Mexico. It’s plied by border patrol, federales, illegal immigrants and “coyotes”—the mercenaries who run illegal immigrants into the United States. Many have crossed. Thousands have had their dreams die under the scorching sun. It’s known as The Devil’s Highway, and it’s where Luis Alberto Urrea has planted his personal literary flag.

“My dad was Mexican, my mom was American. My parents fought in their own border way, and I internalized it,” says Urrea. “The Mexican border is a metaphor. Borders everywhere are a symbol of what divides us. That’s what interests me.”

Urrea, who grew up in Tijuana, lives north of the border, in Naperville, as a tenured professor of English and creative writing at UIC. For his epic novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, he returned home to his ancestors, crossing back to tell the story of his great aunt, Teresita Urrea, a faith healer and shaman sometimes known as the Mexican Joan of Arc. His horrific nonfiction account of The Devil’s Highway itself and the 14 who died lost in the sand was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.

When we met in mid-summer, Urrea was heading for the border again on assignment for Playboy magazine to profile the city of El Paso. It’s a strangely peaceful oasis in what Urrea continues to regard as an unfathomable combat zone. “We have no idea what’s going on behind the border,” he says. “No idea what chess moves and propaganda take place. Just recently, two helicopters with Mexican drug enforcement guys held Americans hostage at a ranch. It never got into the media. Mexico invaded Arizona. It’s a crazy world!”

It’s impossible not to be swept up in the enthusiasms of this man and his prodigious talents. Urrea is arguably UIC’s foremost literary star. He won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life. His first book, Across the Wire, was a New York Times Notable Book; in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. He has published short stories, poetry and essays, and spent most of last June and July on tour for his latest book, Into the Beautiful North, hitting 12 cities in less than six weeks. Once back from El Paso, he’s off to teach workshops at Bread Loaf, the artists colony in Vermont.

“How could I skip Bread Loaf?” he exclaims. “It’s not even a question of money. It’s the honor, to take part in that tradition. You go to Frost’s cabin and his stuff is still there. Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers—all these authors leaned on the same lectern!”

At UIC, his fame has granted him a measure of latitude when it comes to his work load. He was given a teaching assistant, a big help during October, which is national Hispanic month. “I get offers from everywhere. I become the national Hispanic,” he smiles. “I’m the national Latino.”

In addition to a literature class, Urrea also gets to design one workshop each semester—“Something wild.” Last year, it was The American Road. A few students were so inspired by the class that they literally took off. “A couple went nuts,” grins Urrea. “They went down to Route 66. I was like, ‘Where are they?’—then I started getting these e-mails. ‘Dude, I hope you don’t flunk me, but here’s a picture of the Cadillac Ranch.’ I thought, ‘Well, if I’m teaching a Kerouac class, I can’t really punish a guy for turning into Kerouac.’”

This year’s workshop on Ghosts of Chi­cago, in which he assigned “hit teams” to research the city’s past, has prompted an equally lively reaction. “One student whose family lived in the neighborhood before [the construction of UICC] found that [the site of] University Hall used to be a drag strip.”

From Tijuana garbage dump to Harvard
Teaching at a university was never in Urrea’s life plan. On the Mexican side of his family, he was the first to go to college. His dad grew up in Tijuana, never graduated high school and made a living doing custodial jobs, what Urrea calls “bowling-shoe work.” The family moved to California, where Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego. As a graduation present, his father headed back to Mexico and the Tijuana bank where he withdrew his savings so Urrea could continue on to graduate school. That’s when tragedy struck.

In Urrea’s words, his father “ran afoul of the Mexican police,” who forced him off the road. He was horribly injured, such a bloody mess that the cops who likely robbed him never went through his pockets. It was the surgeon who tried to save his father’s life who found the money. Then the authorities refused to release the body without a bribe.

“So instead of going on to school,” says Urrea, “I used my graduation gift to reclaim my father’s corpse and bury the body.”

The experience sent Urrea into a “crazy” period in Southern California. He worked menial jobs; he was an extra in a Chuck Norris kung-fu movie. Concerned friends hooked him up with a well-known youth minister, Pastor Von, who did charity work in Tijuana.

“Those freaking Baptists aren’t going to show me anything,” was Urrea’s initial reaction. “I’m from Tijuana. But he took me to things I’d never seen. It was a revelation. I spent four years there working in garbage dumps and cleaning toilets.”

He lived in abject poverty. He slept on relatives’ couches. He worked on night crews doing janitorial work. Finally, he’d had enough. Desperate to get out, Urrea got hold of Lowry Pei, a writing instructor he’d had at UC who was now at Harvard, and asked for help. Could he get him out of there? He had no skills, but maybe there were janitorial jobs in Cambridge.

Pei wrote back offering him a job—as a teacher of expository writing.

“He remembered who I was when I’d forgotten who I was,” is how Urrea likes to put it.

Scenes from the Devil’s Highway, the subject of UIC professor Luis Alberto Urrea’s acclaimed book: a mural de­picts the struggle to cross the border; the fence that separates the United States from Mexico; and a captured illegal immigrant reveals his backpack scars. These images are part of photographer David Taylor’s ongoing project, “Working the Line.”

