Luis Alberto Urrea, whose name has the lofty ring of an artist you think you know but you can’t place, and who has quietly built the kind of reputation that validates such feelings, is about to become, finally, arguably, after decades of books and trails of critical hosannas, a major figure. As in, a household name. That arguable part? It comes not so much from those already reading Urrea and more from the man himself: He looked into the bookshelves of his Naperville home and said that his new book, “The House of Broken Angels,” a multi-generational saga about a Mexican-American family quite similar to his own, was his go-for-broke attempt to stand alongside his heroes. He nodded at Twain, he mumbled Steinbeck (whose work his veers closer to), then said that he would likely fail, but he wanted, for a moment, “to just exist in that same arena.”
Which sounded disingenuous, considering the collection of literary awards, the stately pyramids and globes and large heavy medals, residing behind glass in the next room.
Still, if any author looks due for next level-dom, it’s Urrea.
When John Alba Cutler started teaching Latino literature at Northwestern University 10 years ago, his classes were full of students who hadn’t actually read much Latino literature. “I would maybe get a student who read ‘House on Mango Street’ and that was it for familiarity with Latino literature,” he said. “Now the majority have read Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Luis Urrea. They’ve laid groundwork. And Urrea, he’s crossing over with a wider appeal, outside Latino classrooms. There’s a proliferation of fiction about the U.S.-Mexico border, but he sits at the top.”
The problem is, where do you begin with this guy?
With the sprawling historical fiction? Or the journalism, poetry, memoirs? The ballet? Worse, in telling Urrea’s own story, where do you start? And stop? A day earlier, in a studio at WBEZ-FM on Navy Pier, Urrea was taping the NPR show “Fresh Air,” and host Terry Gross, whose cool, soft voice came through headphones from her studio in Philadelphia, sounded exasperated with their limited time. They had talked for 90 minutes (which would be edited later into an hourlong interview) and the moment they were finished, off the air, Gross blurted: “Oh, your life has just been too eventful!”
Urrea, 62, rocked backward in his chair, delighted.
Indeed, the story of Luis Alberto Urrea itself has a whiff of folk tale. He is a lot like his best-sellers, an epic mix of ancient and contemporary, a touch of magic realism here, a chunk of painful reality there, yet approachable, warm, not prone to literary pretense. (The Chinese-American family novels of Amy Tan, a friend of Urrea, is a fair approximation.) His Mexico, similarly, is not the monolith of political rhetoric, but generationally and ethnically diverse. Urrea himself has blond hair, blue eyes — his grandmother was named Guadalupe Murray. He speaks in conspiratorial tones, as if — despite a story crammed with incident and anecdote — there is always more left unsaid.
With good reason, his first books, which he has called “The Border Trilogy,” were memoirs, stories of his own life growing up on the border. There is too much history here, funny, scary, random: His father, beloved in the Mexican government, had the license plate “MEXICO 2.” As a child, Urrea had teeth drilled without Novocaine as a dentist swore in his face. He once took science fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin to see “Star Wars.” He had an aunt who became the national bowling champion of Mexico. He cleaned toilets for a living, made doughnuts, was a cartoonist for a nudie rag.
And on and on.
A friend of Urrea calls him “The Stuffer.” Even success arrives in a pig pile. Walking to their car after the “Fresh Air” interview, his wife, Cindy, an investigative journalist, turned to Urrea: “The thing is, you wait your whole life for the kind of attention you’re getting now, for everything to happen, and everything happens at once, in a mad rush.” Urrea sighed. Once in the car, he perked up: Their oldest child was leaving for college soon!
Cindy: “Nothing ties us to Naperville!”
Urrea: “We’re free!”
Then, like that final scene in “The Graduate,” after Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross escape a wedding only to find themselves in the back of a silent bus, exhilaration faded back to reality. The car went quiet. Interview requests were piling up, a long book tour was starting. It had been the second time in as many days Urrea taped an NPR show. TNT was developing a TV series based on his 2009 novel “Into the Beautiful North,” about a Mexican woman, inspired by “The Magnificent Seven,” who sets out to protect her village from banditos; the book itself, selected in 2016 by the National Endowment for the Arts as its nationwide Big Read, already kept Urrea on an never-ending tour. And now the publisher Little, Brown was throwing its marketing weight behind “House of Broken Angels.”
