The Devil's Highway
by Luis Alberto Urrea
Twenty-six men. The Arizona desert. Fourteen survived.
For you if
you want to understand the human cost of immigration policy through the specific deaths of specific people
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
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In May 2001 a group of men tried to cross the Arizona desert from Mexico into the United States. Twenty-six started. Fourteen survived. Urrea spent years with the survivors, the Border Patrol agents, and the families of the dead reconstructing what happened — the coyote who abandoned them, the terrain that killed them, the political machinery on both sides that made the crossing necessary. The most human account of the border ever written. A dispatch that refuses to let twenty-six men be a statistic.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- An outside perspective on Mexico
Part of a Reading Journey
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Pedro Páramo(2024)
dir. Rodrigo Prieto
A ghost town where the dead won't stop talking.
A man travels to his late mother's hometown to find the father he never knew, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in the most literal sense — populated by the dead, still narrating the tyranny of the cacique who once ruled it. Adapted from Juan Rulfo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blurring the line between the living and the dead until power and guilt outlast the man who held them — Pedro Páramo's tyranny haunts Comala long after his death. Pedagogical in showing how one man's greed can hollow out an entire town's future.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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Six million people left the South. Here are three of them.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Exit West
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Doors appear that lead to other countries. They leave. Everything changes.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Harvest of Empire
Juan González
We are here because you were there.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Solito
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Nine years old. Alone. He made it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Octavio Paz
Mexico trying to explain itself to itself.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño
Young poets searching for a lost poet. All get lost.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Sorrows of Mexico
Various
Eight journalists on Mexico. The truth, unfiltered.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Popol Vuh
Anonymous
The Maya creation story, finally in its own words.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
