During a short trip across the border while writing Deep South, acclaimed travel writer Paul Theroux met and heard unforgettable stories from several migrants. Following the experience, he vowed to return. Now he is back. This time, despite the warnings, he drives deeper into Mexico “to destroy the stereotypes” and to see its people as they really are.
Theroux first takes us along the border, as he weaves back and forth between the United States and Mexico. He shares disturbing statistics and details from his conversations with locals about horrific acts of the “unspoken” cartels. He visits a shelter, where he finds deportees who are “soft-spoken, humbled, half starved, and hopeless” but refuse to let the fence define them.
Driving farther south into the interior of Mexico, Theroux finds “no roadblocks, no bandits, only sunlight and mesquite and mariposas, the blue-gray silhouette of the Sierra Madre in the distance.” In the mostly new city of Monterrey, among the steel mills and the campus of the technical university, Theroux strikes up a conversation with a group of bikers, who are also software engineers. Through the steep brown hills of the Chihuahuan Desert, he finds “no traffic going south, but a succession of convoys of eighteen-wheelers” heading north on Route 57, known as the NAFTA Highway. Along the way, he also finds colonial cities “brutally martyred in the cause of modernization” and residents desperately trying to hold on to their culture. In Mexico City, Theroux teaches a writing workshop, explores Mexican literature, and laments that magic realism is a popular genre here because it “disguises reality” and allows the reader to escape what life is really like.
During his travels across the country, Theroux has firsthand encounters with corruption by police and local officials, but he also makes many new friends “along the plain of snakes.”
An enlightening journey across a country that defies stereotyping.
About the Author
Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including Deep South, Figures in a Landscape, The Lower River, The Mosquito Coast, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and Cape Cod.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt