BORDER DANCE L U ´I S A L B E R T O U R R E A ’ S N O V E L J O I N S T H E B I G R E A D
Casey Sanchez I For The New Mexican hen Luís Alberto Urrea was last profiled in these pages in 2010, the author was fresh off the success of Into The Beautiful North, a book that melds in-your-face social realism about survival on the U.S.Mexico border with a sort of big-screenstyle road epic about a group of young Mexican teens making their way across the United States. The National Endowment for the Arts took note of the book’s themes and its accessibility, choosing the novel in its 2013 The Big Read program. An ambitious initiative that is, according to the NEA, “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture,” The Big Read funds a range of community groups — not schools — to build authentic, local conversations about vital books, relevant to readers’ specific locale. More often than not, Big Read sites tend to be small towns bypassed by national literary culture. “The wonder of The Big Read is that you get to break new ground and visit new territories, places that surprise you — like San Angelo, Texas, or Waukesha, Wisconsin,” Urrea said in an interview with Pasatiempo. “These are places that often don’t have authors come through. All of these places are alive with enthusiasm, because they are choosing a book that somehow reflects their community. It’s so flattering for an author.” Cinematic in scope, with a zany plot that riffs on samurai flicks and American buddy movies, Into the Beautiful North is an exceptionally readable novel in this age of militarized borders, forced deportations, and immigrant youth who have become vocal about their right to live as citizens in a country that has raised them and scapegoated them simultaneously — think On the Road meets The Seven Samurai, produced as an Univision telenovela. 38
PASATIEMPO I November 15-21, 2013
Urrea appears at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, Nov. 20, reading his work and in conversation with Michael Silverblatt, host of the syndicated public-radio show Bookworm. For readers who know Urrea from The Hummingbird’s Daughter (a novel) or The Devil’s Highway (a nonfiction book) — both of which are written in prose that pulses with a finely controlled anger, illuminating the border in stark, unforgiving terms — an adventure novel seems a drastic departure. “The tone of Into the Beautiful North is really the way I write. Hummingbird’s Daughter was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon,” Urrea said. “The book is like Arcade Fire recording Reflector. Fans of Arcade Fire will follow them in any direction, but some might be surprised that they are doing a dance record.” One of the things that excites Urrea about The Big Read is the freedom it gives local groups to create activities that respond to the books. Groups have had screenings of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as well as lectures and competitions in writing, art, and quilting in response to Into the Beautiful North, Urrea said. “Some of the students had their paintings published as huge posters and made into T-shirts. That was awesome.” The novel’s appeal is understandable. It is centered around 19-year-old Nayeli, a whip-smart waitress at a taco shop who spends her time learning karate kicks and helping her aunt get elected as the first female mayor of the quaint fishing village Tres Camarones. The town is exposed to predatory narcos who have begun casing the area for its lack of working-age men — all gone to jobs in the United States. After watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli plots a scheme to run away with her friends to the other side of the border, where they will recruit Mexican immigrant men with fight in their blood to protect Tres Camarones.