Book Review: Into the Beautiful North
Sunday News
Oct 06, 2009
The basis for innumerable political diatribes and sob stories, illegal immigration is rarely portrayed as comic adventure.
Luis Alberto Urrea's novel "Into the Beautiful North" frames the issue in a picaresque road trip to Kankakee, Ill., beginning and ending in the rural Mexican village of Tres Camarones.
With the village men long gone to work in the U.S., drug dealers have begun muscling in on what's left of the sleepy town. Petite, feisty teen Nayeli isn't going to stand for it.
One night at the village cinema, she finds inspiration in the movie "The Magnificent Seven." She vows to find her long-absent father, Don Pepe, and six other good men - cops or soldiers, she says - and bring them back to defend the village. Possibly they might also offer a little romance to the women living so long without male companionship.
Nayeli enlists two girlfriends, along with Tacho, the gay proprietor of the village cantina who's been targeted by the nasty bandidos. The young people are encouraged by the formidable Tia Irma, the newly elected village mayor, who'd like them to look up her long-lost boyfriend as they pursue their quest.
Along the way they meet a succession of memorable characters - including a wily coyote, a sympathetic Border Patrol agent and a helpful librarian - who make their round-trip possible. Then there's Tia Irma's old lover, the less-than-saintly young missionary who once visited their village, and a Tijuana trash picker with superhero aspirations who calls himself Atomiko. All assist them on their way.
Things get impossibly complicated when the man-starved girls find true love, and when Tacho talks about his cantina, La Mano Caida, and authorities hear "al-Qaeda."
Eventually Nyeli and Tacho return to the village in triumph, offering the community new hope, though Nyeli doesn't completely fulfill her mission.
Urrea, who was born in Tijuana to an American mother and a Mexican father, notes in the book's acknowledgments that "Tres Camarones does not exist, which doesn't mean you can't find it."
It's a place any reader will want to visit, simply for its entertainment value.
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