“It’s dizzying,” Urrea said.
Even as they arrived earlier that day at WBEZ, the room already buzzed. Cindy, who acts as a kind of de facto manager/researcher for her husband, was steamed at the New York Times: Urrea had written an op-ed about the wall that President Donald Trump wants to build, now weeks later, “now, suddenly, as he’s about to go on Terry Gross, they need changes, and links to sources, right now, right now, and sorry but no — not right now.”
Urrea just smiled.
He soaked in the hubbub. He settled into a chair at the soundboard, and when Gross came on, he brightened. He thanked her (off the air) for buying him a beach house — a “Fresh Air” interview is a publishing Holy Grail. Gross said if she asked anything too personal, let her know; but it’s all in his books already. She said if he made a mistake, start again; yet he’s so used to telling his story, he never fumbled.
Midway through the chat, Gross herself stopped: There was a wind tunnel in her studio, and a door swung open — hold a second. Headphones went silent as she shut the door.
Urrea leaned back.
“The ghosts of my ancestors,” he said.
* * *
Urrea is the literary conscience of the border.
“The Devil’s Highway,” his disturbing, humane 2004 nonfiction account of the struggle for survival among 26 men crossing the border in 2001, a Pulitzer finalist (and his biggest seller so far), is headed into a 23rd printing. But most of his novels — and much of his work — addresses the relationship of working-class Mexicans with borders, real and metaphorical. “Luis has a million impulses co-existing, a constant awareness of possibilities, which is part of having lived on the border,” said Steven Schick, music director of the La Jolla Symphony in San Diego; last month, they collaborated on a reworking of Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale,” using Urea’s writing to tell “a story of people who cross the border daily.” Even “House of Broken Angels” — set in San Diego, and not a border tale — is full of characters marked by it, including a U.S. veteran without citizenship.
It was only “eerie coincidence” the book was released the day after the Trump administration had planned to rescind the DACA program for young undocumented immigrants, said Ben George, senior editor at Little, Brown. “But I do think because of this administration, there is an urgency, so it’s become the right moment for the book.”
Urrea was born in Tijuana in 1955, into severe poverty.
His father, a personal assistant to the vice president of Mexico, and a military man, had fallen from favor; Urrea says his father refused to assassinate someone. His mother, a Staten Island native, served in the Red Cross during World War II; she took part in the Battle of the Bulge and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe injuries. Her family owned an antique store in Manhattan; Albert Einstein was a regular. The Mexican side was stranger: Urrea had a spiritualist grandfather, and a great aunt, Teresita Urrea, “the Saint of Cabora,” “the Mexican Joan of Arc,” celebrated for her supposedly healing powers; she became the basis for his 2005 best-seller “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.”
His parents met and married in San Francisco. “My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda,” Urrea said, “but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English, she didn’t know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.” They moved to San Diego in the late ’50s, to treat Urrea for tuberculous. The family stayed and lived in the barrios, where he grew up “the mixed-race kid, the oddball,” according to the best-selling author Jamie Ford, a close friend.
Urrea describes a neighborhood where pets were casually preyed on by street gangs, and where he once took a brass-knuckled kidney punch walking home from school. His parents were unhappy, financially strapped. Luis withdrew into monster movies, ghost stories and books. “I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted — they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.”
He was an arty kid, headed for the University of California at San Diego, but things got worse: Before he graduated, his father drove to Mexico to withdraw $1,000 saved in a bank there (like many immigrants, he regularly sent money to his extended family). The money was a graduation present. But on the trip home, he was killed by Mexican police. Urrea — who says details remain “nebulous” — was sent to retrieve the body. The police, expecting a bribe, forced him to buy back the corpse. He did, using the $1,000 his father was carrying.
Later, police sent the family a bill for damages caused to the road when they ran his father off the road.
