In The Devil’s Highway (2004), Mexican-American journalist and novelist Luis Alberto Urrea presents a fictionalized version of the tragic crossing of twenty-two undocumented Mexican immigrants on foot across the Arizona-Sonora desert. Subtitled “A True Story” and dedicated to “the dead and [… ] those who rescue the living,” the novel is an intense work that focuses on issues of social justice, specifically on the real, and often appalling outcomes of human trafficking across the US-Mexico border. Urrea begins the novel in media res, portraying the state of the men who survived most of the terrible trip along the Devil’s Highway, a bleak stretch of desert spanning southern Arizona and northern Sonora. Urrea writes, “they were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked.” Urrea graphically describes their struggle to hold on to life in the harsh environment, with few or no life-saving measures in place for them along the way.
Before returning to narrate the beginning of the men’s torturous journey, Urrea develops place as one of the story’s protagonists, establishing the character and context of a site that “has set out to illuminate one notion: bad medicine.” For Urrea, the Devil’s Highway is steeped in death, suffering, and darkness: “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.” The mythology Urrea creates for the Devil’s Highway is brutal and hostile, from its landscape (“the plants are noxious and spiked,” the wildlife “creeps through the nights, poisonous and alien”), to its human history (“As [16th-century Spanish explorer] Melchior [Díaz] died […] on his stinking cot, he burned and howled. Flies settled in his entrails”), to its legends [“the dreaded Chupacabras […] has been seen attacking animals, lurking in outhouses, and even jumping in bedroom windows to munch on sleeping children”). Though she is mentioned but briefly, the Lady in Blue contributes to the borderlands environment Urrea conjures by offering an example of untimely death, one particularly marked by the relationships between indigenous peoples and Spanish invaders: the predecessors of contemporary mestizo populations living and crossing there.
Urrea indirectly references what appears to be historical narration attributed to Fray Eusebio Kino and Juan Mateo Manje of the encounter between the Lady in Blue and the Pima (Akimel O’otham) tribe, saying that the account cited was “written down in 1699.” Though the tribes inhabiting the Devil’s Highway thought they were free of the Spanish after the death of conquistador Melchior Diaz, they were continuously bothered by a “meddlesome white women who flew above their heads,” “a white woman who came bearing a cross.” To eliminate these unwelcome visits, the “warriors did the only practical thing they could: they filled her with arrows.” In Urrea’s account, this little affected the airborne woman: “They said she said she refused to die. Kept on flying.” The novel then references another, related account of similar visits, claiming that the 1699 account referred to a “Blessed Virgin UFO,” adding that fifty years later “a female prophet came out of the desert. She was known as La Mujer Azul.” The native tribes, wishing to eliminate these perturbances, again shot her with arrows, and “this time, she died.” In the concluding references to the narrative, Urrea states that when Jesuits missionaries arrived to the region, the tribes killed the friars, because “they made the People as unhappy as the mysterious spirit-woman.” Drawing on various historical and folkloric accounts, Urrea’s Devil’s Highway presents the Lady in Blue as a pre-Mexican-American border crosser.
Urrea’s inclusion of the Lady in Blue narrative is not lengthy, but it serves specific ends within the arc of the novel. Like everything else in contact with the Devil’s Highway, the Lady in Blue is touched by death and represents a type of undesired transmigration. Her death in the desert resonates with those of the Mexican and Central American men who, during the course of the novel, expire in the same badlands. Her narrative is at once representative of the Devil’s Highway, subject to its cruelty, and in an encompassing manner, part of the legacy shared by Mexican, Mexican-American, Indo-Hispano, and indigenous peoples who live there. Urrea does not dwell on the details of bilocations, theological writing, conversions, and convents, nor does he name Sor María de Jesús de Agreda as that figure, referring to her only as the “la mujer azul”; nevertheless, the Lady in Blue narrative resonates deeply with the place and peoples he portrays and offers a patina of cultural historical authenticity.
(excerpted from chapter 6)
