Crossing the LineClandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border. By David Spener. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Abstract

As debates about immigration intensify in the United States, David Spener’s Clandestine Crossings, a study of unauthorized migration across the United States–Mexico border, has particular relevance. This compelling, historically situated analysis of coyotes, “anyone hired by autonomous migrants to help them cross the border clandestinely” (p. xiii), and coyotaje, or the services provided by coyotes, speaks to unfolding discussions about immigration policy, the politics of “illegality,” and the nation’s ambivalent relationship, now and in the past, with people crossing its southern border. A central contradiction that Spener explores throughout the book is how, despite or even because of attempts to bring the border “under control” (p. 47), so-called clandestine crossings continue and diversify. Spener demonstrates that an increase in coyotes working at the border and new forms of coyotefacilitated crossings directly relate to U.S. actions (p. 81), making the book an important read as the country contemplates immigration reform. The study begins with a theoretical and historical frame (introduction and chap. 1), as Spener outlines a system of “global apartheid” (p. 11) through which policing is legitimized on the basis of “nationality and illegality” (p. 25). While much anti-immigrant rhetoric focuses on unauthorized entry as a criminal act, Spener inverts this perspective, enabling readers to consider clandestine crossings as a way to view a system of injustice. He describes the harrowing experiences migrants endure to go north (chap. 2), discussing both historical (chap. 3) and contemporary (chap. 4) coyotaje. His aim is to “demystify and desensationalize how clandestine border-crossing actually takes place” (p. 122), bringing a “moral, human rights dimension” (p. 25) to migration-policy analysis. Spener provides a fascinating—and unsettling—look at the U.S. government’s simultaneous recruitment and expulsion