En Pocas Palabras. Javier J. Jaspe

Washington D.C.

“The 2023 National Book Festival was held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Several programs were livestreamed, and video of all talks can be viewed online shortly after the Festival’s conclusion. Mark your calendars now for next year’s National Book Festival, scheduled for Aug. 24, 2024.”

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/

Una lista completa de los autores que participaron en el Festival Nacional del Libro de 2023 (FNL2023) puede verse EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/

La serie que continuamos hoy se refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2023. Su objeto no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores, para lo cual nos servirá de guía el propio Website del FNL2023 en inglés: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/

Los textos de Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso, con indicación de su fuente. Esta undécima entrega se refiere al autor Luis Alberto Urrea. Veamos:

Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea is the bestselling author of many works of nonfiction, poetry and fiction, including “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” and “The House of Broken Angels,” a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction “The Devil’s Highway,” now in its 34th paperback printing. Urrea is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors. He lives outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago. Urrea’s newest release, "Good Night, Irene: A Novel External," will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.

EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/item/n92083371/luis-alberto-urrea/

Conferencia/Entrevista en el FNL 2023

2023 National Book Festival: The Family You Need, the Family You Create with Esmeralda Santiago & Luis Alberto Urrea

Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-10986/

PBS Books 2023 National Book Festival Author Talk: Luis Alberto Urrea

Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-11035/

Website del autor:

https://luisurrea.com/

Biografía en el Website del autor:

Hailed by NPR as a “literary badass” and a “master storyteller with a rock and roll heart,” Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.

A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and a Guggenheim fellow, Urrea is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.”

Urrea newest book, Good Night, Irene, takes as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross service. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).

The House of Broken Angels (2018) is a novel of an American family, which happens to be from Mexico. Angel de la Cruz knows this is his last birthday and he wants to gather his progeny for a final fiesta. A national bestseller, The House of Broken Angels was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book.

In 2017, Urrea won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award and his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN-Faulkner Award and was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews, among others. Into the Beautiful North, his 2009 a novel, is a Big Read selection by the National Endowment of the Arts and has been chosen by more than 50 different cities and colleges as a community read. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, his 2005 historical novel, tells the story of Urrea’s great-aunt Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil’s Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications.

In all, more than 100 cities and colleges have chosen Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway or The Hummingbird’s Daughter (or another Urrea book) for a community read.

Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, “Amapola” in Phoenix Noir and featured in The Water Museum). Into the Beautiful North earned a citation of excellent from the American Library Association Rainbow’s Project. Urrea’s first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos. His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in the 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea’s other titles include By the Lake of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering Time.

Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard. He also taught at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.

Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Libros en el Website del autor:

Fiction:

https://luisurrea.com/books/goodnight-irene/

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-house-of-broken-angels/

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-water-museum/

https://luisurrea.com/books/into-the-beautiful-north/

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-hummingbirds-daughter/

https://luisurrea.com/books/queen-of-america/

https://luisurrea.com/books/in-search-of-snow/

https://luisurrea.com/books/six-kinds-of-sky/

https://luisurrea.com/books/mr-mendozas-paintbrush/

Non-Fiction:

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-devils-highway/

https://luisurrea.com/books/nobodys-son-notes-from-an-american-life/

https://luisurrea.com/books/across-the-wire-life-and-hard-times-on-the-mexican-border/

https://luisurrea.com/books/by-the-lake-of-sleeping-children/

https://luisurrea.com/books/wandering-time-western-notebooks/

Poetry:

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-tijuana-book-of-the-dead/

https://luisurrea.com/books/ghost-sickness-a-book-of-poems/

https://luisurrea.com/books/the-fever-of-being/

Other:

https://luisurrea.com/books/

News/Events en el Website del autor:

https://luisurrea.com/news-events/

Conferencias/Entrevistas

Bringing the Joy: A Profile of Luis Alberto Urrea

By Bethanne Patrick

From the May/June 2023 issue of
Poets & Writers Magazine

EN: https://www.pw.org/content/bringing_the_joy_a_profile_of_luis_alberto_urrea

The novel Good Night, Irene tells the story of two American women who joined the American Red Cross Clubmobile service during World War II, forged a friendship while seeing and experiencing untold horrors at the front line, and ended up in hugely different circumstances. It’s the kind of novel you’d expect to see from, say, Kristin Hannah—and, in fact, Hannah has blurbed Good Night, Irene, calling it “powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal.”….

