Battle Ground Descriptive
Luis Alberto Urrea was born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother. He grew up in San Diego and attended the University of California. After graduation and a brief career a movie extra, Urrea worked with a volunteer organization that provides food, clothing, and medical supplies to the poor of Northern Mexico. In 1982 he taught writing at Harvard. His most recent novel, Into the Beautiful North, was published in 2010.
Border Story
In this description of the Mexican-American border from across the wire: Life and Hard Times on The Mexican Border (1993), Urrea uses the device of a second person to place his reader in the scene. By making “you” the “illegal”, he seeks to dramatize and humanize the plight of the poor seeking a new life in the United States.
1. At night, the Border Patrol helicopters swoop and churn in the air all along the line. You can sit in the Mexican hills and watch them herd humans on the dusty slopes across the valley. They look like science fiction crafts, focused lights raking the ground as they fly.
2. Borderlands locals are so jaded by the sight of nightly people-hunting that it doesn’t even register in their minds. But take a stranger to the border, and she will see the spectacle: monstrous Dodge trucks speeding into and out of the landscape; uniformed men patrolling with flashlights, guns and dogs; spotlights; running figures; lines of people hurried onto buses by armed guards; and the endless clatter of the helicopters with their harsh white beams. A Dutch woman once told me it seemed altogether “un-American”.
3. But the Mexicans keep on coming- and the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Panamanians, the Columbians. The seven- mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times. So congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square.
4. They stick to the center island. Running down the length of the island is a cement wall. If the “illegal’s” ( currently “undocumented
Border Story
In this description of the Mexican-American border from across the wire: Life and Hard Times on The Mexican Border (1993), Urrea uses the device of a second person to place his reader in the scene. By making “you” the “illegal”, he seeks to dramatize and humanize the plight of the poor seeking a new life in the United States.
1. At night, the Border Patrol helicopters swoop and churn in the air all along the line. You can sit in the Mexican hills and watch them herd humans on the dusty slopes across the valley. They look like science fiction crafts, focused lights raking the ground as they fly.
2. Borderlands locals are so jaded by the sight of nightly people-hunting that it doesn’t even register in their minds. But take a stranger to the border, and she will see the spectacle: monstrous Dodge trucks speeding into and out of the landscape; uniformed men patrolling with flashlights, guns and dogs; spotlights; running figures; lines of people hurried onto buses by armed guards; and the endless clatter of the helicopters with their harsh white beams. A Dutch woman once told me it seemed altogether “un-American”.
3. But the Mexicans keep on coming- and the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Panamanians, the Columbians. The seven- mile stretch of Interstate 5 nearest the Mexican border is, at times. So congested with Latin American pedestrians that it resembles a town square.
4. They stick to the center island. Running down the length of the island is a cement wall. If the “illegal’s” ( currently “undocumented