The unexpected did not cease: He went to college as a theater major and found himself working as an extra for months on “The Stunt Man” with Peter O’Toole, now a cult classic; director Richard Rush had heard of his father’s death and kept the young Urrea on the payroll. Later, his writing had attracted the attention of Le Guin, then a visiting scholar at UCSD (she died in January at 88); she included his work in an anthology, and his career began.
But first he worked as a missionary in the dumps of Tijuana, where entire neighborhoods resided. “I was looking for something to alleviate the darkness in my family,” Urrea said. He met a pastor who brought him to an orphanage near his grandmother’s home in Tijuana. “The pastor would seduce kids with doughnuts and chocolate milk then hit them with Bible study, and I was having a personal religious resurgence. There’s this little girl on the floor at my side who looked related to me. I mean, could be — my family are copulating fools. This girl, she’s tough. Her name is America. Seriously. She begs me not to leave, said nobody spoke Tijuana Spanish in the orphanage like I did. I told her I’d return, and the pastor’s waiting for me outside: ‘Don’t lie to my kids. That girl will wait years for you, wondering the whole time what she did wrong when you never show.’ ” So, he ended up staying in the dumps, on and off, from the late 1970s until 1987, translating, washing feet, combating lice.
And from there? He taught at Harvard.
Urrea says he contacted Lowry Pei, a former UCSD professor who was working at the Ivy League school, and begged for a janitorial job, anything to get out of the Tijuana dumps. Pei told him to send published work, so Urrea told friends that even janitors at Harvard need to be published. He says he misunderstood. Pei, now an English professor at Simmons College, says “Some of Luis’ stories are hard to believe, and I don’t remember if that story is true, but he did call, he was out of prospects — ‘You got to help, I got to get out.’ ”
* * *
Today, decades later, Urrea lives in Naperville, on a middle-class street, minivan in the driveway, a house full of folk art; a statue of Bigfoot, purchased from SkyMall, occupies the living room. He has three kids (his son, Eric, is the drummer in the indie rock band Marina City) and pets. He has a spotty scruff, and a barrel chest. He wears “Hamilton” sweatshirts.
He is an image of suburban contentment.
Then he plops on a couch to listen to himself on “Fresh Air.” Gross describes him as a “distinguished” professor, and Urrea, in his living room, pumps a fist. He says, proudly, “That’s actually part of my title — ‘distinguished.’ ”
He sounds genuinely surprised, still.
He moved to Chicago in the late ’90s, to teach creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now he’s tenured. He counts literary stars (Neil Gaiman) and rock bands (Wilco, Los Lobos) as friends. Author Dave Eggers says Urrea gained a reputation as “one of our most important American public intellectuals,” the kind of all-purpose man-of-letters “who can bring both humor and gravitas to any proceeding, who can explain the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. in all its tragedy and beauty.”
But Urrea himself sounds restless.
He says “House of Broken Angels” — largely inspired by an older brother who, before he died of cancer, had a vast, melancholy birthday party in his final days — will be his “farewell to the border.” His next book is inspired by his mother’s Red Cross service. “Luis chafes at being placed in an ethnic box,” Cindy said. “He wants to pull people up, but everyone wants him to be their Mexican, explain Mexico, the border, and Luis — Luis just wants to be Mark Twain.”
For the moment, UIC remains a perfect fit.
He’s a draw to the English department, but “still feels like an outsider,” said David Schaafsma, an English professor at the school, “always the kid from the dirt road with no plumbing.” Indeed, the school, said department chair Lisa Freeman, is mostly populated by Pell Grant recipients, many are first-generation college students, like Urrea. Besides, Cindy tells him he has a Jesus complex. He doesn’t disagree. In a writing class the other day, a student said she didn’t want to get too revealing.
He said she was not obligated to.
But then, lightly pressing, he said writing can exorcise the past. He told her he named his personal demon Mr. Smith, after a vile manager he once had. “Mr. Smith stands too close and cusses you out. He’s the voice saying you’re talentless, your voice is shrill, you’re poor and screwed up.”
The student’s eyes moistened in relief.
Sometimes, he told her, your writing will be a moral act. “Remember that. People will take umbrage with that, but so? Writing is outreach, and writing — it can be your ministry.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
