On May 14, 2003, nineteen people died while en route from a small Mexico/Texas border town to Houston, Texas, in what at the time was called the "greatest illegal immigrant tragedy in modern history." An estimated 73-84+ undocumented immigrants - most of them Mexican citizens, with a small minority hailing from other Latin American countries, such as Honduras - were packed into the back of a hermetically-sealed, locked-from-the-outside tractor trailer, without water, air conditioning or fresh air. Over the course of four hours, 17 people asphyxiated to death before the truck's driver finally pulled over to rest. When Tyrone Williams - who was contracted by coyotes to transport the immigrants to Houston, on what should have been the final leg of their trip - opened the trailer and discovered the dead, he fled from the scene. Most (if not all) of the immigrants were apprehended by local police and ICE, and were given temporary work visas so that they could remain in the U.S. and testify against their human traffickers. Two more immigrants died at the hospital, bringing the death toll to 19. The coyotes were charged with a variety of offenses, including murder.



Jorge Ramos, a native of Mexico and anchor for Noticiero Univision, weaves survivor, witness and official accounts of the tragedy together in DYING TO CROSS. The bulk of the story is told from the perspective of the half dozen or so survivors who were willing to speak to Ramos. The account of the perilous four hours spent in the trailer, for example, are primarily survivor accounts, with liberal use of direct quotations interspersed with medical explanations of what the victims' bodies and minds would have been going through, given the circumstances. Ramos also offers brief biographies of a few of the immigrants, as well as accounts of how they came to buy a spot on that fateful trailer. The book concludes with a description of the aftermath, however, as there was no real trial to speak of, this section of the report is almost anti-climactic. Ramos attempts to use this tragedy to illustrate failings in U.S. immigration policy as well as U.S./Mexican political relations, but his analysis seems a little scattered and superficial. (It's not that I necessarily disagree with his conclusions, rather, I don't feel as though he made a very comprehensive argument in favor of a more open and humane border policy.)



Given the book's subject matter, DYING TO CROSS is surprisingly boring, and I can't really pinpoint why. It seems as though the survivors' accounts of the trailer ride should have been more nail-bitingly suspenseful - but, not so much. There was a lot of talk about prayer, Satan worship, God-begging, etc., which got really tiresome, really fast. Case in point: all of the women passengers survived; one of the surviving men attributed this to the fact that the women started praying to God immediately, while the men "wasted" their energy on "frivolous" activities - like banging on and rocking the trailer, in a failed attempt to get the driver's attention. Um, yeah. Trying to stop the truck - what *were* they thinking!? Plus, the women's 100% survival rate couldn't possibly be due to the fact that women's bodies tend to retain more water than men's, for a variety of reasons including menstruation and oral contraception, right? (Ramos loses major cred for failing to counter these superstitious claims with scientific explanations.) Naturally, the survivors all thanked God for sparing them, proclaiming it a "miracle," etc., which begs the question of why God favored them and not the nineteen who died - one of which included a 5-year-old boy. But hey, maybe that's just the cantankerous ole atheist in me.