The Devil’s Highway

Five men, “burned nearly black” by the sun, stumble through a mountainous desert. The men, disoriented by dehydration and hyperthermia, “see God and devils” all around them—they have resorted to drinking their own urine to stay alive and are “beyond rational thought.” They imagine the lush landscapes of their homes as they tear into cacti, desperate for water. Their sense of direction hopelessly impaired, they walk westward toward Yuma.

The men are in the Cabeza Prieta (Dark-Head) National Wild Life Refuge, at the southernmost end of the US Air Force’s Barry Goldwater bombing range. Another more “terrible” stretch of desert cuts through the Cabeza Prieta—the Devil’s Highway. The narrator, Luís Alberto Urrea, notes that in ancient religious texts, “fallen angels were bound in chains and buried beneath a desert known as Desolation.” This stretch of desert, Urrea says, could be Desolation itself.

The men see mirages and “deceptive” tricks of the landscape which urge them on toward an imagined oasis. There is no water or shade, and the men have been pricked with cactus spines and cut on rocks. They pass abandoned army tanks as they leave the mountain pass and face the flat plain of the preserve. The temperature is 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

The first white man known to die on the Devil’s Highway, Urrea writes, died on January 18th, 1541, though “as long as there have been people, there have been deaths in the western desert.” He claims that “desert spirits of a dark and mysterious nature” have always been present on its trails, and that the Devil’s Highway is a place of “retribution,” not of salvation.

Urrea recounts the myths of the people native to this land—the Tohono O’Odham tribe. Their creation myth tells the story of the birth of the Elder Brother, I’itoi, who watches over the desert from a windy cave and “resents uninvited visitors.” According to legend, an evil witch spirit, Ho’ok, hides in the mountains, and the mischievous coyote spirit Ban rules the plains. The myths of another local tribe, the Yaqui, speak of “tiny men” who live underground, and of how the devil, Yuku, once controlled all the corn that grew. Mexican “hoodoo” legends, too, are prevalent in the area, telling of the wailing ghost of a woman and the feral, vampiric wolves known as Chupacabras (“goat suckers”) that roam the night.

The landscape and wildlife are “noxious,” Urrea writes. What few plants live in the desert are spiked and dangerous, and the “poisonous and alien” wildlife includes rattlesnakes, scorpions, black widows, tarantulas, coral snakes, Gila monsters, and even killer bees.

Other tribes, such as the Hohokam, have vanished from the region, though their etchings and ruins remain. Old footprints, some of which are “old beyond dating,” still mark the landscape, telling stories of “long-dead cowboys” and the “phantom Hohokam themselves.” Carefully arranged rock piles and boulders rolled into straight lines aim wanderers toward watering holes and mark ancient graves. Some rock piles have been placed by the Border Patrol signcutters, or trackers, who refuse to divulge what the piles signify.

Little or no records were kept of the area before the arrival of white men, who had a “mania” for keeping records. As they “civiliz[ed]” the frontier and built the Wild West, they perhaps did not realize that they were not only writing their own history—they were writing the history of Mexico, as well.

The North American continent is broad, Urrea writes, and those who sought to conquer it moved west toward open land. In Mexico, a tall and narrow country, the open land lay in the north, and that is where the Europeans settling Mexico “hustled.” Urrea writes that “the drive northward is a white phenomenon.”

Urrea travels back in time to the Sonoita (in Spanish, spelled Sonoyta) of 1541, which, even then, was “the unwilling host of killers and wanderers.” A Spanish conquistador called Melchior Díaz led a patrol through Sonoita, though the Spanish did not plan to settle there—they were fearful of the natives, whom they believed were “hostile” cannibals. Díaz was bound for the Sea of Cortez. He kept sheep at his settlement in a small brush corral, and wild dogs had been attacking them in the night. Díaz, miserable to be stuck in Sonoita, had slaughtered the native people of the region mercilessly. Urrea writes, “this rout of natives serves as the preface to the story of death that begins with Díaz.” As Díaz rode through his settlement one day, he noticed a dog in the sheep pen. He entered the pen, threw a lance at the dog, and then, somehow, impaled himself on his own weapon. It took twenty days for Díaz to die—twenty days until “the fallen angels of Desolation came out of the Cabeza Prieta, folded their hands over him, and smiled.”

The land was haunted before Díaz’s death, Urrea writes, and continued to be haunted afterward by “Catholic apparitions” that plagued the tribes. As Jesuits infiltrated the area, the natives fought back against oppression, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that “the modern era of death really got rolling.” As the gold rush began, more and more white Arizonans and Texans died on the Devil’s Highway, and Urrea writes that their wagon-wheel tracks remain in the desert to this day.

Urrea describes how “a source close to this story” once observed the titular Cabeza Prieta itself out in the desert. As Urrea’s “source” drove through the desert one “brutal” afternoon, he saw the ground split open, and a “black human head” rose up from the ground to laugh at the passing traveler.

Urrea returns to his description of the five men lost in the desert. As they come upon a dirt road, they are unaware that it is called the Vidrios Drag. They are now praying to be found by the Migra, or the Border Patrol, whom they had “walked into hell trying to escape.” They cannot decide whether they should continue on the road or head for a nearby mountain range, and as they “shuffle around,” unable to make a decision in their exhausted state, a white truck approaches, and then men run toward it. A Border Patrol agent, Mike F., had been cutting for sign and, unable to find anything, was planning on turning around when he spotted the lost walkers.

