This solid, sound-rich piece retells the all-American road story of our time. Sixteen-year-old Edgar, from central Mexico, tries to hoof it into the United States from Ciudad Juarez and Nogales, only to be caught by our Border Patrol and sent back. Strangely, the narrator of Edgar's adventures is a woman speaking English, accompanied by Spanish sound bites spoken by Edgar and the men involved in his story.

It is of course a gripping story, one we know from TV and newspapers. But Edgar's slow-going Spanish, in contrast to the clipped cadences of coyotes who oversee his journeys -- as well as Edgar's father who is financing everything from afar -- contribute to a spellbinding bilingual voice play. And if we think we've heard enough about undocumenteds, this piece gives us a fresh earful of people tramping endlessly through the desert. When someone tosses his coat over a rattlesnake; when Edgar bashes his knee on a rock -- it is as if we are there, along for the ride, because of the riveting script.

On his third try at crossing "the line of division" from Tijuana, a thousand miles from his first attempt, Edgar succeeds. Until the very end the piece has postponed telling us that his father has all along been in Los Angeles. When Edgar meets his father for the first time since he was a baby, the only way Dad can recognize Sonny is by what Edgar is wearing, a shirt for an obscure Mexican soccer team, the "Cruz Azul."

Their happy reunion in an L.A. McDonald's makes for an uplifting end game, one which many conservative Americans might see as deplorably illegal, even immoral. But Columbian rock star Juanes, whose music has been playing in the background throughout, gives his full-voiced final stamp of approval to this odyssey in his plaintive "Fijate Bien."