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But the spring 2023 lead title from Little, Brown, forthcoming at the end of May, wasn’t written by Hannah or another woman. This epic journey told from a female perspective comes to us from none other than Luis Alberto Urrea, the acclaimed author of books about Mexico and Mexican American families, including nonfiction reportage like The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (Little, Brown, 2004) and Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (Anchor, 1993); novels such as Into the Beautiful North (Little, Brown, 2009) and The House of Broken Angels (Little, Brown, 2018); the graphic novel Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush (Cinco Puntos, 2010); and poetry collections (his fourth, Piedra, will be released by FlowerSong Press later this year).

Before it’s even possible to ask Urrea about the female perspective from which he has written his new novel, he is explaining the shift in a thoughtful torrent of words. (Urrea confesses he honed his skills as a wordsmith and “big talker” in places like his San Diego high school, where he always had a coterie of girl friends with him. “And I mean girl friends,” he emphasizes. “I was the one they came to for little drawings of sheep on their upper arms, or when we needed to talk our way into a club.”) The point, as he continues, is that Luis Urrea has always been, if not a ladies’ man, a man surrounded by ladies—women, and by “women” he means a family consisting of his grandmother, aunts, and cousins he spent time with whenever his parents sent him to stay with his father’s relatives in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

Still, not a single major character in Good Night, Irene is a Mexican woman. There is one Mexican American character, a soldier named Garcia, whose role is minor yet meaningful. Much of the action takes place in the European theater or on Staten Island, New York, where his mother grew up in the 1930s. How did Urrea, who has been named to the Latin American Literary Hall of Fame, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, who spent years working with and advocating for immigrants at the Mexican border, wind up writing about white women in World War II?

The answer has to do with two specific white women, one of whom is in the new novel, the other living by the author’s side: His mother, Phyllis McLaughlin Urrea, who died in 1990 at the age of seventy-four, and his wife of twenty-seven years, Cinderella “Cindy” Urrea….

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Luis Urrea’s first marriage “imploded” (“the less said about that one, the better,” he says) in the early 1990s. So he decided to leave Boulder, Colorado, where the two had been living, and head to Tucson, Arizona, to research a book that involved the Yaqui, an Indigenous people of Arizona. “I liked the writing community there, too, which included Charles Bowden and Leslie Marmon Silko,” he says. “But one of the first things I got asked to do was to contribute to a serial novel in the Tucson Citizen that they were calling ‘Heat Stroke.’”

The reporter assigning “Heat Stroke” installments was Cindy Somers. “We met for lunch, and she said, ‘No offense, but I don’t know your work.’” Luis tilts his head toward his spouse with long-held affection. Cindy laughs, the sunlight streaming through the windows of their hotel room in Key West, Florida, where Luis is teaching at this year’s Key West Literary Seminars.

Their initial lunch lasted three hours; they now have a grandson (the child of Cindy’s daughter from a previous marriage, Megan) and a daughter of their own, Chayo, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It was the second marriage for both of us, and we’re not messing around, you know?” says Cindy. “For Luis to have the kind of career he wanted to have, I needed to quit the newspaper business and help him do the research that became The Devil’s Highway.”

When Cindy Urrea says “help him do the research,” she is not implying she was some sort of invisible amanuensis, akin to the character of Joan Castleman in Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel, The Wife, or someone who types feverishly as the Great Man spews deathless prose. Cindy is a strong, opinionated, and accomplished individual who has chosen to collaborate with her spouse on his artistic journey—and, without her, Luis is quick to agree, his new novel wouldn’t exist.

