Description
For readers of Jon Krakauer and Susan Orlean, The Coyote’s Bicycle brings to life a never-before-told phenomenon at our southern border, and the human drama of folks who would cross.
It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just around the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, just a small cadre of human smugglers?coyotes?and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there.This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an improbable journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived on the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.
Taylor follows the trail of the border bikes through some of society’s most powerful institutions, and, with the assistance of an unlikely source, he reconstructs the upward thrust of certainly one of Tijuana’s most innovative coyotes. Touching on immigration and globalization, in addition to the history of the United States/Mexico border, The Coyote’s Bicycle is at once an immersive investigation of an outrageous occurrence and a true-crime, rags-to-riches story.