The River Flows North

"It’s one of the few fictionalised works that really tries to trace the difficulties of crossing this particular region along the border. The border is made up a lot of different biotopes as well as urban and rural areas. What’s been happening since the middle of the 1990s is that because certain parts of the border became reinforced, especially urban corridors in California and in Texas, most of the undocumented migration now occurs in the desert areas of Arizona, because that part of the border is more difficult to enforce. The idea was that migrants would not possibly want to come to the desert, so it would act as a deterrent to migration. But that’s not what happened. People continued migrating and now they come through the desert. It gets very, very cold in the desert at night, and it gets very, very hot in the day, especially in the summer. In the summer temperatures can go up to 120 degrees and higher. The desert has vegetation – cacti, trees, scrubs – but generally the desert looks very uniform. When you trek through the desert you don’t necessarily know where you are. That’s what happens to many undocumented immigrants. They are left behind by the coyotes , or they can’t keep up with them. They get lost. In this novel the characters are trying to get to a popular highway in Arizona from which they think they’ll be picked up to go to other parts of the United States. She humanises the undocumented immigrants. She personalises their individual stories. When we read or talk about undocumented immigrants, we tend to talk about them as a faceless mass of people. We talk about their arrival here in the United States and what happens after their arrival. In this novel we don’t see their arrival. I don’t want to talk about the ending, but it’s ambiguous. We don’t know if some of these immigrants ever arrive. But we see the sheer difficulty of their border-crossing journey – trying to get where they’re going after their coyote dies, trying to survive the heat, trying to survive not having enough water, trying to survive a storm. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Graciela Limón also shows us a wide variety of characters who all have different motivations for making this trip. One of her characters is a Salvadoran immigrant who is the victim of domestic abuse. Some people come because they want to be with their family. There’s an old man and his young grandson, who come because they want to find the remains of his mother who died in the desert trying to make this trip. There are a number of other writers who deal with the border as well, and one of the most famous ones is Cormac McCarthy. Others include Susan Straight and T Coraghessan Boyle. Thinking and writing about the border has been something that a variety of people have been engaged in, especially people who live in that area. Right now it’s become exceedingly clear that what happens at the border is not only a regional issue but has national and global repercussions."