Luis Alberto Urrea
Author of The Hummingbird's Daughter
About the Author
Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of many books of nonfiction and poetry. He has won the Christopher Award, the Western States Book Award, and most recently, the American Book Award.
Image credit: luisurrea.com
Series
Works by Luis Alberto Urrea
Associated Works
My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop (2012) — Contributor — 622 copies, 16 reviews
Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure (2000) — Contributor — 247 copies, 8 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection (2003) — Contributor — 240 copies, 2 reviews
Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (Voice of Witness) (2008) — Foreword — 145 copies, 3 reviews
By Hook or By Crook and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year (2010) — Contributor — 87 copies
Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (2010) — Contributor — 76 copies, 15 reviews
Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (2020) — Contributor — 69 copies, 7 reviews
The Highway Kind: Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads (2016) — Contributor — 58 copies, 3 reviews
Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry (1994) — Contributor — 55 copies
The Late Great Mexican Border: Reports from a Disappearing Line (1996) — Contributor — 26 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1955-08-20
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of California, San Diego
University of Colorado - Occupations
- author
professor - Awards and honors
- Western States Book Award (Poetry ∙ 1996)
Latino Literature Hall of Fame (2000)
Lannan Literary Award (Nonfiction ∙ 2004)
Pulitzer Prize Finalist (2005)
Kiriyama Prize (2006)
American Book Award (1999) - Agent
- Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
Michael Cendejas (Lynn Pleshette Agency ∙ Lynn Pleshette Agency)
Trinity Ray (American Program Bureau ∙ American Program Bureau)
Julie Barer (Barer Literary ∙ LLC) - Short biography
- Luis Alberto Urrea (born August 20, 1955 in Tijuana, Mexico) is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.
Luis Urrea is the son of Alberto Urrea Murray, of Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico and Phyllis Dashiell, born in Staten Island, New York. He was born on August 20, 1955 in Tijuana, Mexico, and listed as an American born abroad. Both his parents worked in San Diego. In 1958 the family moved to Logan Heights in South San Diego, because he had tuberculosis and they felt he would recover in the US. The family moved again in 1965 to Clairemont, a newer subdivision in the city of San Diego. His mother encouraged him to write and encouraged him to attend college and to apply for grants that would help pay for his college education. He attended the University of California, San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in writing in 1977. Urrea completed his graduate studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His father died by murder on a trip to his home village in 1977, seeking money there to spend on his son's college education. This motivated Urrea to write an essay that was published in 1980, as way of processing his grief.
After serving as a relief worker in Tijuana, he worked as a teachers aid in the Chicano Studies department in San Diego's Mesa College in 1978. He also worked as a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for several publications. In June 1982 Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing and fiction workshops at Harvard University. He has also taught at Massachusetts Bay Community College, and the University of Colorado, and he was the writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Urrea married in 1987, and later divorced in 1993. In 1994, Urrea's first novel, In Search of Snow, was published. His mother died in 1990, bringing Urrea back to California to settle her affairs, and parts of Across the Wire were published in the San Diego Reader.
Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, Illinois, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In two heavily researched historical novels, The Hummingbird's Daughter and Queen of America, Urrea tells the story of his father's aunt, Teresita Urrea, who was known as "The Saint of Cabora" and "The Mexican Joan of Arc." - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Tijuana, Mexico
- Places of residence
- Tijuana, Mexico
San Diego, California, USA
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Lafayette, Louisiana, USA (show all 7)
Naperville, Illinois, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
November 2022: Luis Alberto Urrea in Monthly Author Reads (November 2022)
Reviews
Take the time you were stranded in the airport with no money for twelve hours and add it to the worst hike of your life. Then multiply your pain, despair, and rage by a hundred and add a better than fifty percent chance of dying, and you have some idea of the ordeal twenty-six men from Mexico endured in May 2001 when a smuggler got them lost in the pitiless desert south of I-8 in Arizona. This is a story of a struggle for survival in the desert and of geopolitical forces acting on individual show more lives. I could not put this book down except to sleep when my eyelids refused to stay up.
As I read I empathized easily with the group of border crossers. I liked the perspective in this paragraph, on the immigrants' expectations:
It wasn't until I read these some of these reviews that I realized how controversial it is to humanize so-called illegals.
The book isn't perfect--the language tries too hard in places, and there are gaps* in the reporting of the aftermath--but it's a gripping read that still has important things to say, thirteen years after it was first published and sixteen after the terrible events that inspired it.
*The gaps are understandable. The fact that the author presents some information on the prosecution of Mendez, the coyote, but nothing at all on the higher-ups in the smuggling enterprise says a lot. show less
As I read I empathized easily with the group of border crossers. I liked the perspective in this paragraph, on the immigrants' expectations:
How bad can it be? A day of thirst, some physical struggle--they've lived like that all their lives. The place may be alien to them, but the situation feels like home. After all, they tell themselves, America's a country with a state called Nuevo México. Other states are called Red, Snowy, Mountain, and Flowery; several of them were going to Flowery, and some of the others were going to Northern Caroline to see about making cigarettes. The state of Nuevo México even has a capital city called Holy Faith.
It wasn't until I read these some of these reviews that I realized how controversial it is to humanize so-called illegals.
The book isn't perfect--the language tries too hard in places, and there are gaps* in the reporting of the aftermath--but it's a gripping read that still has important things to say, thirteen years after it was first published and sixteen after the terrible events that inspired it.
