Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. The smugglers—coyotes, as they are often known by the migrants who hire them—are frequently depicted as boogeymen and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this role in a billion-dollar global industry, anthropologist Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years. The result is the first-ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling, a heart-wrenching, intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind.
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