Illegal resumes the story of Sara and Emiliano Zapata where Disappeared left off. Sara is living at the Fort Stockton Detention Center. A mere three weeks ago she was a reporter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Now she's applying for asylum. Sara's best friend, Linda Fuentes had suddenly disappeared. Sara's investigation uncovered Linda's location and State Police were able to free her along with other women. Linda had sent Sara Leopoldo Hinojosa's cell phone. Hinojosa was responsible for enslaving Linda along with many other women, so his phone likely contains sensitive and important incriminating evidence. Because of this, Hinojosa set out to kill Sara and her family. Her mother fled to the interior of Mexico to live with her sister, while Sara and her brother Emiliano crossed illegally into the United States - with Hinojosa's phone.
In the desert they were attacked by two of Hinojosa's men. One fled while the other was seriously wounded. While Emiliano stayed with the injured man, Sara went to get help. She encountered Sandy Morgan, a park ranger whose father Wes Morgan is an attorney. Under Wes Morgan's guidance, it was decided that Sara would apply for asylum at the Fort Stockton Detention Center while Emiliano with Hinojosa's phone would travel to Chicago to stay with their father.
Emiliano was taken in by rancher Gustave Larsson. He harbours resentment towards his father who abandoned their family and is conflicted about contacting his father, especially since he finds life on the ranch with Gustave peaceful. But Emiliano's father, who is staying in a motel in Sanderson, only thirty miles away, has left three messages for him. Reluctantly, Emiliano connects with his father and arranges for him to come to Larsson's ranch to pick him up. He also contacts Yoya, the person Ernesto told him is able to open the phone. She tells Emiliano she will do some research into his situation and advises him to only use a burner phone to contact him and also to consider going to a metropolitan area for his own safety. This leads Emiliano to contact his father and arrange to travel back to Chicago with him.
Emiliano's father along with help from Gustave Larsson manage to get him through the Border Patrol checkpoint. His father is now remarried to a woman named Nancy who has a six-year-old son named Trevor. He works for Abe Gropper and has changed his name to Roberto (Bob) Gropper. Emiliano decides not to tell his father about Hinojosa's phone.
At Fort Stockton, Sara meets with Sandy Morgan who tells her that her father is appealing the decision to deny her bond. Sara learns that her father is going to pick up Emiliano that morning and she tells Sandy that when her father came to see her, he had told her that his wife and father-in-law were nervous about harbouring an illegal immigrant. Sara later learns that Wes Morgan attempted to see her but was turned away and has gone to El Paso to file a complaint with the commissioner of ICE in charge of detention facilities. Sara also learns that her brother has made it past the Border Patrol and that he likely has the phone.
In Aurora, where Bob and Nancy Gropper live, Emiliano struggles with his feelings of anger, guilt and loss of trust in his father. Through Yoya, Emiliano learns that Hinojosa was killed after he was arrested and that he was part of a Mexican-U.S. trafficking ring. Some of the women are kept in Mexico, while others are taken to the United States. As a result, Yoya believes it is Americans who are after Hinojosa's phone. It is likely the phone contains sensitive information that can identify the Americans. She believes Sara is safe for now at the detention center but advises Emiliano not to call her.
However, at Fort Stockton, Sara is taken to see Assistant Field Office Director Walter Mello who questions her as to how she got into the country and if anyone was with her. Mello's threatening questioning leaves Sara fearful.
The next day Yoya tells Emiliano that Walter Mello requested the incident report on the attack in the desert as well as Lester's confession. Mello will now know that Sara did not cross the border alone. She is also able to learn that someone named Marko Lisica was responsible for the attack on them in the desert and knows that Emiliano has Hinojosa's phone. Lisica owns the Odessa Agricultural Cooperative, but Yoya doesn't believe he's the main player. Instead, someone above Lisica, whom she names as "Big Shot" has more to lose if the contents of the phone are revealed. Their goal now is to determine if the phone's contents can be used by the police.