“He’d never told anybody the stories about his mom,” says Cindy. “When he decided to tell me about her service in the Second World War, I said what is wrong with you? Yes, the border, that’s important. But here you have a story about a woman during wartime, right at the front, and you have primary sources, her letters and keepsakes. It’s a personal story that no one else has.”

Phyllis Urrea did have a story: In 1943 she left her family home on Staten Island and joined the Clubmobile service, a little-known arm of the Red Cross that sought to provide a small (and, in many cases, final) taste of home to soldiers at the battle lines in France, Belgium, and Germany. Clubmobiles were glorified food trucks outfitted with coffee urns, doughnut fryers, and usually a trio of young women in canvas uniforms whose mission was to share chat and cheer with “the boys.”

Phyllis and her comrades wanted to go as close to the action as possible, although not all the “donut dollies,” as they were sometimes known, much to their chagrin, shared that ambition. Regardless of their taste for adventure, the women of the Clubmobiles were supposed to be “healthy, physically hardy, sociable, and attractive.” They wore lipstick and nail polish, played swing records and danced with soldiers, and they carried chewing gum, cigarettes, magazines, and sometimes mail on their trucks.

Here was a little-known and even somewhat misunderstood slice of history that Luis Urrea’s mother took part in and that Luis and Cindy Urrea knew had been important to her. And they both knew for certain Luis could bring it to life through fiction. There was just one problem: The mother Luis had known was a nervous, affected woman desperately miserable in her marriage and disappointed by life. How could he write about her as a brave, formidable presence who had moments of deep happiness and connection?

“The skeleton of my mother’s sorrow informs this book,” says Urrea, speaking this time from his Chicago-area home, Cindy again by his side and a vital part of the conversation.

Urrea was born in 1955 to Phyllis Irene McLaughlin Urrea and Alberto Urrea, who met in San Francisco and threw in their lot with each other without perhaps thinking things through as well as they should have. Phyllis came from a sophisticated New York City background filled with culture and nightlife; she always called her only son “darling boy” and encouraged him to be as white and Western and culturally knowledgeable as possible. Alberto, often described by Luis as an Errol Flynn look-alike, had different plans for his son, wanting Luis to become as macho and Mexican as possible…..

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Both served in the Second World War, and “both of them suffered from PTSD, I now realize,” says Urrea. “At night, when I was growing up, my father would be in one bedroom with nightmares, grinding his teeth until they all cracked, and my mother would be in another bedroom shouting and kicking and crying through nightmares. They both suffered, but they couldn’t communicate about that suffering.”

He says that as he got older, his mother “got crazier and crazier, and more and more unhappy. There would be moments of the old Phyllis, when she might gesture with her hand bearing a large topaz ring and holding a cigarette, say something witty and effervescent, flick a bit of tobacco off her lip....”

Alberto Urrea kept their small family “very isolated,” Luis says. “My mother never drove again after her Clubmobile experiences, and it was easy to cut her off from family and friends. He had the car and he’d leave, and he was cheating on her and she found out. They were locked in this hopeless battle. I found out later that her family had tried to reach out to her for decades, but she remained kind of opaque, behind a wall of fog.”

Luis Urrea knew his mother had a story, but he didn’t know how to tell it. Then Cindy Urrea read a book that was revelatory, both for the research side and the writing side. “The coolest thing about this book for me is that it came from the women telling their own stories,” says Cindy. “We couldn’t find any historical record. We couldn’t find any facts and figures. We couldn’t find anything like that.” But then she read Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and published by Random House in 2017.

“That’s the one that changed everything,” she says. “Some of the stories about the Soviet women who enlisted were so much like the American women. The Soviet woman who brought a suitcase full of her favorite chocolates and the American woman who brought all of her evening dresses because she thought that’s what ‘entertaining the troops’ meant.”

But there’s a much more serious and dark side that Cindy realized after listening to Luis’s stories about his mother’s sadness. “PTSD takes different forms for women, and it’s taken us too long to acknowledge that. When Luis told me about his mom’s service I said, You know what? Phyllis gets a free pass for everything. Every day your job, as a Clubmobile operator, is to listen to these boys. They’re boys! These women saw planes go up and some didn’t come back.”

She continues: “Just knowing that you are the last bit of home that Bobby Jones from Oklahoma is ever going to see. So you better not ever be in a bad mood. You always smile and serve a cup of hot coffee and a hug. Because you’re saying goodbye to him. You’re standing in for the world.”

“I couldn’t believe there was no historical record about these women,” says Cindy. “I kept coming up against brick walls. But the Alexievich book opened something up for me that I was able to share with Luis. When these women came back, no one was interested in their stories—but they weren’t interested in telling them, either. They didn’t consider themselves stars of the show.”

For some time, Urrea worked on a book that he says was about a “gray, sad ghost of a woman” that didn’t work, although his longtime agent, Julie Barer, refrained from telling him so. “She would just nod and encourage me to keep going, even though we both knew I wasn’t getting it.”

It wasn’t until 2014 that Luis and Cindy Urrea found Phyllis’s Clubmobile partner and closest friend, “Darling Jill,” that the story morphed significantly. Jill Pitts Knappenberger happened to live near the Urreas, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. When they got in touch with her and requested a visit, she welcomed them into her life and her home and loads of memorabilia: clothing and knickknacks covered in patriotic symbols, all of Phyllis’s letters to her, her own diaries—and a tiny gold Clubmobile charm on a gold chain “that she never took off,” says Cindy. “They weren’t considered veterans. Jill never got over not being able to take advantage of the GI Bill.”

Darling Jill was able to show Luis Urrea the side of his mother, Phyllis, that he had never known, and that enabled him to write the kind of book he had never written, a women’s war story that takes no liberties with the history of the central conflict and manages to illustrate how differently war affects women, both during and after.

Luis Alberto Urrea has had a particular and important job in the literary world, that of telling the stories of the border. He has been telling stories of Mexican Americans since his first book, Across the Wire, was published in 1993, and he is still telling those stories. One of his best-known quotes is “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up,” and he clearly felt, for decades, that he had a responsibility to the people among whom he had lived and worked to share and shape their stories with compassion. “It’s a political act to go into Mexico and face poverty and disease and danger and heartbreak, to give the kind of love God would call you to give to people who on the surface might be unlovable and certainly are forgotten,” Urrea says.

He continues: “Well, isn’t that the same story in war? Those grunts. Those GIs. The soldier who confesses he kissed another male soldier on the mouth. The guy who was so scared that he actually defecated in his pants and is too ashamed to come near my character Irene. She’s the last person on earth who should be washing shit out of a guy’s pants, but she does it because it’s an act of love. It’s an act of service. She’s there to do her job, and that becomes a beautiful political act. It wasn’t any kind of genius on my part. It just kept happening, organically, that people who were in dire straits reached out to each other.”

Urrea says he had a lot of stories he needed to finish before he could write about his mother, and not simply because he was wary of “splashback” about writing from the perspective of a white woman. “My mother’s story was always percolating in the background,” he says. “But finally I understood that borders separate us all constantly. Feelings keep us separated. When I realized that my poor mom was trapped behind a wall she didn’t know how to breach, I finally saw her.”

The Urreas took several research trips, including two to Europe, to fully understand the overall experience of the Clubmobile women and the specific wartime life of Phyllis Urrea. “For me, concrete things speak loudly,” says Urrea, who is sitting near a sculpture of a coyote on a motorcycle that represents one of the book’s soldier characters. “When we went to the airfield where Phyllis and Jill’s plane took off for France, the manager took me on a walk down the runway. He bent down and pulled a piece of tarmac from the grass and said, ‘This is the original. You better take it because your mom might have stood on it.’” His eyes fill with tears. “You know, when your parents are dead and gone so long, to be suddenly given a little piece of trash that is an unexpected connection to one of them…. It’s on my desk now. I see it every day.”

He looks up and to the right. “It is witness. But this is the key to everything I do. It’s the literature of witness. That’s what I care about. And isn’t it stunning to see that you don’t understand enough about your own parent to witness their story?” Urrea says he could write about his father because he was killed, because when he went to bury his father he had all his Mexican family with him to recall his father to life. “But my mom’s story was kind of sealed. It was a secret, put away.”

Darling Jill had part of Phyllis’s story but not all of it. “I realized every one of those women’s stories is a secret,” says Urrea. “Even Jill, who was open and sunny and sharing with us, she had an absolute border you could not cross.”

Cindy adds, “My favorite part of watching this book come about was watching Luis on the couch in Miss Jill’s apartment as she introduced him to his own mom. I would just sit there trying not to cry, because she knew Phyllis when she was at her very, very best. I don’t know that Luis ever met that Phyllis. To watch him meet that Phyllis through Jill was the magic about this novel for me.”

Luis nods and says, “Mom brought the joy sometimes, but I only saw it in little eruptions, like when we saw the movie Patton eight times. She’d met General Patton ‘over there’ and revered him, and when she watched that film she was back to her wartime best self.”

The “magic key” that Jill Knappenberger gave to Luis was showing him that his mom brought the joy around the clock. “Jill made it very clear that my mother was delight on two legs, something I could not fathom. I thought my mother was a very strange character. When Jill said, ‘Your mother brought the joy,’ that was one of those moments that changes your life forever.”

In 2022, while Little, Brown editor Ben George was working on editing the manuscript of Good Night, Irene, Luis and Cindy Urrea were looking forward to their last research trip for the book, which would take them from England to Germany. In February they learned that Luis had cancer that would need to be aggressively treated by surgery.

Luis’s hand strays to his throat. “You have cancer surgery and you leave for a long trip,” he says. “I have pictures of myself with these gauze pads hidden under my shirt collar because I was bleeding. I don’t know how to put this, but it was my first brush with the shadow of mortality.”

Now fully recovered, he nevertheless thinks experiencing the scare was a good thing for this book. “All of my dearest and closest best friends had died,” he says. “I was ready to understand that we are given a limited moment here on earth.” Being forced to consider the brevity of human life also brought him closer to his book’s inspiration. “When we went to England and saw the village where my mother and Jill and the other Clubmobile women were billeted, at one point I saw that I was staring up at a window my mother had once looked out of, in a picture we have. In another picture she’s looking at a graveyard we walked in. Things that we saw while thousands of miles from home made me feel closer to my mother than I ever had.”

Luis Alberto Urrea laughs. “Once we’d walked the runway where their plane took off for France, once we’d visited Buchenwald, I thought, my mom was a badass. I tell my audiences over and over, you should rethink the old gray women in your life that you take for granted. My mom’s own madness wrecked her. But you try and you try to give something back, and in this book, I finally gave my mom a happy ending.”

Bethanne Patrick is a critic, the host of the Missing Pages podcast, and the author of the memoir Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, published by Counterpoint Press in May. She teaches creative writing at American University and serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundatio

Correction: An earlier version of this profile stated that Luis Alberto Urrea was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Hummingbird’s Daughter; in fact, Urrea was a finalist for the prize in nonfiction for The Devil’s Highway: A True Story. The text has been updated to reflect this correction.Top of Form

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Luis Alberto Urrea’s life seems like wild folk tale

From Tijuana to Naperville, with stop at Harvard

By Christopher Borrelli

Chicago Tribune

EN: https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=7c4fb165-58b7-44d0-bb30-17c06529ccb6

Luis Alberto Urrea, whose name has the lofty ring of an artist you think you know but you can’t place, and who has quietly built the kind of reputation that validates such feelings, is about to become, finally, arguably, after decades of books and trails of critical hosannas, a major figure. As in, a household name. That arguable part? It comes not so much from those already reading Urrea and more from the man himself: He looked into the bookshelves of his Naperville home and said that his new book, “The House of Broken Angels,” a multigenerational saga about a Mexican-American family quite similar to his own, was his go-for-broke attempt to stand alongside his heroes. He nodded at Twain, he mumbled Steinbeck (whose work his veers closer to), then said that he would likely fail, but he wanted, for a moment, “to just exist in that same arena.”

