Commentary: Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea on the joy behind the ugliness of the 'border planet'
It's funny - and not funny ha-ha - how millions of people, from the White House chief resident on down, have recently and suddenly discovered "the border," the boundary land of Mexico and the United States, when it's been there all along, before countries, before maps, as a singular place with a character of its own. "The border planet" is what Luis Alberto Urrea has called it.
The master of both fiction and nonfiction was born in Tijuana; he's a U.S. citizen by virtue of his New York City mother, and a Mexican courtesy of his Basque Mexican father, whose lineage dates to the 16th century conquest. If the border had its own flag, Urrea would be wearing the T-shirt. The border is the standout character in Urrea's work, from "The Devil's Highway" to his new novel, "The House of Broken Angels." The man who has been spending much of his life making the border make sense to himself now tries to help the rest of us to do the same.
Q: What do people get wrong about what the border actually is?
A: I say this a lot, but the myth that's perpetuated constantly is this seething pit of terror, danger, hatred, invasion, suspicion. But for people like us - my family and everyone I've ever known - it's also an imaginary line
