Praised by many as a significant “voice of the border,” writer Luis Alberto Urrea has explained the reason for his persistent focus on life at the edge: “The border runs down the middle of me,” he says. “I have a barbed-wire fence neatly bisecting my heart.” He was born in Tijuana in 1955 and raised in San Diego, torn between the conflicting cultures of his father’s Mexico and his mother’s United States. Urrea earned writing degrees from the University of California at San Diego (BA, 1977) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (MA, 1994), and for a decade pursued a dual career as a relief worker and investigative journalist in the slums surrounding Tijuana. He wrote four books exposing the horrors of extreme poverty that he encountered, all of them acclaimed for their combination of stark realism and lyrical voice: Across the Wire (1993); By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996); Nobody’s Son (1998), winner of the American Book Award; and The Devil’s Highway (2004), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A popular fiction writer as well, Urrea has published multiple collections of short stories and poems and many novels, including the Pulitzer-nominated The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005) and, most recently, Queen of America (2011). Currently a professor at the University of Illinois‒Chicago, he has taught expository and creative writing at several universities and contributes a monthly column to Orion magazine.
In this 2012 audio essay for Orion, Urrea examines the ways reading altered his perceptions of the downtrodden neighborhood of his youth. His focus is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain’s idyllic 1876 novel about a mischievous boy growing up along the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Petersburg, Missouri. Becky Thatcher, whom Urrea mentions toward the end of the piece, is Tom Sawyer’s friend and longtime crush.
Download the transcript.
Listen to “Life on the Mississippi,” and respond to the following questions.