Which sounded disingenuous, considering the collection of literary awards and large heavy medals residing behind glass in the next room.

Still, if any author looks due for next level-dom, it’s Urrea.

When John Alba Cutler started teaching Latino literature at Northwestern University 10 years ago, his classes were full of students who hadn’t actually read much Latino literature. “I would maybe get a student who read ‘House on Mango Street’ and that was it for familiarity with Latino literature,” he said. “Now the majority have read Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Luis Urrea. They’ve laid groundwork. And Urrea, he’s crossing over with a wider appeal, outside Latino classrooms. There’s a proliferation of fiction about the U.S.-Mexico border, but he sits at the top.”

The problem is, where do you begin with this guy?

With the sprawling historical fiction? Or the journalism, poetry, memoirs? The ballet? Worse, in telling Urrea’s own story, where do you start? And stop? A day earlier, in a studio at WBEZ-FM on Navy Pier, Urrea was taping the NPR show “Fresh Air,” and host Terry Gross, whose cool, soft voice came through headphones from her studio in Philadelphia, sounded exasperated with their limited time. They had talked for 90 minutes (which would be edited later into an hourlong interview) and the moment they were finished, off the air, Gross blurted: “Oh, your life has just been too eventful!”

Urrea, 62, rocked backward in his chair, delighted.

Indeed, the story of Luis Alberto Urrea itself has a whiff of folk tale. He is a lot like his best-sellers, an epic mix of ancient and contemporary, a touch of magic realism here, a chunk of painful reality there, yet approachable, warm, not prone to literary pretense. (The Chinese-American family novels of Amy Tan, a friend of Urrea, is a fair approximation.) His Mexico, similarly, is not the monolith of political rhetoric, but generationally and ethnically diverse. Urrea himself has blond hair, blue eyes — his grandmother was named Guadalupe Murray. He speaks in conspiratorial tones, as if — despite a story crammed with incident and anecdote — there is always more left unsaid.

With good reason, his first books, which he has called “The Border Trilogy,” were memoirs, stories of his own life growing up on the border. There is too much history here, funny, scary, random: His father, beloved in the Mexican government, had the license plate “MEXICO 2.” As a child, Urrea had teeth drilled without Novocaine as a dentist swore in his face. He once took science fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin to see “Star Wars.” He had an aunt who became the national bowling champion of Mexico. He cleaned toilets for a living, made doughnuts, was a cartoonist for a nudie rag.

And on and on.

A friend of Urrea calls him “The Stuffer.” Even success arrives in a pig pile. Walking to their car after the “Fresh Air” interview, his wife, Cindy, an investigative journalist, turned to Urrea: “The thing is, you wait your whole life for the kind of attention you’re getting now, for everything to happen, and everything happens at once, in a mad rush.” Urrea sighed. Once in the car, he perked up: Their oldest child was leaving for college soon!

Cindy: “Nothing ties us to Naperville!”

Urrea: “We’re free!”

Then, like that final scene in “The Graduate,” after Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross escape a wedding only to find themselves in the back of a silent bus, exhilaration faded back to reality. The car went quiet. Interview requests were piling up, a long book tour was starting. It had been the second time in as many days Urrea taped an NPR show. TNT was developing a TV series based on his 2009 novel “Into the Beautiful North,” about a Mexican woman, inspired by “The Magnificent Seven,” who sets out to protect her village from banditos; the book itself, selected in 2016 by the National Endowment for the Arts as its nationwide Big Read, already kept Urrea on an never-ending tour. And now the publisher Little, Brown was throwing its marketing weight behind “House of Broken Angels.”

“It’s dizzying,” Urrea said.

