The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

Nonetheless, agents are sensitive to the death they encounter in their jobs, and find the most heinous crimes committed along the border to be the crimes of smugglers who abandon their groups of walkers in the desert. The Border Patrol rap is often monotonous and tiresome, and the agents are often distrustful of and cruel toward the illegal immigrants they apprehend out in the Yuma desert. He describes the ways in which the agents “cut for sign,” or search for evidence of illegals in the desert, by paying close attention to the footprints and other detritus that immigrants leave behind on drags of smoothed-over sand created by Border Patrol agents. Border Patrol office in Wellton, Arizona.

Urrea then explains the culture and practices of the U.S. Urrea posits that the Cabeza Prieta could be-and, to the Wellton 26, most certainly was-Desolation itself, a cursed and vengeful landscape which tortures and swallows all those who pass through it. Urrea invokes ancient religious texts which mention a vast desert known as Desolation, beneath which all of the fallen angels are buried. Urrea begins by recounting briefly some of the history of the “haunted” desert which is home to the Cabeza Prieta (or “dark-head”) National Wildlife Refuge, and the particularly treacherous strip of desert known as the Devil’s Highway. Acclaimed writer Luís Alberto Urrea tells the story of the Wellton 26 (sometimes referred to as the Yuma 14), a group of illegal immigrants, mostly from the impoverished southern Mexican state of Veracruz, who became lost in the treacherous Yuma desert after a series of fatal mistakes made by their smuggler, or pollero, Jesús “Mendez” Lopez Ramos.

The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea