Chapter 17: Summary and Analysis
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
⚠️ This summary and analysis contains major plot details from Chapter 17 of The Devil Takes You Home. If you haven't read the chapter yet, you may want to do so before continuing.
Summary
The chapter opens with Juanca asking Mario to help him move a heavy table in his kitchen. As they shift the furniture, Brian notices that the table is covering a section of the floor and asks if the access to the tunnels is really in the kitchen. Juanca confirms it, calling it a family thing. Mario, still haunted by the photographs from the car and Juanca's earlier warning at the barbecue joint, seizes the moment to ask Juanca how he got involved in the drug trade.
Juanca begins a long, reluctant confession. He was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez. His father worked as a migrant laborer on the U.S. side, picking fruit and vegetables, but often wasn't paid and was threatened with deportation when he complained. Eventually his father turned to carrying drugs for a local dealer in El Paso, becoming a mule. The money was better, and the family enjoyed a brief period of comfort, but then his father was killed.
Juanca's mother used her savings to pay a coyote to bring the family to El Paso through a tunnel. They ended up in a small house on a street called Broadway, where a false floor in the kitchen concealed another tunnel entrance. The house was a front, with rooms filled with bags of dirt from the digging. Juanca's mother played the part of a respectable Mexican widow, going to church and being friendly with neighbors, so no one suspected anything.
Juanca's older brother Guillermo, only four years older, started helping smuggle goods through the tunnels, hoping to earn enough to move the family to a better life. But Guillermo disappeared on a trip one night and never returned. Juanca suspects his bones are somewhere in the desert, or that he was dissolved by cartel