*The gaps are understandable. The fact that the author presents some information on the prosecution of Mendez, the coyote, but nothing at all on the higher-ups in the smuggling enterprise says a lot. show less
What a wonderful use of language to express emotions and setting this author has. Sympathetic characters all, trying but failing to push back against cultural boundaries. Loved the first story, Mountains without numbers. There is something so melancholy and realistic about this one. Scenes like this are probably happening in dying towns all over America, people stuck in their lives remembering when their lives seemed much fuller.
Loved to Mr Mendoza, with his use of humor and magical realism, show more once again what is, is no more.
The sous chefs, I adored, so cliched and amusing. Done so well.
Water Museum, an apocalyptic of a world running out of water. Almost seems not to fit, but it does because once again something that is gone is mourned. What is not remembered proves frightening.
Such a wonderful collection.
ARC from publisher. show less
Loved to Mr Mendoza, with his use of humor and magical realism, show more once again what is, is no more.
The sous chefs, I adored, so cliched and amusing. Done so well.
Water Museum, an apocalyptic of a world running out of water. Almost seems not to fit, but it does because once again something that is gone is mourned. What is not remembered proves frightening.
Such a wonderful collection.
ARC from publisher. show less
4.25 stars. this is a pretty incredible piece of reporting and missive of compassion. yes, even compassion for the border patrol officers. the way he handles this story and the reason behind the tragedy is exceptional. he tells the story of border crossings in a more general way, but also using this awful tragedy as an impetus to both tell personal stories of those who cross, but also to give an overview of what that crossing is like, how much it costs (physically, emotionally, financially, show more psychologically), who is involved on all sides of the story (the person crossing, the person taking them, the person trying to ensure they can't do it). it truly shows the humanity in a way i haven't seen before. and his writing is amazing. (wow, that section on the stages of hyperthermia, just wow.)
i'm impressed by this in how he handled all of it and expanded my mind so much as i was reading. show less
i'm impressed by this in how he handled all of it and expanded my mind so much as i was reading. show less
For all the big events that define Mexico’s remarkable history (e.g., the rise of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, the Spanish conquest, the Mexican-American war, the Tlatelolco Massacre), it is sometimes the little ones that are the most interesting to consider. In the late 19th century, a few decades before the popular revolution that would reform the country’s political system, a young girl is born out of wedlock in the distant state of Sinaloa. Impoverished and of mixed heritage, show more Teresa Urrea had little going for her and seemed to be destined for an anonymous life of servitude and misery, especially after her teenage mother abandons her into the care of mean-spirited aunt, who treats her like one of the household livestock.
Despite it all, Teresa proves to be a strong, smart, and courageous person who is noticed by both Huila, an indigenous medicine woman, and Don Tomas, the wealthy Mexican landowner who turns out to be her father. Under their tutelage, Teresa learns to be a talented midwife and healer for the People who inhabit the environs of her father’s Sonoran ranch. When a violent event leads to her apparent death, Teresa stuns everyone by returning to life, but transformed with miraculous, new-found powers. She soon develops a large following among the dispossessed and forgotten citizens of the region, who consider her to be a messenger of God and take to calling her ‘Santa Teresita’. This status as a holy hero of the People threatens the existing power structure (i.e., the Church, the dictator Porfirio Diaz), who quickly plot Teresita’s demise.
The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells Teresita’s true-life story, from her humble birth to her rise to common sainthood to her eventual exile from her homeland. Author Luis Alberto Urrea, a distant relative of the real Santa Teresita, spent years of meticulous research constructing the record of his great-aunt’s history and that attention to detail shows up on every page of the novel. Indeed, Urrea has managed the improbable: he has blown life into a small, but significant, event that would otherwise be lost to the ages and given the reader a moving and compelling fictional experience. He writes with compassion, humor, and insight that combines the picaresque style of Larry McMurtry’s The Lonesome Dove with the familial and political narratives of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, with the additional bonus of being a true tale. This is historical fiction at its finest and it is a book that I can recommend without hesitation. show less
Despite it all, Teresa proves to be a strong, smart, and courageous person who is noticed by both Huila, an indigenous medicine woman, and Don Tomas, the wealthy Mexican landowner who turns out to be her father. Under their tutelage, Teresa learns to be a talented midwife and healer for the People who inhabit the environs of her father’s Sonoran ranch. When a violent event leads to her apparent death, Teresa stuns everyone by returning to life, but transformed with miraculous, new-found powers. She soon develops a large following among the dispossessed and forgotten citizens of the region, who consider her to be a messenger of God and take to calling her ‘Santa Teresita’. This status as a holy hero of the People threatens the existing power structure (i.e., the Church, the dictator Porfirio Diaz), who quickly plot Teresita’s demise.
The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells Teresita’s true-life story, from her humble birth to her rise to common sainthood to her eventual exile from her homeland. Author Luis Alberto Urrea, a distant relative of the real Santa Teresita, spent years of meticulous research constructing the record of his great-aunt’s history and that attention to detail shows up on every page of the novel. Indeed, Urrea has managed the improbable: he has blown life into a small, but significant, event that would otherwise be lost to the ages and given the reader a moving and compelling fictional experience. He writes with compassion, humor, and insight that combines the picaresque style of Larry McMurtry’s The Lonesome Dove with the familial and political narratives of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, with the additional bonus of being a true tale. This is historical fiction at its finest and it is a book that I can recommend without hesitation. show less
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- 25
- Also by
- 24
- Members
- 6,945
- Popularity
- #3,520
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 320
- ISBNs
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