When Luis A. Urrea wrote The Devil’s Highway, he wrote backwards in a stack of notebooks. The fact that this book is a work of investigative journalism, with some educated guesses thrown in, and that it was not written front to back needs to be kept in mind during an analysis of Mr. Urrea’s writings about the Border Patrol. Before Mr. Urrea wrote The Devil’s Highway, he was of the opinion that the Border Patrol was made up of a bunch of jackbooted thugs; this however changed. During Mr. Urrea’s Meet & Greet at UTSA, he explained, much as he did at the University of Washington, that during his research, there was a moment in the desert that he realized, with a little help, that the US Border Patrol are made up of people: fallible, emotional, genuine (UWTV 2009). The human nature of Border Patrol is what makes them so easy to demonize or idolize, and it is this idea that is reflected in the book.
Urrea talks about the origins of the Border Patrol in the beginning of The Devil’s highway; he says on page 8 “White Europeans conceived of … El Norte mania[,]… the first illegal immigrants…were Chinese [; fear caused the]… force known as the Mounted Chinese Exclusionary Police [to take]…to the dusty wasteland”(Urrea 2004). In other words, the Border Patrol was formed out of a non-native people’s fear of immigration. What does that make the Border Patrol? Urrea is implying that they are nothing but the imperfect tools of a hypocritical society. He goes on to further describe the contradictory impression that their imperfection has made on immigrants on pages 14-15, “They’d walked into hell trying to escape the Border Patrol, and now they were praying to get caught”(Urrea 2004). Despite the fact that apparently when Border Patrol agents encounter immigrants they “Sometimes,… [they] beat them down with …[their] baton, and sometimes everybody just laughed and drank… [their] water”(Urrea 2004). This apparent contradiction exemplifies the fact that the Border Patrol is group of people, and as such, they have all sorts in their ranks: demon, angel and everything in-between. At Mr. Urrea’s Meet & Greet at UTSA, he mentioned that he once asked an agent about how they deal with the bad eggs in the force, the agent said, “They better hope the public finds out about them before we do.” To put it another way, the force has internal justice for any immigrate beaters that might be in their midst. Death hardens people, makes their humanity more difficult to recognize. Border Patrol agents encounter death at almost every turn desensitizing them to a phenomenon that much of humanity tries their best to avoid. The agents seeming lack of emotional response to death often alienates them from more emotionally effected members of society. Sometimes even their coping mechanisms alienate them from society. One method that agents use to help cope with the amount of death they see is similar to that of an emergency room surgeon: jargon. They generally refer to the sick or dying as already dead. This concept is seen and explored on page 16 where Agent F says, “We’ve got five bodies on Vidrios Drag”, as if the people he found were already dead. This dehumanizing terminology can cause many people to assume that the Border Patrol agents are emotionless, cold, and unfazed by death. But this is not the case as Mr. Urrea found out on the Devil’s Highway when Kenny Smith let Mr. Urrea know that the tough guy exterior is just that, an exterior (UWTV 2009).
Emotions lie inside almost every human out there, including Border Patrol agents; it is easy to forget that especially if they refer to you or someone you know as a “body,” “tonk,” or “wet”(Urrea 2004). People generally dehumanize the dehumanizer, they say that the emotionally unaffected are, or cannot be, normal people. This stigma helps continue the stories that Border Patrol Officers are just as likely to kill you and rape your daughter as to save you and give you water. Not to say that Border Patrol agents are given a bad rap for no reason. There have been cases of “disproportionate use of force” by agents in the Border Patrol in the past (2012). Where after getting pelted by rocks an agent “shot and killed a 15-year-old…boy across the Rio Grande”(2012). Cases such as this litter news articles dating back to the formation of the Border Patrol, but in most cases, especially these days, the agent responsible for the crime is found and prosecuted. Rarely will you hear about the lives that Border Patrol agents save because that is just part of their job, not news. As such, it is easy to get a disproportionate view of the Border Patrol.
Before I read The Devil’s Highway I never really thought about the Border Patrol as a group of people just doing a job. In fact, I really did not think about them much at all. In reading The Devil’s Highway I was moved by the portrayal of agents, and gained a greater perspective on the border controversy as a whole. Now, I have a much greater empathy for both the agents and the immigrants in this political conflict. Much like the agents on page 54 in the book I have gained a slightly greater distrust for my own government’s motivations and a simmering hatred for those who lead their prey into the desert.
Works Cited
(2012). US border agents 'killed Mexican'. Belfast Telegraph Online.
Urrea, L. A. (2004). The Devil's Highway. New York, Little, Brown and Company.
UWTV (2009). Devil's Highway: An Evening with Author Luis Urrea, YouTube.
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