“We all are standing unafraid on the frontier; we all are shadows in the shade on the frontier”
When you live in Arizona, you can’t escape the hot button issue of illegal immigration, so this book might appeal to me more than someone living in, say, New Hampshire (although I suppose Newhampshireans could hear about illegal immigration as much as we do down here). Augusto Moro, who lives in Mexico, probably hears about illegal immigration quite a bit, too, and he decided to create this book about one man’s journey into the morass of the immigration business. 
Illegal Cargo is published by Black Panel Press.
The book begins with an Anglo woman, narrating about a woman she met in Mexico named Helena while she, the Anglo, was making a documentary about immigration. She lost touch with Helena and doesn’t know where she is, so she visits Helena’s father José, in El Salvador, to ask if he’s heard from her. He seems remarkably unconcerned about her, but over the next few days, he decides to go to Mexico and look for her. Part of his change of heart comes because he thinks he sees Helena on the television during a news report about immigrant, and partly it’s due to him realizing he wasn’t the greatest father, and Helena is the only child he has left. So he heads north to find her.
Despite not being an actual immigrant, as he seems perfectly content in El Salvador, José has to travel the routes that immigrants take, so we get a good understanding of the issues people from other countries go through when their movements aren’t exactly sanctioned by governments. When he enters Mexico, he gets robbed, meets other refugees, gets very sick, meets some kind people, and eventually gets taken to Mexico City by bandits who think they can get a ransom for him. He does escape, but he’s lost in Mexico City. I don’t want to give away the ending and whether he finds his daughter or not, but it’s a somewhat unexpected ending that doesn’t really go where we think it will, but gives us a more realistic version than a lesser work would give. Moro wants to not only tell a compelling story, but show how this kind of immigration – which, yes, is technically illegal – has an impact on people and the communities from which and to which the immigrants are moving. 
So we don’t really get easy answers. José isn’t terribly sympathetic at the beginning of the book, but he becomes more so as he goes on his journey. The gangsters who kidnap him aren’t sympathetic, either, and they never become so, but it’s not to hard to understand why they do what they do. The people José meets along the way aren’t all good people, but they’re trying to make the best of the situation. Moro, unfortunately, never really gets into the reason why people immigrate illegally, and that’s a crucial part of it. Helena isn’t a political refugee, she’s just trying to get a better life. But because José is technically not an immigrant, Moro doesn’t really get a chance to examine why these people leave their homelands and come to the United States. The people who think we should just deport illegal immigrants back to their country of origin probably won’t dig this book anyway, but it feels like Moro misses an opportunity – he shows the horrors that immigrants have to go through, but he doesn’t give anyone a good reason to go through those horrors. Helena, for instance, seems like she braves the dangers of illegally crossing three international borders (the El Salvador-Guatemala border, the Guatemala-Mexico border, the Mexico-U.S. border) not to make a better life for herself (which is what the documentarian in the beginning says) but because José was kind of a lousy father. That doesn’t seem like a good enough reason. So while José’s journey and struggle are compelling, the book doesn’t feel quite as impactful as it might be, because Moro keeps it too personal and focused on him, without making at least some points about illegal immigration in a wider context. I know I’m griping about something that isn’t his focus by saying it should be, but it’s because José’s particular quest doesn’t feel as dramatic as Moro wants it to be, and so the book suffers a bit. We see what immigrants have to go through, which is terrible, but there’s not as much of a sense of why they put themselves through it.
Moro does a nice job with the art, creating interesting characters to populate the margins of society. José is old and out of shape, and Moro does a nice job showing him as a dude who’s kind of given up on life, until seeing Helena stirs something in him. 
He’s never heroic, but he’s determined, and Moro does a good job showing the shift in his attitude. The other characters are well done, too, as Moro makes sure they look “regular,” for lack of a better word, but he gives them that inner steel that makes them endure extremely bad conditions in search of a better life. His gangsters are a bit more cartoonish, but he still gives them a menace that makes them scary, especially because he makes it clear they’re not strangers to pain. There’s an interesting supernatural element to the comic, too, which doesn’t overwhelm the grittiness of the narrative but complements it, and Moro does a good job with keeping the supernatural elements grounded to a degree – the coloring of the book changes a bit when they’re present, but the style stays the same, so it’s as if the supernatural parts are still bound to the reality of the comic. Moro also does a good job with the rough conditions and the slightly seedy areas the immigrants need to get through, which adds to the melancholy nature of the book – the immigrants not only are leaving a bad situation, they need to get through many more before they think about making their lives better. It’s a nice-looking comic.
Illegal Cargo isn’t quite great, but it’s a solid read. While I think there are aspects of the immigration story that Moro could have written about, the story does work as a personal one, where we can sympathize with a parent trying to find their child. In that regard, it’s a good story, and while it feels a bit incomplete, it’s still worth checking out. You can find it below, and remember, if you use that link even if you don’t buy this specific book, we still get a piece of that action!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