Mike F. knows that people wandering the desert are almost always up to something, and believes that the more “casual and innocent” someone tries to look, the more dangerous they might be. Though these men don’t appear to be a threat, Mike F. gestures for the men to stay where they are and radios the nearby Wellton Station to tell them he has “five bodies on Vidrios Drag.” Bodies, Urrea says, are how Border Patrol agents often refer to living people. Among the other cruel nicknames for illegal aliens are “wets” and “tonks,” named for the sound of a flashlight smacking a human head.

There are stories all along the border of Border Patrol officers abusing their power—assaulting women they find, shooting coyotes, or smugglers, in the head. There are rumors that Texas Rangers handcuff the “illegals” they find and toss them into irrigation canals to drown. To immigrants, Urrea notes, there is no difference between the Border Patrol, the Rangers, and any other “hunt squad.” There is “ill will on all sides.”

The disoriented men tell Mike F. that there are somewhere between seventeen and seventy men lost in the desert behind them, all dying. Mike F. gives the men water, which they drink and regurgitate. The men continue to guzzle water as Mike F. informs the Wellton Station of their claims, and, on the other end of the radio, “the guys at Wellton [realize] the apocalypse had finally come.”

Southern Arizona, Urrea writes, has been divided into two Border Patrol sections. Fifteen hundred agents patrol the eastern Tuscon sector, and three hundred patrol Yuma. There is a “chaos of stupidity” which rules the border, and jurisdiction between Arizona and California is often blurred. Border security had been ramped up in the late nineties, but smaller, “rougher” places to cross had become “hot spots” in the wake of that reform. Two hundred thousand immigrants passed through just one part of the Tuscon sector each year, and just as many had died in the crossing. The “unofficial policy,” Urrea writes, was to let the dead lie where they had fallen and leave their remains uncollected in order to cut down on paperwork and avoid generating case files for remains that might be a hundred years old.  

Urrea writes that it would be difficult to find a Border Patrol agent in Arizona who had not encountered death. Many agents feel that the worst deaths are the young women and children, but many feel the “deepest rage” when illegals die after having been abandoned by their smugglers.

Urrea describes a day in the life of a Border Patrol officer in Wellton. Many drive between twenty and seventy miles to work; many are ex-military; all of them speak Spanish, and several are Mexican-American. Wellton Station, Urrea writes, is “considered a good place to work,” and notes that “the old boys there are plain-spoken and politically incorrect.” Border Patrol officers know they are disliked, and go to great lengths to avoid getting tangled up in trouble. Human rights groups pay close attention to Border Patrol, as evidenced by the fact that they are “constantly lodging complaints,” so agents take care to “watch [themselves]” around the immigrants they apprehend. Most agents patrol alone, and always bring plenty of water with them on their potentially dangerous routes, for themselves and for anyone they might apprehend. Some agents, for fun, shoot at old army tanks, rattlesnakes, and rabbits. Some even play pranks on the illegals they arrest.

Border agents create “drags” by attaching car tires to the backs of trucks and dragging them through the desert. When these strips of smoothed-over sand are disrupted by foot traffic, the Border Patrol is able to “cut sign”—they can see where an illegal might have tried to jump over the drag or brush their tracks away with a branch. Signcutters—or just “cutters”—know the land by heart, and can read it “like a text.” Along with surreptitiously placed sensors which send messages to base, displaced pebbles, twigs, and dirt (called “hither thither”) help to tell the story of a “walker’s” journey. Cutters can discern what time of night walkers crossed a drag by observing the movement of insects, lizards, and rats (“bug-sign”). Cutters move northward from drag to drag until they find one that is undisturbed. In this way, they can “box walkers in” between drags. The walkers Mike F. encountered had strayed so far from the drags that they were considered “off the map.”

As signcutters worked backwards from the Vidrios Drag, they began to find corpses. Fourteen men had died, and twelve more men were rescued alive. The dead were referred to as the Yuma 14, and as the media got hold of the story, everyone wanted to know what had happened. The tracks, Urrea says, told the story of the men’s journey.

Some Wellton officers resent that the dead are called, to this day, the “Yuma 14.” One officer, Officer Friendly, insists that they should be called the Wellton 14—but because walkers are identified by sector, Wellton’s role in the investigation was erased. The Wellton 26, Friendly concludes, is the proper name for the men who were found.

Urrea describes the “groaning shelves” of the Tuscon consulate, where all the paperwork of the Wellton 26 was processed. There were so many reports that they were difficult to file, especially as the reports came in during the time of year known as “death season.” Not just Mexicans die crossing the border—Chinese and Russian refugees enter the U.S. this way, too, or are otherwise smuggled through Canada. Muslim missionaries in southern Mexico who can “pass” as Mexicans often come over the border, as well, and many Border Patrol officers are suspicious that al Qaeda members—possibly coming from a training ground somewhere in Brazil—are being brought across after paying smugglers off at an astounding price of fifty thousand dollars apiece. 

Urrea recalls sorting through the postmortem packets for each of the Yuma 14. The portraits of their corpses reveal terrifying, withered faces, and Urrea wonders if these portraits are the first photographs the men have ever “posed” for. The victims’ belongings are also enclosed in their packets. Urrea notes that all the bags in which these belongings are kept stink of death, and that the women working at the Consulate light candles to disguise the stench.

Some of the Wellton 26, Urrea writes, were indigenous, making Spanish their second language. Most them came from the tropical Southern Mexico state of Veracruz, and most were farmers and coffee-growers. Some survivors insist to this day that many more men were on their journey than were ever found, and that their remains are still lying in the desert. Urrea writes that “what we take for granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign,” and that these rural Mexicans were thus “aliens before they ever crossed the line.”