Border Legacies: 20 Years of The Devil’s Highway and Latino Literary Tradition

Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University celebrates maestro and award-winning Mexican American writer Luis Alberto Urrea, whose powerful work has shaped American, Latino and Indigenous literary traditions. It has been twenty years since Urrea challenged the nation to acknowledge the United States’ role in creating the unforgiving corridor of desert known as The Devil’s Highway. His book of the same name, The Devil’s Highway, won a Lanan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. Twenty years later, the United States still maintains brutal border and migration practices. Javier Zamora will join Urrea in this reverent celebration of a new canon of “American” and “Latino” story, reading from Solito, his award-winning memoir of migration and arrival, which traces Zamora’s journey from El Salvador to the United States. After Urrea and Zamora read from their work, ASU Professor and CIB Director Natalie Diaz will join them in a conversation about the power and impact of borderlands stories and imaginations, exploring how they help us grapple with beauty, love and wonder from within a cruel and unreasonable nation of borders.