Survival, Ghosts, and Jaguars in the Sonoran Desert

Creators of Frontera. Left: Julio Anta. Right: Jacoby Salcedo.

Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo’s graphic novel Frontera follows teenager Mateo as he takes on a perilous journey through the Sonoran Desert. After a rocky beginning leaves him stranded without supplies, Mateo continues forward on his path, saved only by the help of Guillermo, a ghost who died in the desert years ago.

Frontera is based on real-life situations (minus the ghost) and is an accessible starting point for teenagers (and adults) who are interested in learning more about those who travel across the Sonoran Desert. In this interview, Frontera’s creators, Anta and Salcedo, talk about how they came to Frontera as a project, the historical research that went into the book, and their upcoming DC project This Land is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story.

Cover of Frontera (2023), by Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo.

TB: How did you guys come to this project?

JA: It’s a long story. It started after Jacoby and I had begun working together on 4 to 10-page stories that we would post online for free. It was our way of putting the stories we were passionate about out there in the hopes of getting larger projects.

 After we had done a few of those, I saw an anthology call come through for short stories that I thought I had a good idea for. The idea was essentially the story of Guillermo, a migrant who had died in the Sonoran Desert. For almost a century, he's been trapped there and has seen how the border evolved over those years—it became militarized and more dangerous, with more migrants dying every year.

It was a 10-page version of Guillermo's story and, fortunately/ unfortunately, it was rejected from the anthology. But we still wanted to do something with the story because we thought it was an interesting way to talk about modern-day immigration and how it's changed at the southern border of the US over the last century. Around the same time, we saw this online Twitter pitching event called PitMad for acquiring agents and editors so that your book can be published by a book publisher.

On a whim, I just told Jacoby what I thought sample pages should look like, and he very quickly made them. I wrote a document of our vision for the book. Within two weeks—we only found out about the event two weeks ahead of time—we put it out there and received interest from a few agents and editors. That's how we found our agent Jess and our editor Carolina, who is with HarperAlley, the publisher of this book.

With our agent, we refined the idea. Through that process, I discovered the Mateo character, which would plant us in the present and give us a modern POV to which Guillermo could now impart his wisdom and historical perspective. Mateo’s conception made it a YA (young adult) graphic novel when the original concept really wasn't. 

The book was inspired by my desire to tell a sweeping episodic adventure story that educates readers about the border and helps them empathize with a character who is not dissimilar to them, just this American kid who sees himself as an American citizen, and then gets the rug swept from under him and has to go on this journey to get his life back on track, essentially.

TB: Jacoby, this is set in the real world (kind of). We've got ghosts, but we've got historical perspective and also current real-life places. What sorts of research did you do in your preparation to work with real settings in the book?

JS: Luckily, Julio is a really good researcher, and he provides my reference links, but quite honestly, Google Street View. A lot of the areas are based on real buildings–  the street market, the buses, that's an actual bus. For the bus station, I couldn't find enough reference pictures and ended up getting angry because I was just like: "I want to make this as accurate as I possibly can.”

I also look at pictures of migrants and look at what they are wearing. I don't want to have someone wear something they wouldn't wear, if they knew that they were immigrating through the Sonoran Desert. Early on in the research, there was a scene where Mateo had a jacket. I remember drawing it and texting Julio, "I regret giving him a jacket because why would he have a jacket literally when it’s blazing hot out?"

JA: It's a little too Coco.

JS: I wanted to keep everything as grounded as I possibly could. In the book itself, other than Guillermo, everything is based on true events like El Jefe, the border patrol destroying water stations, the militias, the drones, all of it.  I think it would do the story a disservice if I didn't try to keep the visuals grounded as well.

The Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona during winter, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, photo by Santryl.

TB: Speaking about the reality of it, Julio, you mentioned that the book started with Guillermo’s story which spans generations. How did you put the history of all that together?

JA: It's daunting at times, but really, all of my books stem from the research and the interest that I already had beforehand. When we first got the idea to do this as the anthology pitch in 2019, we were still in the midst of (and we still are today, but it was much more in our face all the time) this criminalization of immigrants, children being separated at the border. There was just so much to be angry about every single day. That led me to want to understand how the United States has dealt with immigration since its independence.

I knew about things like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Japanese internment camps. I didn't know about the Bracero Program, which took place around the same time during World War II, that the United States brought Mexican immigrants to come to the US to take over the jobs of US soldiers and then just promptly kicked them all out of the country with Operation Wetback and deported them all. 

From the beginning, Guillermo was always part of the Bracero Program. I wanted to find a way to connect it to the modern day. Some of the things that Jacoby mentioned earlier, like the militias and the destruction of water aid stations, were reports that I was reading at the time. It might have been in 2020 that some militias were caught kidnapping migrants and then giving them over to border patrol. Then I learned about groups like No More Deaths, which is a humanitarian group that puts out water aid stations in the Sonoran Desert.

I think Jacoby and I are such a good team because I love researching and he is very invested in making sure that what he draws is grounded and real.

TB: It's weighty to showcase families being separated. That's something that comes up multiple times in this book. How did you approach portraying these heavy scenes for a younger audience? I feel like we see these images in the news, but in a very different context.

