Last week I posted my review of Craig McDonald's EL GAVILAN. I have a guest post as a special holiday treat from Craig today. I know I really enjoyed this piece as it's especially relevant to me where I live. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Happy Holidays!
The Devil's Highway to the Buckeye State
My new novel,
El Gavilan, examines
the effects of illegal immigration and a single murder on one Ohio town.
Many of those undocumented workers came to the Buckeye State via a
torturous path dubbed the Devil's Highway.
The Devil's Highway technically runs between northern Mexico, across the
Sonoran Desert wastelands of blasted-out ironwood and saguaro, and on up
into Arizona. It's considered the deadliest stretch of ground to cover
for those who would flee Mexico to America, yet thousands try every year
and many don't make it to the other side.
El Gavilan opens with a quote of unknown provenance: "Never attach more feeling to a thing than God does."
The poet Ofelia Zepeda said of the region through which the Devil's Highway
runs, "You need a new kind of prayers to negotiate with this land."
I'd argue the Devil's Highway knows no true end. The ones who do reach the
American portion of the borderlands don't always opt to live out their
days in Arizona, California or Texas. They head in deeper, trekking
further north to make their meager living at myriad Mexican food
restaurants . . . by mowing lawns or picking fruit for half-minimum
wages in Georgia or Michigan and all points in-between.
Like the Oakies chased from their homes by the Dust Bowl tragedy nearly a
century before -- the destitute immortalized in John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath -- men and women fleeing Mexico for El Norte found
their path hastened by the American highway system. Route 66, "The
Mother Road," may not be doing so dandy these days, but the U.S.
interstate system is cranking right along.
A recent immigration study puts a fine point on it: "Ohio has the
nation's 10th largest highway network and is within a single-day drive
for half of North America's population. Ohio contains 70 percent of the
country's manufacturing capacity. The state links the Northeast and
Midwest; thus, much business and cargo traffic passes through its
borders on this well-developed highway network. Ohio's economy is
primarily based in Agriculture and Industry."
In other words, and in any language: Ohio=Prosperity. (Or it used to; these days, Ohio is just about the hardest hit state economically outside of Michigan.)
But circa 2005, or thereabouts, before the housing bubble burst, my corner
of Ohio was literally swamped with undocumented workers. Like drunken
sailors, developers were plowing under acres of corn and soybeans and
platting out vistas of cookie-cutter subdivisions constructed largely
through the sweat and effort of illegal immigrants. The bastards trucked
them in by the dozens in old Ford Aerostars to frame-out houses for
chump change wages. (An exposed wall of one side of my garage—a house
built circa 2000—is covered with Spanish writings scrawled in
Sharpie).
The influx of undocumented,
unassimilated workers changed the face of central Ohio, nearly
overnight. As a journalist, I saw results some while before the average
Ohio citizen maybe took notice. When the citizenry of central Ohio
realized what was happening, handwringing ensued. Racial tensions rose,
then spiked.
The impact on infrastructure and public services here in Ohio was profound.
The immigration report put it this way, by the numbers: "Seventy-two
percent of the total population growth between 2000 and 2006 in Ohio was
directly attributed to the immigrant population . . . The annual fiscal
cost to Ohio taxpayers for emergency medical care, education and
incarceration is currently $224 million and is estimated to rise to $372
million per year in 2010 and $627 million per year in 2020."
When the Great Recession hit, a number of undocumented workers ventured back
across that dusty line, suddenly finding prospects more enticing in the
Mexico they'd earlier fled than in the financially decimated wastelands
of post-recession America.
My aim in El Gavilan was
to take one family's immigrant experience, trace it up into Ohio, and
then watch the ripples flare out when a member of that family falls prey
to a seemingly racially motivated spasm of fatal violence.
But before the murder that fires the story of El Gavilan occurs, there is another scene of violence and loss, very near the start of the book:
El Gavilan opens
with a tragic fire that claims more victims than necessary when first
responders and Latino firebombing victims aren't speaking the same
language. Failure to communicate literally kills. The scene is based on
all too real firebombing in Ohio that occurred in a mostly Latino,
non-English-speaking apartment enclave in what had formerly been a
white, working class neighborhood.
The victims were part of a family who'd chased prosperity from central
Mexico all the way to Ohio's Capital City -- braving and surviving the
passage through the desert wastelands only to be taken down deeper along
The Devil's Highway, taken down in Ohio, "the heart of it all," as our
state's publicists like to phrase it.
© 2011 Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan
Author Bio
Craig McDonald, author of El Gavilan,
is an Edgar®-nominee and an award-winning journalist, editor and
fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines,
anthologies and several online crime fiction sites. His debut novel, Head Games, was published by Bleak House Books in September 2007. Head Games was selected as a 2008 Edgar®-nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author. Head Games was also a finalist for the Anthony, Gumshoe and Crimespree Magazineawards for best first novel. His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors which appeared in 2006, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, a second collection of interviews published by Bleak House Books in 2009. McDonald was also a contributor to the NYT's nonfiction bestseller, Secrets of the Code.
He recently won national awards for his profiles of crime novelists
James Crumley, Daniel Woodrell, James Sallis and Elmore Leonard. His new
novel, El Gavilan, is available from Tyrus Books.
For more information please visit http://www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter
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