Into The Beautiful North Sparknotes

PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BORDERS IN THE NOVEL

Into the beautiful North, by Luis Urea, is a story of a young girl who together with her three best friends went to the United States. The story begins with a group of bandidos (drug dealers and corrupt police) harassing people in a village in Mexico called Tres Comarones. All the men in the village had gone to the United States to look for jobs. The mission of the young girl’s trip was to cross the border and recruit men to save their town, Tres Camarones from the bandidos. Nayeli, the young girl, also wanted to bring her dad home from the United States. Her dad had crossed borders to the United States to look for jobs in order to sustain the family. The author depicts both physical and psychological borders throughout the novel. The border runs down the middle of me,” Luis Urea, the son of a New York socialite and a Mexican cop, once claimed. Some of the borders act as permanent barriers were others were easily crossed. The author repeatedly shows that physical borders can be crossed but the psychological barriers are more difficult to bridge.

The author describes the many tensions that affect people on both sides of the borders. Luis Urea shows the effect of migration on the families left behind and also the reality of immigrants’ life in the

United States. It was very hard to leave their families but the men of Camarones had to go up North since they needed to sustain their families. This was a psychological barrier which the men had to bridge for their families to survive. The economy of Tres Camarones was not good and there were no enough jobs in the village after the hurricane. Therefore, the men had to immigrate to the United States. However, the men expected to find a paradise in the United States. This was not the reality as they found out that United States was not as beautiful as they expected. They all expected to find good job opportunities but that was not the case.

Their first attempt to cross the physical Mexican-United States border was not successful. The four friends traveled north by bus to Tijuana and encountered scenes of severe poverty on their journey. When they arrived in Tijuana, a poor local couple offered them shelter in their home located in an abandoned dump. They then meet a man named Atomiko who helped them to make arrangements on how to illegally cross the border into the United States. The friends crossed the border with the assistance of a coyote, but they were caught and deported by the border police.

They were then helped by a friend they met in Mexico to cross the border through a tunnel which led them to the United States. The tunnel was dug by the drug dealers and was used to illegally export drugs to the United States. A van then picked them and dropped them off at a park so that they won’t not look suspicious. Although Nayeli was only 19 years old, she took a risk and succeeded in her mission to travel to North America. The author also shows the reason why some Mexicans took matters into their own hands and crossed borders since their police were involved in drug dealing.

When Nayeli and her friends arrived at the United States, there was a psychological barrier since they belonged to a different country and culture. For example, Tacho was interrogated by an American cop, verbally abused and was beaten up. The author describes the plight of the immigrants. Through the book, Luis wished to dispel "whatever idiotic, monolithic picture we have of anybody else," he says. "They are multifaceted just like we are, on either side." He was comparing the life on the both sides of the fence. For example, Tacho, the nearly unsinkable sole male traveler, who wished to leave behind the doldrums of small-town life and the homophobic slurs associated with it had a language-based misunderstanding with a hysterical border control. However, the resulting scuffle was balanced later by the kindness of a burned-out border control officer who was astonished by the kids' story and journey. The startling interaction between Nayeli, Tacho, and some documented Mexican-Americans contrasted with many random acts of sweetness from strangers.

In the last section of the novel, the greater focus is upon Tacho and Nayeli's long trip east to Kankakee.

Kankakee was a small town outside of Chicago from which Nayeli's father had last sent a postcard. They departed as the rest of the group organized a group of homesick Mexican men who responded to their call for warriors. Tacho and Nayeli's journey across the west was one of nonstop marvels and increasing disillusionment. Their perceptions of the United States was dissolved into frequent bafflement with the strange and ridiculous realities. The division between the two worlds contracted and expanded over and over as they witnessed America and interacted with

others.

When she reached Kankakee, Nayeli discovered that her father had started a new family with a woman in America. Nayeli’s father and his new wife had a baby together. Nayeli left a postcard he sent her under his windshield and left without speaking to him. This was a psychological barrier as Nayeli was hurt to see that her father had forgotten them and had started another family. Nayeli returned to San Diego where her friends from Tres Camarones have succeeded in recruiting several Mexican men who wished to return to their village. In the end, Nayeli led the recruits across the border back into Tres Camarones in order to save the village.