JS: Honestly there isn't quite a difference. We're trying to keep it within the age range itself. It's Young Adult; we can't show too much. I think it's because we have the context of it – there's this scene with Guillermo flashing back with Mateo and showing the history of the border. Then it ends with his family being captured by border patrol.

We have a child being handcuffed – I remember texting Julio: "This is really hard to draw," because it is. I got that reference image because there is a reference image. This is actually happening. Readers who aren't aware need to see this, because this is how they build empathy and become knowledgeable about what is happening at the border. Other than another scene where there is a death, that is the only time when I felt like we had to pull back, just to make it YA-appropriate.

JA: That was the scene where we show the dead body in the desert, but it's covered with tarp. You just see the feet sticking out from the bottom, which, even if we weren't working with that age range, still felt like the right move. Because this was not a character that we had given any agency, it felt right to pull back at that moment.

To Jacoby's point, for the most part, I try to take a journalistic approach because I do want people to learn from this. I like to imagine that our readers are a combination of people who might identify with this experience, but also people who have maybe only come into contact with it through the news or their family's perspective that may be slanted and anti-immigrant. This could be their first time seeing an empathetic approach that humanizes the people experiencing this.

TB: Speaking of this audience that you're aiming for, how has the response been from readers to this work?

JA: It's been great. When you do the work that we do, there will always be elements that are negative simply because of the content. There’s been an amazing reception to this book. It's Eisner-nominated, which is amazing. More important for me is hearing from the actual readers and the educators who are using it in their classrooms.

A lot of times, when we do these projects, in the days and weeks after it comes out, I'll get so many direct messages from people on social media saying how they identify with the characters or how it reminded them of their parents' story or their grandparents' story – or from an educator who said that they were able to give it to a student whose story is similar, especially now with so many new arrivals coming into the US.

El Jefe in Arizona, 2013. United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

TB: Why did you include El Jefe, and what was it like to draw a real-life famous jaguar?

JA: I first encountered El Jefe while reading a French comic called The Scar. The whole premise of the comic was that the border wall is a scar on the land and on the desert. It's not just people and families that are separated from each other because of these unnatural walls, but also wildlife.

I started learning more about El Jefe's story – El Jefe was the only one of his species of jaguar that was stuck on the US side of the border wall, with the rest of his species stuck on the Mexican side of it. It really spoke to the way that families are separated. 

We found out right around the time the book was released that for the first time, El Jefe was seen on the Mexican side of the border, reunited with the rest of the species. It was a really sweet full-circle moment. I think the power of the way that we depict him in the story is relevant to a lot of people, because we're not the only ones that suffer from these policies of our governments. It's also the entire world around us. 

JS: Everything with El Jefe was super fun to draw, especially towards the end, because then I finally figured out how to really draw him. Going off of pictures, it was just a jaguar. I had to give him some markings and a cool little scar. 

TB: In the book, you showcase some people organized in support of migrants. We see the water stations, and we see helpers from the reservation who are looking for people to help. Can you speak to the real-life inspirations behind those?

JA: This was part of the research. The border between the US and Mexico has shifted over time with the Mexican-American War. Before that, it was indigenous land, and now it is the spot of the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation. I started becoming curious as to what their interaction with immigration is.

As we know, no community is a monolith. You can see that within the Latino community. You can see that with any marginalized group. There are plenty of Latinos who are anti-immigrant the second that they get to the US. There are also plenty who see themselves as migrants to this day and want to help them. I found this to be true with the indigenous reservation in the Sonoran Desert. Some elements want to protect their land and keep it closed off from smugglers and cartels. There are very legitimate reasons why they want to do this at times. Then others want to help migrants who are crossing through. They don't see it as a binary, black-and-white thing. Many of these people work to set up water aid stations in the Sonoran Desert.

In writing a book that is so much about the Sonoran Desert, it was really important to feature a character who was part of the reservation and to give her the opportunity also to talk about that difference in perspectives.

TB: You both have a DC project coming out soon in October, a Blue Beetle graphic novel. Can you tell me a bit about the book?

JA: This Land is Our Land: The Blue Beetle Story is a new retelling of the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle origin story. It is a YA graphic novel grounded in the real world, dealing with real issues that teenagers face today; it's also a superhero origin story with really big action set pieces that I imagined as what my Blue Beetle movie would be.

It's the story of Jaime discovering this alien scarab that attaches itself to his back and begins to control his emotions, driving him to his most base instincts, while he is living in El Paso which is increasingly politicized from anti-immigrant perspectives. An old friend of his comes back into his life, and unfortunately, with him, brings this baggage of these very right-wing, radicalized, anti-immigrant views.

This brand-new character, Riley, begins to fall in with a hate group that starts committing real-world violence. We run these two stories of radicalization parallel to each other. 

TB: Jacoby, what's it like to draw Blue Beetle?

JS: I love drawing Blue Beetle. It was cool that I was able to redesign his costume a little bit. I like streetwear. It was fun to use DC easter eggs but make some streetwear clothing. Since I'm dealing with a bunch of teenagers, they're going to be throwing their fits on.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

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Frontera was published by HarperAlley, and This Land is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story will be available from DC Comics on October 1.

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