And so he went from a Tijuana garbage dump to a teaching position at Harvard. To call it culture shock would be an understatement. On one of his first days, he was walking across campus when he spotted a sign inviting students to visit with novelist John Irving in the Lamont Library. “I thought, ‘that’s not possible.’ But I went and he said, ‘Come in, come in.’ He’d just written A Prayer for Owen Meany and wanted feedback. After the reading, I talked [with him] and thought, ‘I just met John Irving!’” Boston itself was a revelation. Urrea, as he likes to point out, had never been east of Yellowstone. “And here I was at Walden Pond. I was walking where Thoreau had walked.”

It was at Harvard, where he taught from 1982 to 1990, that Urrea first “fell in love” with non-fiction and writers such as Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey and Joan Didion. “I was blown away by Didion; she’s the greatest secret in the universe!” His earlier literary tastes had run to Steinbeck, Hemingway and “big fat epics,” the work of James Michener and Robert Ruark, whose Something of Value he calls, “insanely violent but mind-shredding, a book that takes you somewhere else.”

Ask him whom he admires now and he gives a huge helpless shrug. “There are so many!” Early on, Urrea was enamored with science fiction, the likes of Ursula Le Guin and Ray Bradbury. He was a huge fan of Thomas McGuane—“I’d never read such intelligent English wrangling. I had to be careful because I used to write really bad Thomas McGuane.” For poetry, he loves Pablo Neruda. The last 10 or 15 years, he’s been greatly influenced by Asian writers—Japanese and Chinese poets.

Shamans and the tricks they play
When his mother died in 1980, Urrea made a “command decision” to return to their home in San Diego and wrap up family business. Then he wandered the country, spending time in Boulder, where he taught at the Universities of Colorado and Arizona, and began his work on The Hummingbird’s Daughter. He eked out a modest living freelancing, including a year’s stint as writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette—“living the swamp life.” Then The Hummingbird’s Daughter came out to rave reviews and the phone began ringing with job offers. The one he couldn’t turn down came from then LAS Dean Stanley Fish. “He offered me a job with tenure. I thought I’d be a complete idiot if I didn’t take it.”

With more than 15 books published, Urrea calls himself a “binge writer. I’m not a nine-to-fiver. I don’t have a schedule. I wait and build up a lot of pressure, and then there’s a massive explosion.” That’s when he retreats upstairs to his office, puts on music and lights incense. “I can go so long that when I stop, it’s hard for me to get out of my chair. Nine hours go by easily. I told my daughter, ‘You think I’m a hippie because I light incense, but I’m actually praying.’ When they smell that peculiar odor, they know to stay downstairs.”

Given his varied talents, it’s not always clear whether what he’s working on will end up as fact or fiction. “Often the genre asserts itself, almost when the idea comes, almost as a gift from heaven,” explains Urrea, whose latest book was always intended as fiction. Into the Beautiful North is a Mexican version of “The Magnificent Seven”; led by a whip-smart 19-year-old named Nayeli, a claque of attractive young women head north to bring back seven men to rescue their village from drug bandits. It’s filled with hilarious dialogue, wonderful characters and, of course, plenty of border action. Alan Cheuse, a Latin American aficionado and book reviewer for National Public Radio, gave it an enthusiastic  review and called Urrea “our number one explainer of Mexico’s ways to U.S. readers.”

Unlike this new novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter remained unclassified in Urrea’s mind. “It was only late in the game that [the story] expressed itself as fiction. There were so many riffs I wanted to do and so many tangents. There was this esoteric side, and I always say you can’t footnote a dream. When you write about shamans, you can’t help but get in a trance state. They can actually make you dream, or think you dream, some of the material, which is an astounding experience.”

All that time spent in the world of shamans may have had other consequences.

Twice during the writing of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, the entire manuscript vanished from Urrea’s computer—once when he was half done. Devastated, and with no back-up, he went back to work re-creating what he’d lost—and only half-jokingly blames the medicine men for the mysterious vanishing act.

Urrea credits his wife, Cindy, for helping him get through the book. They met when she was a reporter for the Arizona Republic in Tucson and interviewed him for a profile. They married six months later. “I like to say it’s the longest interview in history,” he jokes. When he wrote The Hummingbird’s Daughter, she helped him research ancient letters and documents, transcribing them into a computer. (“I type like a caveman!”) She was especially indispensable when Urrea was reporting for The Devil’s Highway, cracking access to the border patrol. “They jerked me around for four months. She kept at it, like a reporter. I’m more of a poet. When I’m rebuffed, I retreat to my room and listen to Black Sabbath and feel depressed.”

For a time, Cindy managed his schedule and kept up his ambitious website, which ran a regular weekly feature, “Migration Monday,” devoted to border news. “Of course, now I have agents and managers,” he says, and Cindy spends most of her time with the kids, Megan and Chayo, in Naperville. (Her son from a previous marriage, Eric, attends the University of Illinois at the Urbana-Champaign campus.) Urrea, however, is skeptical that she’s put aside journalism. “She’s been longing to write a couple of books. She wants to get back in the game.”

Urrea has plenty on his own plate. He’s already hard at work on a sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter. Like all his previous work, it will mean crossing back to his native Mexico, though that passage, literal or literary, could well mark the end of his border obsession. “Honestly,” he says, “I’d rather garden here in Naperville, write Haiku poems and hang out with my kids.”