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Terms
A coyote is a guide who helps migrants illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Coyote Quotes in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
The Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies quotes below are all either spoken by Coyote or refer to Coyote. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
My Triqui companions often explain their everyday lives in terms of sufrimiento (suffering). But one of the sites of sufrimiento most frequently described by Triqui migrants is crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Many times throughout my fieldwork, my migrant companions told me stories of their harrowing experiences. One of my friends was kidnapped for ransom with her four-year-old boy. […] One young man I know described burns on his skin and in his lungs after being pushed by his coyote into a chemical tank on a train. Another man explained that he was raped by a Border Patrol agent in exchange for his freedom. All my migrant companions have multiple stories of suffering, fear, danger, and violence at the border.
Early in my fieldwork, I realized that an ethnography of suffering and migration would be incomplete without witnessing firsthand such an important site of suffering for Latin American migrants.
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Coyote Term Timeline in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
The timeline below shows where the term Coyote appears in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Introduction: “Worth Risking Your Life?”
...laborers. He brings a change of clothes, a little food, and money for transport and coyotes. The journey is 49 hours by bus. At military checkpoints on the way, the migrants...
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...to cross under ideal circumstances: his companions are young and fit, and they know their coyotes personally. Older and non-Mexican migrants are usually less fortunate.
(full context)
...disembarking the bus near the border in Altar, a scorching-hot desert town full of thieves, coyotes, and prospective migrants. In the local church, posters depict the deadly animals, extreme heat, and...
(full context)
...Town to Border. Holmes remembers waiting in an empty, filthy apartment in Altar. His group’s coyote lets Holmes cross for free because of his noble purposes. The apartment’s owner comes to...
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