Even as they arrived earlier that day at WBEZ, the room already buzzed. Cindy, who acts as a kind of de facto manager/researcher for her husband, was steamed at The New York Times: Urrea had written an op-ed about the wall that President Donald Trump wants to build, now weeks later, “now, suddenly, as he’s about to go on Terry Gross, they need changes, and links to sources, right now, right now, and sorry but no — not right now.”

Urrea just smiled.

He soaked in the hubbub. He settled into a chair at the soundboard, and when Gross came on, he brightened. He thanked her (off the air) for buying him a beach house — a “Fresh Air” interview is a publishing holy grail. Gross said if she asked anything too personal, let her know; but it’s all in his books already. She said if he made a mistake, start again; yet he’s so used to telling his story, he never fumbled.

Midway through the chat, Gross herself stopped: There was a wind tunnel in her studio, and a door swung open — hold a second. Headphones went silent as she shut the door.

Urrea leaned back.

“The ghosts of my ancestors,” he said.

Urrea is the literary conscience of the border.

“The Devil’s Highway,” his disturbing, humane 2004 nonfiction account of the struggle for survival among 26 men crossing the border in 2001, a Pulitzer finalist (and his biggest seller so far), is headed into a 23rd printing. But most of his novels — and much of his work — addresses the relationship of working-class Mexicans with borders, real and metaphorical. “Luis has a million impulses co-existing, a constant awareness of possibilities, which is part of having lived on the border,” said Steven Schick, music director of the La Jolla Symphony in San Diego; last month, they collaborated on a reworking of Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale,” using Urea’s writing to tell “a story of people who cross the border daily.” Even “House of Broken Angels” — set in San Diego, and not a border tale — is full of characters marked by it, including a U.S. veteran without citizenship.

It was only “eerie coincidence” the book was released the day after the Trump administration had planned to rescind the DACA program for young immigrants brought to the country without legal permission, said Ben George, senior editor at Little, Brown. “But I do think because of this administration, there is an urgency, so it’s become the right moment for the book.”

Urrea was born in Tijuana in 1955, into severe poverty.

His father, a personal assistant to the vice president of Mexico, and a military man, had fallen from favor; Urrea says his father refused to assassinate someone. His mother, a Staten Island native, served in the Red Cross during World War II; she took part in the Battle of the Bulge and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe injuries. Her family owned an antique store in Manhattan; Albert Einstein was a regular. The Mexican side was stranger: Urrea had a spiritualist grandfather, and a great aunt, Teresita Urrea, “the Saint of Cabora,” “the Mexican Joan of Arc,” celebrated for her supposedly healing powers; she became the basis for his 2005 best-seller “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.”

His parents met and married in San Francisco. “My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda,” Urrea said, “but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English, she didn’t know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.” They moved to San Diego in the late ’50s, to treat Urrea for tuberculous. The family stayed and lived in the barrios, where he grew up “the mixed-race kid, the oddball,” according to the best-selling author Jamie Ford, a close friend.

Urrea describes a neighborhood where pets were casually preyed on by street gangs, and where he once took a brass-knuckled kidney punch walking home from school. His parents were unhappy, financially strapped. Luis withdrew into monster movies, ghost stories and books. “I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted — they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.”

He was an arty kid, headed for the University of California at San Diego, but things got worse: Before he graduated, his father drove to Mexico to withdraw $1,000 saved in a bank there (like many immigrants, he regularly sent money to his extended family). The money was a graduation present. But on the trip home, he was killed by Mexican police. Urrea — who says details remain “nebulous” — was sent to retrieve the body. The police, expecting a bribe, forced him to buy back the corpse. He did, using the $1,000 his father was carrying.

Later, police sent the family a bill for damages caused to the road when they ran his father off the road.

The unexpected did not cease: He went to college as a theater major and found himself working as an extra for months on “The Stunt Man” with Peter O’Toole, now a cult classic; director Richard Rush had heard of his father’s death and kept the young Urrea on the payroll. Later, his writing had attracted the attention of Le Guin, then a visiting scholar at UCSD (she died in January at 88); she included his work in an anthology, and his career began.

