Urrea at Home Among Western Authors

By David Frey, 6-27-09

Author Luis Alberto Urrea doesn’t usually make the list of Western writers. Lately he’s been living in Chicago, after all. But after a teaching stint at the University of Colorado in the 1990s, he says, he still has his stuff in a Boulder storage unit, and he’s afraid to move it, lest it giving up on his dream of living in the mountains.

“As long as my junk is on the Front Range, somehow I’ll find a way back there,” he told the crowd at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Summer Words literary seminar.

Urrea tends to be considered a border writer, maybe a Latino author. His works often straddle the U.S.-Mexico border. But those lonesome deserts are the West. His epic novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter is often compared to the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende, Urrea says, but in his mind, he was ripping off Larry McMurtry’s cowboy opera Lonesome Dove.

His nonfiction work The Devil’s Highway, for which he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, “is a cowboy story,” he says. “It’s a story about cowboys and Indians.” The Border Patrol is a modern-day cavalry. The immigrants are Indians. Often, the chases even rage on Indian reservations.

His new novel Into the Beautiful North is even a riff on the classic Western movie The Magnificent Seven, and it traipses across a good deal of the West.

“I do not go home at night and dream of the Border Patrol,” he says. “I think think about aspens and critters.”

The dream of the West was not so different in Mexico, he said, but there it was the dream of the wide open spaces of the north. The word for border in Spanish is “frontera,” he said. The frontier.

Growing up in San Diego, authors like Edward Abbey inspired him. Like those writers of the West, Urrea says, he sees the land as “an active, vibrant, breathing character.”

“Richard Brautigan wrote that mountain rain comes down with love in its pocket,” he told the crowd. As gray skies turned rainy overhead, aspen leaves shuttered and thundered rumbled over the mountains, it was easy to see what he meant.