The Devil's Highway Quotes

“What we take from granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign. Rural Mexicans don't have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese. They don't smother their food in mounds of sour cream. Who would pay for it? They have never seen "nachos." In some regions of the south, they eat soup with bananas; some tribal folks not far from Veracruz eat termite tacos; turkey, when there are turkeys, is not filled with "stuffing"―but with dry pineapples, papaya, pecans. Meat is killed behind the house, or it is bought, dripping and flyblown, off a wooden plank in the village market. They eat cheeks, ears, feet, tails, lips, fried blood, intestines filled with curdled milk. Southerners grew up eating corn tortillas, and they never varied in their diet. You find them eating food the Aztecs once ate. Flour tortillas, burritos, chimichangas―it's foreign food to them, invented on the border.
They were alliens before they ever crossed the line.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O'Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don't work out here. "You need a new kind of prayers," she says "to negotiate with this land.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Rita Vargas caught her breath—the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human--wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: "If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?') In politically correct times, "illegal alien" was deemed gauche, so "undocumented worker" came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is "undocumented entrant." As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.

Maye it is.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Getting bodies,” in Border Patrol lingo, didn’t necessarily mean collecting corpses. Bodies were living people. “Bodies” was one of the many names for them. Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called “wets” by agents. “Five wets” might have slipped out. “Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“wonder, if we in the U.S. stopped buying cocaine and stopped selling heavy weapons across the border, what would happen then? So easy to talk about them. What does it mean when they are also us?”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“If the North American continent was broad ("high, wide, and lonesome"), then Mexico was tall. High, narrow, and lonesome. Europeans conquering North America hustled west, where the open land lay. And the Europeans settling Mexico hustled north. Where the open land was.

Immigration, the drive northward, is a white phenomenon.

White Europeans conceived of and launched El Norte mania, just as white Europeans inhabiting the United States today bemoan it.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“conservative pundits try to get their constituents to believe the American Taxpayer, that mythical and handy beast, is funding lifesaving towers foisted on them by the lily-livered INS, which, by the way, allowed hijackers to blow up New York.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Everybody loves Jesus Christ, they just don’t know what to do with Jesus Garcia.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“A border cop confessed: “I have a rule now. If it don’t speak English, shoot it.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“The media only cares about the Yuma 14 because of the large numbers. But this tragedy goes on every day. It never stops. If only one person dies out there, it is exactly the same horror story.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Cutters read the land like a text. They search the manuscript of the ground for irregularities in its narration. They know the plots and the images by heart. They can see where the punctuation goes. They are landscape grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Aztlán (“The Place of the Reeds”) was the traditional home of the Aztecs, a possibly mythical motherland from which the tribe ventured forth on a one-hundred-year walk. It was a land to the north of Mexico City. Chicanos recognize Aztlán as being in the American southwest, and it came to represent the stomping ground of “La Chicanada,” or the entirety of the Hispanic west. The Aztecs (Mexica, pronounced “Meshica,” hence, “Chicano”) walked south, out of the deserts, on their way to what would become Mexico City. They apparently walked across the Devil’s Highway on their way home.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Your spit turns to paste. Your mouth tastes nasty, so you take another little drink. You tell yourself you’ll only sip a couple more times, but to hell with it—you take a big pull off the bottle. Your lungs, now, are leaking moisture to the vampire air. Your tears leak into the sky—eyes dry and scratchy. The fluid in your lungs helps transport oxygen through the tissues into the blood. Less fluid, less oxygen. You breathe harder, you get drier.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“And now your jug is getting hot—your drinking water is starting to get as hot as coffee. The desert’s air, like you, is thirsty. It’s sucking up your sweat as fast as you can pump it, so fast that you don’t even know you’re sweating. But you’ve been walking across rough terrain for a couple of miles now, and you are breathing hard. The air comes to your lips and pulls water from you. Every breath dries out your nose, your sinuses, your mouth, your throat. Your tongue: you drink more hot water; your tongue, you take just one more gulp of hot water; your tongue. Desolation drinks you first in small sips, then in deep gulps.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“America’s a country with a state called Nuevo México. Other states are called Red, Snowy, Mountain, and Flowery; several of them were going to Flowery, and some of the others were going to Northern Caroline to see about making cigarettes. The state of Nuevo México even has a capital city called Holy Faith: Catholicism, New Mexico. And then there’s the hilarious Chi-Cago. (“Piss.” And, “I Shit.”) It’s funny until they feel the cold of winter.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“There was nothing delicious in Delicias”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“For a while, the Mexican government offered the walkers survival kits with water and snacks, but the uproar from the United States put a stop to that.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“The gringos and the missionaries and even the government representatives from Mexico City told them to stop procreating. It was simple: too many mouths caused hunger. But the Pope ordered them to continue being fertile—even condoms were wicked.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“And it’s beautiful. Edward Abbey, the celebrated iconoclast and writer, loved the place. He chose to be buried there, illegally, among the illegal Mexicans he despised.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it's not a region at all. Maybe it's just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Cops tend to assess a situation at first glance--people are always up to something. In the desert, they were often involved in some form of dying.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“They couldn’t sweat him, no matter what they did. Hey, they were gringos—no way were they going to do the kind of things to him the Mexican cops and the Federales would have done. Every Mexican gangster knows this—Los Yunaites is the land of human rights,”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Audiences for ten years have been startled to learn that the federal law that makes these humans illegal isn’t even on the criminal books. You can look it up for yourself, since no TV or radio host is going to waste a segment explaining the actual law to you. Right or left. Felony? Nope. Misdemeanor? Sorry, but no.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story