Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants

by Ted Conover

Overview

To discover what becomes of Mexicans who cross into the United States without a visa, Conover traveled and worked alongside them for more than a year. This is the chronicle of his journey.

“Ted Conover has written a book about the Mexican poor that is at once intimate and epic. Coyotes is travel literature, social protest, and affirmation. I can compare this book to the best of George Orwell’s journeys to the heart of poverty.” —Richard Rodriguez, author of Brown and Hunger of Memory

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394755182
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/12/1987
Series:	Vintage Departures
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.15(w) x 8.01(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Ted Conover is the author of several books, including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, and The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and National Geographic. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is distinguished writer-in-residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

"Ted Conover lived the bizarre life of the Mexican illegals. Theirs is a subterrestrial world of high-wire tensions, of brutal police, of sinister smugglers — coyotes. A devastating document, this one must be read." — Leon Uris

The acclaimed author of Rolling Nowhere has taken another adventure, this time on the underground railway that operates across America's southern border. To discover what becomes of Mexicans who desperately slip into the United States, Ted Conover disguised himself as an illegal alien, walked across deserts, hid in orange orchards, waded through the Rio Grande, and cut life-threatening deals with tough-guy traffickers in human sweat. This electrifying account is the harrowing vision of a way of life no outsider has ever seen before.

From the Publisher

This first title in the Vintage Departures series (``devoted to exploring the vastness of the world, of one's life, or even of one's own backyard'') focuses on the world of illegal aliens. Conover, author of Rolling Nowhere, posed as an immigrant, crossing the border twice and learning first-hand about ``coyotes''those who sneak Mexicans and other Latin Americans across the border, often under murderous conditions. Menaced by hoods, arrested, freed, forced to dodge spotter planes, Conover spent a year, as he puts it, ``working, drinking, smoking, driving, sleeping, sweating and shivering with Mexicans.'' His conclusion: ``It is urgent that we know more about these people who ask little more than to wash our dishes, vacuum our cars, and pick our fruit.'' This well-written, anecdotal account offers an intimate glimpse of the United States from a perspective few citizens are aware of. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Conover, author of an earlier book on hobos, studies Mexican illegal aliens by living their life and crossing the border with them. His book is similar to John Davidson's The Long Journey North ( LJ 10/15/79), but Conover takes dangerous personal risks, spends more time with his contacts, covers a larger group of Mexicans, and ranges across Idaho, Arizona, and Florida as he describes how these people migrate within the United States. His experiences in central Mexico effectively capture the immigrant's impact on his own rural community, although one wishes for deeper personal insights into his subjects' motivations. An eminently readable and revealing account. Highly recommended. Roderic A. Camp, Latin American Studies Dept., Central Coll., Pella, Ia .

Library Journal

YA The title refers to the name given to those people who smuggle illegal aliens into the United States. Conover lived among the people who pay ``coyotes'' enormous sums of money to be brought into this country secretly under condi tions that are full of physical threat. The most touching part of the book is the description of Conover's visit to Ahua catlan, the province from which many of the men he has met come. Here he wit nesses what has happened to the families left behind. While the money the men have earned has resulted in some im provement, there is still enormous pov erty in their lives, and their home life is drifting toward disintegration. There is humor, too, including a hilarious episode in which several men pool enough mon ey together to fly from Mexico to Los Angeles but must find the appropriate clothing and behaviors to avoid arousing suspicions by ``La Migra.'' Conover has done a good job of capturing the difficult lives of these men who want only to earn a decent wage to support their fami lies. Barbara Weathers, Duchesne Academy, Houston

School Library Journal