Center for Latin American Studies

Quinones takes a keen look the migrant economy – both the rural to urban flow within Mexico, and between the U.S. and Mexico – in these nine stories. He devotes the first, middle and last chapters to Delfino Juárez, a construction worker who left his mountain village in Veracruz to work at Mexico City job sites when he was 12 years old before making his way to Arizona through the Sonora desert, a journey that almost cost him his life.