Search results matching tags 'Round Rock Reads', 'immigration', and 'Luis Alberto Urrea'

The Book

Sarah Samson — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:27:00 GMT

We had a great brown-bag discussion of The Devil's Highway last Saturday. Near the end of the event, we came up with a few questions for Mr. Urrea, the author, so I've been waiting to post until I heard back from him. Well, he hasn't responded yet, but I promise I will let you know when he does. This is what we decided to ask him:

Are you in touch with any of the survivors? How are they doing?
Why did you write The Devil's Highway?

Many of us attending the discussion shared with the group what a difficult read Devil's Highway was, painful to read about people suffering so much, going through the stages of heat exhaustion, and then many of them ultimately dying. It's grim. I appreciated that Urrea told the story as if he were a reporter, he did not over-emotionalize or over-identify with any one character, making the story more bearable for me to read. From the Border Patrol cop, to the immigrants from Veracruz, he gave us a picture of each individual; there were no "good" or "bad" guys, they were all people trying to do what they thought was the right thing for them to be doing.

One person at the discussion read an especially poignant quote from near the end of the book: (page 198, 199)

"Vargas watched as each coffin was carried from the plane to great tumult. One by one, they were laid inside the waiting hearses.....Later, she calculated that the dead men's flight alone had cost over sixty-eight thousand dollars.

'What if,' she asked, 'somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?'

Something to think about.

Beginning our Journey

Sarah Samson — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 21:58:00 GMT

Since I finished reading the book, I realize I really don't know a lot about the issue of immigration. This weekend, I set out to educate myself. For this post, I'll start with listing some good websites, links and facts about immigration. For my next post, I'll get into some resources and articles that will help us understand the different positions on the immigration debate.

First I started with a pop quiz from the Census Bureau's website to find out how ignorant I really am. I did lousy--five questions and I didn't get one right on my first guess. My score was 225. How did you all do?

So now it's Sunday night, and I'm a little more educated about the statistics. Here are some things I found out: there are approximately 11.5 to 12 million undocumented people currently living in the U.S., according to the PEW Hispanic Center. Most of these immigrants are from Mexico (56 percent), 22 percent are from other parts of Latin America, and the rest are mostly from South and East Asia. Immigrants in the USA sent $40 billion to their relatives and friends in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2005, according to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). You can read some more basic immigration statistics here.

At the end of The Devil's Highway, Mr. Urrea suggests some non-fiction books for further reading: Dead in Their Tracks by John Annerino, Down by the River by Charles Bowden, Coyotes by Ted Conover, Border by Lila Downs, Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexican Border by Ken Ellingwood. Most of these books are available at the Round Rock Library. I'm definitely going to check one out!