But first he worked as a missionary in the dumps of Tijuana, where entire neighborhoods resided. “I was looking for something to alleviate the darkness in my family,” Urrea said. He met a pastor who brought him to an orphanage near his grandmother’s home in Tijuana. “The pastor would seduce kids with doughnuts and chocolate milk then hit them with Bible study, and I was having a personal religious resurgence. There’s this little girl on the floor at my side who looked related to me. I mean, could be — my family are copulating fools. This girl, she’s tough. Her name is America. Seriously. She begs me not to leave, said nobody spoke Tijuana Spanish in the orphanage like I did. I told her I’d return, and the pastor’s waiting for me outside: ‘Don’t lie to my kids. That girl will wait years for you, wondering the whole time what she did wrong when you never show.’ ” So, he ended up staying in the dumps, on and off, from the late 1970s until 1987, translating, washing feet, combating lice.

And from there? He taught at Harvard.

Urrea says he contacted Lowry Pei, a former UCSD professor who was working at the Ivy League school, and begged for a janitorial job, anything to get out of the Tijuana dumps. Pei told him to send published work, so Urrea told friends that even janitors at Harvard need to be published. He says he misunderstood. Pei, now an English professor at Simmons College, says “Some of Luis’ stories are hard to believe, and I don’t remember if that story is true, but he did call, he was out of prospects — ‘You got to help, I got to get out.’ ”

Today, decades later, Urrea lives in Naperville, on a middle-class street, minivan in the driveway, a house full of folk art; a statue of Bigfoot, purchased from SkyMall, occupies the living room. He has three kids (his son, Eric, is the drummer in the indie rock band Marina City) and pets. He has a spotty scruff, and a barrel chest. He wears “Hamilton” sweatshirts.

He is an image of suburban contentment.

Then he plops on a couch to listen to himself on “Fresh Air.” Gross describes him as a “distinguished” professor, and Urrea, in his living room, pumps a fist. He says, proudly, “That’s actually part of my title — ‘distinguished.’ ”

He sounds genuinely surprised, still.

He moved to Chicago in the late ’90s, to teach creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now he’s tenured. He counts literary stars (Neil Gaiman) and rock bands (Wilco, Los Lobos) as friends. Author Dave Eggers says Urrea gained a reputation as “one of our most important American public intellectuals,” the kind of all-purpose man-of-letters “who can bring both humor and gravitas to any proceeding, who can explain the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. in all its tragedy and beauty.”

But Urrea himself sounds restless.

He says “House of Broken Angels” — largely inspired by an older brother who, before he died of cancer, had a vast, melancholy birthday party in his final days — will be his “farewell to the border.” His next book is inspired by his mother’s Red Cross service. “Luis chafes at being placed in an ethnic box,” Cindy said. “He wants to pull people up, but everyone wants him to be their Mexican, explain Mexico, the border, and Luis — Luis just wants to be Mark Twain.”

For the moment, UIC remains a perfect fit.

He’s a draw to the English department, but “still feels like an outsider,” said David Schaafsma, an English professor at the school, “always the kid from the dirt road with no plumbing.” Indeed, the school, said department chair Lisa Freeman, is mostly populated by Pell Grant recipients, many are first-generation college students, like Urrea. Besides, Cindy tells him he has a Jesus complex. He doesn’t disagree. In a writing class the other day, a student said she didn’t want to get too revealing.

He said she was not obligated to.

But then, lightly pressing, he said writing can exorcise the past. He told her he named his personal demon Mr. Smith, after a vile manager he once had. “Mr. Smith stands too close and cusses you out. He’s the voice saying you’re talentless, your voice is shrill, you’re poor and screwed up.”

The student’s eyes moistened in relief.

Sometimes, he told her, your writing will be a moral act. “Remember that. People will take umbrage with that, but so? Writing is outreach, and writing — it can be your ministry.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com; Twitter @borrelli