New West Book Review

Book Details Vivid, Violent Tale of Life on the Arizona-Mexico Border

By Jenny Shank, 12-28-09

Crossers
by Philip Caputo
Knopf, 448 pages, $26.95

Philip Caputo’s sprawling new thriller, Crossers, examines three generations of a family that must dole out rough justice in the territory surrounding their Arizona ranch on the Mexico border, “a pretty place where some ugly things happen.” The book opens in 1903, when thirteen-year-old Ben Erskine’s uncle sends him on horseback to buy a bottle of tequila in Mexico.  The errand turns out to be a fateful one, as Erskine ends up choosing to kill a man who attacked him, the first killing of many as his life unfolds.  Erskine eventually has a family and becomes a policeman, although he follows laws only when they suit his ends, and he remains a mystery to his descendants, whose dramas play out in the more contemporary sections of the book.

In 2003, Ben Erskine’s grandson, Blaine, along with his wife and strong-willed mother, are running the ranch Ben established decades earlier, the San Ignacio.  On the other side of the country, Gil Castle, Ben Erskine’s other grandson, is struggling with grief in the aftermath of his wife’s death in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  Castle is a multimillionaire with a job on Wall Street and a grand house in Connecticut.  Unable to continue his old lifestyle, he quits his job, sells his house, and accepts his family’s offer of sanctuary on the ranch.

Shortly after Castle moves into a cabin on the ranch, he discovers an exhausted Mexican named Miguel in the manzanita.  He learns that Miguel had been forced into a drug smuggling attempt and witnessed the murder of two fellow migrants.  These smugglers are a part of Crossers ‘other main plot thread: a female Mexican drug lord with red hair, nicknamed La Roja, who is engaged in a violent war for drug route control with another kingpin and also seeks to purchase the San Ignacio ranch to further her smuggling operation, and a mysterious double-agent-for-hire named the Professor, who, like Ben Erskine a hundred years before him, plays “outlaw and lawman at the same time.”

Caputo writes with authority about all aspects of his story, including the drug and immigrant smuggling trades, what it was like for a soldier in the Mexican Revolution, how the Mexican-American border was once a fluid boundary, and the details of ranching in contemporary times and a hundred years ago. Crossers provides an accurate portrait of the violence, greed, and desperation that has cropped up around the border for generations.  Caputo knows his stuff, evidenced by the depth of his description in the following long sentence, which reads in part:

“Within sight of the high steel fence dividing Nogales, Sonora, from Nogales, Arizona, its Mexican side decorated with graffiti—’Borders are scars on the face of the earth’—and with white crosses commemorating migrants who now gazed upon the face of the Virgin, some murdered by bandits, most by the desert, roughly a block from the port of entry where cars backed up for half a mile waited to cross into El Norte while day-tripping tourists and documented Mexicans went through pedestrian turnstiles in both directions past Indian women begging with their ragged children, the returning Mexicans lugging plastic bags from Wal-Mart and Safeway and discount stores, the departing tourists bargain-rate treasures from the emporiums on Avenida Obregón—Zapotec rugs, copper chairs, ceramic washbasins, wood carvings, belts, jackets, straw hats, religious icons—in the middle of Calle Juárez near the enterprises that flourished in every border town from Matamoros to Tijuana—cheap hotels, currency exchanges, farmacias mostly patronized by aging gringos seeking half-price medications for their many ailments…”

Some of the villains in Crossers are familiar and some of its plot points slot too neatly into place.  For example, Gil’s family sets him up with a neighbor named Tessa, a single rancher who also happens to be gorgeous ("a moderately tall woman with breasts disproportionately large for the rest of her…It was as if the bosom of a German soprano had been grafted onto the waist and limbs of a ballerina").  Tessa is worried about her daughter, a soldier sent to serve in the Iraq war, and is therefore suffering in connection with 9-11 in such a way that allows she and Gil to feel they share common ground.  Not a bad match for Gil in the only single woman available for miles in any direction.

Despite its few flaws, Crossers succeeds in its effort to provide a nuanced, panoramic portrait of lives lived and lost on the Mexican-American border.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.