The River Flows North (review)

As a Latina writer and professor living in Los Angeles, Graciela Limón focuses her The River Flows North on the experience of a group of Mexican and Central American people trying to cross the border to the United States. Inspired by the work of photojournalist John Annerino and his book Dead in Their Tracks (1999), Limón narrates the stories behind the faces of the numerous illegal migrants who attempt to make it to the American side of the border, often at the expense of their own lives. As Alberto Urrea did in his The Devil’s Highway (2004), Limón tells a story sadly common in the United States: a group of migrants pay a coyote (a human smuggler) to cross the Sonoran Desert between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, but most of them die along the way. In Limón’s novel, only two people of the original group, Menda and Borrego, make it to the United States.

Limón’s focus on each of these crossings, building an individual narration within the telling of the group’s voyage, makes The River Flows North an engaging novel. The author alternates between the main diegetic narration which leads the protagonists from La Joyita to La Ocho, as the migrants call Interstate 8, and the many flashbacks narrating individual stories, dedicating one chapter to each character. Thus, the novel can be read as a politically engaged work, in which the author tries to restore dignity and identity to the vast number of faceless migrants who are daily in the news. In this recovery of personal histories that compel people to move, we find, for example, Menda, a Salvadorian woman who survives her family’s massacre during the 1980s civil war and her husband’s abuses; Julio Escalante and his grandson Manuelito, who engage in this grueling trip to recover Manuelito’s mother’s corpse; or Doña Encarnación Padilla, of the Lacandona people, the old abuelita who goes to the Sonoran Desert to die in the land of her ancestors.

The River Flows North reflects new and compelling issues in the study of western American literature. The complexity of the region calls for a multicultural approach to its problems and themes, and Limón’s novel touches on a phenomenon that appears to involve only the margins of the United States, but in reality has a huge impact on the whole economy and racial and ethnic patterns of the western regions. The narration takes place in a sort of no-man’s land, the Sonoran Desert, with flashbacks to Central American settings, and only the very last chapter deals with the United States, when Menda and Borrego understand they are on the other side of the border because their rescuers speak “inglés” (174). However, the border is revealed as an osmotic place, a piece of land on which different stories interweave with no clear distinction between good and evil, reality and dream, the United States and Central America.