Scanning the Bookshelf

Some bad things happen to wonderful people in Luis Alberto Urrea's new novel, "Into the Beautiful North." Sleazy criminals from a narco cartel are threatening to set up a center of operations in the peaceful Mexican village of Tres Camarones, which lies south of Mazatlan on the coast.

When a close-knit trio of three young women and the owner of the town's taqueria and Internet cafe decide to venture north on an arduous bus trip to Tijuana, they find the city threatening and overwhelming. Then, to make matters worse, when the four of them cross the border for the first time (not, as you might be thinking, to find work), the Border Patrol catches them, deports the women but detains their "protector," Tacho, and their mood turns despairing.

And, yet, these somber moments don't make for a dark story. Quite the opposite.

"I want the story to be on the border of where comedy meets tragedy," says Urrea, talking by phone from his home in Naperville, Ill., where he lives with his wife and children. "The comedy helps us deal with the moments of shock, when bad things do happen. This is similar to what happens in fairy tales and I think of this story as a kind of adult fairy tale."

And if everything isn't happy at end of this tale, there is still enough joy and delight to make the analogy stick.

Urrea, 53, was born in Tijuana, raised in San Diego and now teaches at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He has a large and devoted following, rooted in his immensely readable early books, "Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border" (1993) and "By the Lake of Sleeping Children" (1996), which recounts his passion for volunteer work with children who lived in the Tijuana dump.

A good portion of this story takes place in San Diego, site of his high school years. The trash dump in Tijuana figures into the story, too.

"Way back when I was working at the dump," Urrea recalls, "I saw that even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives. And in this book, I think the characters are choosing joy, too."

His father was Mexican, his mother American. Their marriage was difficult and his parents rearing of him was alternately affectionate and disturbing. Some of the tension in the marriage was about his ethnic identity. His mother, thinking he should be emphatically American, felt he should called Louis.

In "Nobody's Son: Notes From an American Life" (1998), he distills a good deal of his relationship with his father into a single sentence: "He was my hero and my greatest source of terror." Part of the reason he was heroic to the young Luis: His dad was a great storyteller, a skill that Urrea inherited and honed.

Urrea managed, in spite of the poverty and sense of desperation, to graduate from Clairemont High in San Diego. He then got a B.A. in writing at the University of California, San Diego and did graduate work at the University of Colorado.

But the moment when his sense of hopelessness dramatically dissipated, he insists, was when "I was airlifted to Harvard."

That is, he got a guest teaching spot in writing.

That was in 1982.

"I would have taken a job as a janitor there. I met Eudora Welty and I met John Irving. This was the departure for me."

All of his books seem to revolve, in some way, around the relationship between Mexico and the United States, with particular attention to the border region. But he never depicts that relationship in any broad or abstract way.

Whether he's working in nonfiction or fiction, his writing fixes on the individuals. This is what makes "The Devil's Highway" such a memorable piece of journalism. No doubt, it's also why his tale of the 26 men who attempted to cross into the United States (only 12 survived) became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction in 2005.

"The Devil's Highway" is being made into a movie, now in production after some delays. So is his grand-scale novel "The Hummingbird's Daughter," which took him 20 years to research and write; it was published to a good deal of acclaim in 2006. The film version is apparently in production too, with Antonio Banderas in a starring role and the Mexico City-based Luis Mandoki ("Gaby: A True Story") directing.

The new novel offers a story in the form of a quest. The rickety theater in Tres Camarones screens old films. One night the feature film is John Sturges' classic Western "The Magnificent Seven," itself based on Akira Kurosawa's great "Seven Samurai."

Seeing this story about gunmen protecting a Mexican village, the film's heroine, Nayeli, dreams up an improbable scheme: travel north and hire Mexicans who have left for the United States to return and be their hired protectors.

One subtext is that all the men of Tres Camarones have left to find work in the United States. Another is that Nayeli wants to travel all the way to Kankakee, Ill., the last known address for her father, to persuade him to return. The crusty and newly elected municipal president of the town, Irma Garcia Cervantes (better known as Aunt Irma), endorses the plan and the quest is on.

The story itself isn't autobiographical, but the town is loosely based on Urrea's ancestral town, El Rosario, in Sinaloa, and the path of the novel loosely follow his own: from Tijuana to San Diego to Illinois by way of Colorado. Some of the descriptions of the landscape Tacho and Nayeli travel through are among the novel's most poetic passages.

"I wanted the book to be a love song to America," says Urrea. "The place is so astonishing and so blessed. The moment when Tacho and Nayeli are trapped in traffic near Glenwood Springs and they suddenly see thousands of mayflies — that was something I experienced."

He mentions Tacho, openly gay, as his favorite character. "He's based on an actual guy named Tacho who I know in Sinaloa.

"He says to himself, 'I'm going to be who I am, and that is truly macho. To hell with you, I'll be who I am.' He's also kind to others and grateful for what he has."

Urrea is very happy about the reception of the book, particularly among bloggers who like it to so much that they think there should be a sequel.

Urrea isn't committing to one, but the idea appeals to him.

"I would love it. The characters are so alive that I could probably write one."

To find out more about Robert Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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