N
o knock against serious drama, but there is something about a story that can blend comedic and serious themes just right: combining the two in the right mix can cause both elements to sing in ways they could not otherwise. Charles Dickens at his best (when he’s writing something I would want to read again, e.g., Little Dorrit) exemplifies this, as does one of the more Dickensian modern novels I have read, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North.
How else could you describe a novel that uses the setup of The Magnificent Seven to skewer the current mess of immigration policies in the United States and Mexico? The very idea makes me smile, but the fun and ridiculousness of the premise is what makes the novel’s examination of some very difficult realities possible. And in a world where the United States has spent millions of dollars on border walls that wash away in yearly floods (and Arizona alone spent millions on an ill-advised wall of cargo containers that it is now paying to take down), what’s less realistic, the theater of immigration politics or a group of young people looking for fighters to help protect their small Mexican town from a drug cartel?
This is all anchored by the novel’s main character, Nayeli, whose interest in finding “Siete Magnificos” is secondary to learning what has happened to her father, who went north for work like most of her hometown’s men but hasn’t been heard from in years. She carries a postcard sent by him from the exotic town of Kankakee, Illinois—the message is equal parts humor and sobering reality, with a picture of a “paranoid turkey” staring out from a cornfield and her father’s favorite words of wisdom: that “everything passes.” Does he mean he’s never coming back, or that he’s only there for a time and will return some day?
With her on the journey are her two friends, Yolo and Vampi, also recently graduated from high school, and her boss, Tacho, who has promised the mayor of the town (also Nayeli’s aunt) to look after them on the trip. Between the four, a reader can easily tease out the reasons why any human would choose or be forced to move from one region to another: curiosity for a new place, boredom with the old place, a longing for someone you love or lost, a longing (or need) for somewhere better than your current situation. Yolo is curious about Los Yunaites and keen to find the young missionary man from California that worked in their town for a few years. Vampi is into death metal (“Soy una vampira,” she says by way of introduction) and equally curious about the North. Tacho may or may not be looking to move elsewhere—he’s a gay man living in a small town that doesn’t like change, and the weight this has put on him is clear around the persona he has created as “grumpy but loving older brother figure” to the trio of women.
The trip north… the trip to and over the border and eventually (unsurprisingly) to Kankakee is full of warmth, humor, and terror. I was scared for their lives more than once. I was surprised and warmed by the people that helped them out of tough scrapes. I was angered—as they were—when seemingly supportive people turned on them. Nayeli, a former soccer star and trained in karate, is obliged to kick ass more than once. It’s hard not to cheer as she is forced to beat someone up, but it’s hard not to feel the direness of the situation at the same time. Things could all too easily move from comedy to real-life horror.
While the novel maybe has a bit of nostalgia for the Mexico that has changed—the towns with so many who have moved elsewhere—Urrea also makes sure to poke fun at the inability of Nayeli’s hometown to accept change, among other shortcomings. Rather than valuing Mexico over the United States, or small towns over big cities, this novel celebrates humans being good to one another, wherever they might be at the moment and wherever they might be from. What is mocked and criticized are the humans and systems that keep people from living their lives and being happy.
In the words of a show that also crossed the United States’ border (this time from the north): “Remember I’m pulling for ya—we’re all in this together.” The debacle of humanity’s approach to immigration and refugees is not going to be easy to get through, but the heart of Into the Beautiful North provides a guide for how we can eventually get there.