The crossing and clashing of U.S., Mexican cultures

FICTION

Agood storyteller crosses borders with ease -- even if it's the line between Mexico and the United States that divides and binds us. In his new novel "Into the Beautiful North," Luis Alberto Urrea captures the affections and conflicts of his Mexican-American heritage. He has produced a powerful narrative and a vivid picture of life in both countries.

Born in the border city of Tijuana, Urrea moved with his family to San Diego as a child, carrying with him a sense of cultures that cross, collide and sometimes marry (his maternal grandmother was a Woodward from Richmond). This marriage of cultures is part of the appeal of "Into the Beautiful North."

It's a fast-moving and often funny tale about Nayeli, a young Mexican woman who crosses the border with her friends not to seek work but to bring back a few good men. Her town in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa has lost most of its adult males to jobs in the United States. The melancholy of separated families covers the town like a shroud.

The loss is felt in other ways as drug traffickers move into the vacuum left behind by the men who've moved on. What to do? Inspiration comes from a dilapidated print of "The Magnificent Seven" that Nayeli watches in the town movie hall. It's a 1960 Western in which bandit-ridden Mexican villagers go to El Norte, as the United States is called, to seek help from Yul Brynner and his ragged crew. Nayeli has found her role model, and a quest is born -- not to mention, for the reader, an entertaining road novel. Her friends come along for the ride. It's a tale of innocents abroad, assuming you count Vampi, the village Goth princess, and Tacho, a gay man with machismo, as innocents -- and they are in the world to which we're heading.

Taking a bus north to Tijuana, Nayeli and crew get their first taste of danger and culture shock. The city has its own lingo and street-tough ways that make it seem foreign even to many Mexicans. "So this is the border," Tacho says. "I don't get it."

Friends and allies come, literally, from trash as Nayeli and her friends take shelter in the city's vast garbage dump. The story takes its most fantastic turn as the protagonists find hospitality (and a hero, sort of) among the trash pickers. But for Urrea, who lived and worked for years with Tijuana's poor, this surreal world is as real as the poverty he knows intimately. Even people living on a mountain of garbage, he shows, can show grace and grit. Sure, it's dirty and dangerous, but as one character says, look on the bright side: "From up there, you can see the United States."

As Nayeli and her friends travel on, Urrea trades Mexico's small-village intimacy for the exhilarating open spaces of America. Along the way, he helps us see beyond the stereotypes. Many Mexicans don't really want to leave their homes to seek opportunities here but are driven by desperation, Urrea argues. Mexican women aren't necessarily submissive, even in a society that values machismo; Nayeli is a fighter, and her aunt, the mayor of their town, is a political innovator.

Urrea also suggests that while we tend to focus on the impact of immigration on the United States, few people in this country understand the impact that the exodus of so many people has had in Mexico, where separations have torn the social fabric in countless communities.

Stereotypes also fall about the United States, where Nayeli and her friends meet bigotry and generosity. In Urrea's view, most U.S. Border Patrol agents, instruments of a cold and unyielding bureaucracy to some, are a decent bunch of guys who keep a sense of humor in doing a thankless task. You can learn a lot about the forces of money, drugs and fear driving the immigration issue from this book. But Urrea keeps the focus, above all, on people.

Forget the issues, if you like, and enjoy "Into the Beautiful North" simply as a well-crafted novel. Urrea isn't really interested in persuading the reader to take sides. With a poet's grace and a storyteller's drive, Urrea tells us about the many ways one man can love two countries.

Contact Clarke Crutchfield at (804) 649-6455 or .