While canvassing the neighbours for work, Emiliano meets Irene Costelo who hires him to paint her house. Meanwhile in the detention center, Mello reveals to Sara that he knows she crossed the border with her brother and wants to know his location. Determined to protect Emiliano, she tells Mello he returned to Mexico and refuses to answer any more questions without her lawyer. Mello places Sara in isolation.
After several days, Emiliano receives a call from someone named Louie who tells him that Yoya has gone into hiding, escaping just before her home was raided. Louie informs Emiliano that Yoya has learned a few things from an intercepted email between Lisica and Mello. Sara's lawyer, Wes Morgan was killed during an attack that was made to look like a burglary and that his father's business card was found. Lisica has ordered Mello to work on Sara while they deal with the father in Chicago. He also tells Emiliano that Big Shot "coordinates with Mexico for the women, distributes them to ...influential men here in the U.S. He protects these men. That's why they want things done quietly, legally if possible." He advises Emiliano that if he wants to go through with keeping the phone he needs to find someone in law enforcement he can trust.
Mrs. Costelo overhears this conversation and knowing Emiliano is in some kind of trouble tells him to find an old friend of hers, Stanislaw Kaluza, a retired Chicago Police officer who can be found at St. Hyacinth Basilica in Chicago.
After her credible fear interview, Mello again attempts to coerce Sara into revealing Emiliano's whereabouts. She attempts to bluff Mello by telling him that Emiliano returned to Mexico, but Mello reveals that they now know that he is with her father. He tells her the easy way is for Emiliano to give up the phone and that she simply needs to call him. Sara agrees to do this. But what Mello, Lisica and "Big Shot" do not realize is that Sara and Emiliano are determined to do the right thing no matter the personal cost.
Discussion
Illegal is an exciting, well-written novel that explores the illegal immigrant experience through the eyes of two young Mexicans who have stumbled upon a Mexican- U.S. human trafficking operation. Sara, a reporter and her brother Emiliano have fled to the United States after Sara is given the phone of Hinojosa, a main player in the Mexican trafficking ring. Although they haven't turned on the phone, both are certain it contains critical information that could break up the trafficking ring. With Sara in a detention center and Emiliano on the run with the phone, they must each make the difficult decision of what to do with the phone. Do they return the phone to protect themselves and their families, knowing they will be leaving the trafficked women to their fate? Or do they take the risk hoping that their actions will rescue the many Mexican women who have been enslaved and abused. The novel's storyline focuses on this conflict in a game of moves and counter-moves.
Sara, in detention, comes to a decision fairly quickly. Despite being in isolation, deprived of her attorney and emotionally and physically abused, Sara knows she must be strong. At the beginning of her time in the detention center Sara tries to put aside her fear. "I had to reach out in the dark and borrow Linda's courage, the courage that prompted her to steal the phone from Hinojosa and send it to me. I had to remember Linda's suffering. It was up to me and now up to my brother to make sure what she went through was not in vain."
In a letter to Emiliano that she knows he will never see, she writes,
"The one thing that is becoming clear to me is that I need to believe that my life has meaning
regardless of how long it lasts. It has to have a purpose now and not
only when I get out of here." Seeing the suffering of the women in the detention center has strengthened Sara's resolve to help not only them but the women who are being trafficked. She writes, "If I were cut off from the suffering and hopelessness of the other women, my soul would shrink and die." So while she agrees to phone her brother to tell him to give up the phone Sara uses the call to send Emiliano a very different message. It appears she is telling him to simply obey her as he did Brother Patricio in the mountains, but she is really telling him to do what is right, to "Do it for Linda."
For Emiliano the process is longer and more complicated. He's puzzled by Sara's words to him during his phone call when she reminds him of what he learned on the Tarahumara trip with Brother Patricio. This was a trip Emiliano, filled with anger over his father's abandonment and their family's poverty, had been forced to undertake after stealing a camera. The two-day hike was grueling, living with the Rarmuri and Emiliano finally "realized that there was no way out other than to keep going..." Brother Patricio told him he was learning endurance for hope. "Hardship creates endurance and endurance creates character and character creates hope. And hope is the conviction that what you're doing is worth doing regardless of the outcome." Reflecting on this experience, Emiliano believes this was Sara's message.
