The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Urrea, Luis Alberto. Into the Beautiful North. New York: Little Brown and Company, Hatchette Book Group, 2009. Kindle AZW file.

Into the Beautiful North tells the story of a Mexican village called Tres Camarones where a large number of the male residents have left in order to look for work in the United States. Inspired by the movie The Magnificent Seven, and concerned by the criminals who have overrun the village, a teenage girl named Nayeli gathers a group of her friends to cross the Mexican border into the United States with the aim of convincing some Mexican men to return to Tres Camarones. Secretly, Nayeli also hopes to reunite with Matt, an American missionary who once visited the village, and search for her missing father who left to find work in America several years earlier.

Nayeli works as a waitress in a taco shop owned by her friend Tacho. One day, Nayeli and Tacho are subjected to sexist and homophobic abuse by a crooked cop and a drug dealer who decide to run their operations from Tres Camarones because there are so few men in the village.

Nayeli’s aunt Irma wins the election to become mayor of Tres Camarones and immediately insists on a film festival at the local cinema celebrating the actor Yul Brynner, whom she mistakenly believes is Mexican. During the festival, Nayeli watches the movie The Magnificent Seven and convinces her friends Tacho, Yolo, and Vampi to travel to the United States to recruit their own seven men to save their village from criminals.

The friends travel north by bus to Tijuana and encounter scenes of severe poverty on their journey. When they arrive in Tijuana, a poor local couple offer them shelter in their home located in an abandoned dump. Here, the friends meet a man named Atómiko who helps them make arrangements to illegally cross the border into the United States. The friends cross the border with the assistance of a coyote, but they are caught by border police and are deported.

Next, they manage to cross the border through a tunnel dug by drug dealers and arrive in San Diego. They go to stay with Matt, a missionary who once visited Tres Camarones, who Nayeli has a crush on. However, when Nayeli discovers Matt and Yolo having sex, she leaves San Diego heartbroken and begins a road trip to find her missing father whose last known whereabouts were Kankakee, Illinois.

When she reaches Kankakee, Nayeli discovers that her father has started a new family with a woman in America and that they have a baby together. She leaves a postcard he sent her under his windshield and leaves without speaking to him. Nayeli returns to San Diego where the other characters from Tres Camarones have succeeded in recruiting more than 20 Mexican men who wish to return to their village. In the epilogue, Nayeli leads the recruits back into Tres Camarones.