The Devil’s Highway: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Urrea reviews video footage of the Wellton 26 survivors at the sheriff’s department. In the videos, the men have just been rescued, and they are still in the hospital, and still deeply disoriented. Officers ask them questions anyway, but they are unable to offer very much helpful information—other than to identify Mendez as their pollero.

Jesús—aka Mendez—had come illegally from Guadalajara to work in a San Antonio brickyard. He hated the backbreaking work, and, in 2000, met Rodrigo Maradona—a fellow brickyard worker who had an interesting side hustle. Jesús’s testimony would later “shift” away from this narrative, though, and towards one in which “Chespiro himself appeared like the devil in the brickyard and whispered temptations” in Jesús’s ear.

Maradona told Jesús that he was making a thousand dollars a week moonlighting as a Coyote, and offered to get Jesús involved in the hustle and living life as a “gangster.” Maradona omitted the fact that the trade in Nogales had been forced west by Migra crackdowns, and that Jesús would be working in a “mean” little town below the Yuma border. Jesús was still enthused, and told Maradona he wanted in.

Jesús liked “bold” music which lamented how land had been “stolen at gunpoint” from Natives. Urrea speculates that Jesús told himself that, as a smuggler, he was “a kind of civil rights activist” and a “liberator of the poor and the downtrodden.” Soon, Jesús had a “macho” hustle, an apartment, a girlfriend, and money to spare. He saw himself reflected in the songs he was listening to on the radio, and loved “living outside the law.” Urrea lists the many forces at work along the border looking to catch illegals, including human rights groups who wander around hoping to “save dying walkers,” as well as prospectors, drug smugglers, journalists, INS agents, park rangers, military police, and splinter groups of “patriot militias.” “With so many hunters trying to catch Jesús,” Urrea writes, “it’s a wonder he managed to get lost.”

In San Luis, on an early run, Maradona and Jesús loaded illegals onto a long-haul bus to Sonoita. From there they walked the thirty miles to Wellton. Maradona showed Jesús how to use the landscape to navigate, and the two-day walk went off without a hitch. Their pollos all made their buses to Phoenix.

The Border Patrol was on the Cercas gang’s tail, and Jesús was caught a couple of times. His name began cropping up in border reports, and he and Maradona were both transferred from San Luis to Sonoita. The boys decided to make the most of it, and though they were concerned about navigating a new desert, El Negro promised that a couple of locals would “show them the ropes,” and convinced them that there was “nothing to worry about.”