"I had come to Chicago so I could give the phone to Yoya's people and so they could use the information in the phone to save the women who had been enslaved by Big Shot. Wasn't that the thing that required my endurance and my hope? Wasn't that what I was being asked to do? What would my life be like if I ran away from what was being asked?"
Sara had told her brother to "Do it for Linda." This meant to fight for them, to fight "For the Lindas and the Saras and the Trevors of the world. For those who are hurt and for those who are good. Because life's not worth living as a coward. Because whatever little courage I had should be used for the benefit of others."
Sara's message helps Emiliano figure out what he needs to do and gives him the resolve to do it. He leaves his father's home, rejecting the offer his father's employer, Abe Gropper has made of ten thousand dollars if he brings the phone the next day. He flees his father's home and is helped by several people, including Stanislaw Kaluza and his daughter Sophie and his granddaughter Aniela, Detectives Jaworksi and Rogers.
Stork has populated his novel with many interesting and well-crafted characters. There is Sara Zapata, the journalist who is searching for the truth and who believes the most people have some goodness in them. This is seen many times throughout the novel when Sara tries to appeal to the good in the people who are trying to do her harm. For example, when she is taken to her credible fear interview, she appeals to Norma Galindez, her asylum officer, begging her to call her attorney, Wes Morgan. Sara made the appeal because, "I could tell in her voice that there was goodness in her." She tries to appeal to the good in Mario, her guard in isolation and asks him to check for messages for her and begs him to call Sandy Morgan which he eventually does. She even attempts to appeal to any goodness in Rosaura Martel, a guard known as La Treunta Y Cuatro.
There is Emiliano who tries to discern the right thing to do. He doesn't want to go to Chicago with his father who abandoned him, Sara and their mother for a better life in the U.S. But after talking with Yoya, he knows he has to do this to keep the phone safe. "Because all that Sara had done to save the missing girls, all that she had sacrificed, all that she was going through at the detention facility, all that could not be lost." He puts aside his feelings and does what he knows to be right. He continues to show fortitude, ingenuity and a strength of character that is in contrast to his father Bob Gropper.
Aniela, Stanislaw Kaluz's granddaughter serves as a budding love interest for Emiliano as well as a character who moves the story forward in a simple but very contrived way. Stanislaw Kaluz is the kindly grandfather figure whose help makes taking down the traffickers a real possibility. And there is Bob Gropper, Emiliano's father, who has given up almost everything including his identity to be successful.
Stork is a master storyteller who has written a novel with many interesting facets to explore. One example is the issue of forgiveness. It is Aniela who helps Emiliano begin to forgive his father. Emiliano
tells her that when he was dying in the desert, he was able to forgive
his father and himself "for all the stupid, selfish things I had done
in Mexico." But in the real world he finds forgiveness of his father
and Mrs. Coselo's killer much more difficult. Aniela, who has also
experienced abandonment by her father, tells him she has learned hatred
is poison. "Hate turns you into something you're not meant to be." she
advises Emiliano. She tells him that all the faults she saw in her
father and in his wife she also saw in herself, "...the arrogance and
the superiority and the way they used people, all that was, is, in me."
Her admission causes Emiliano to consider that the same drive to succeed
and to prove himself to others that his father has may also be a part
of him. But Aniela explains, "The big difference,...is that I don't like
those things about myself. My father and his wife take pride in them. I
know what's in me and I try not to act accordingly."
Besides the issues of illegal immigration, human trafficking, and the treatment of illegal immigrants in U.S. detention centers, Stork also weaves an element of faith and prayer into his story, inviting readers to consider the power of prayer in our lives. The conclusion, while not overly exciting, ties up loose ends and is one of hope and optimism. Illegal is one of the best young adult novels of 2020.
Book Details:
Illegal by Francisco X. Stork
New York: Scholastic Press 2020
291 pp.
