No Option But North: The Migrant World and the Perilous Path Across the Border

by Kelsey Freeman

Overview

"At a time when anti-immigrant vitriol substitutes for US immigration policy, No Option But North deftly blends heartbreaking accounts of the journey north with cogent insights into the systemic causes that make the trek north an almost impossible option if you’re poor and from south of the border. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the human rights implications of US immigration politics." —Antonio Villaraigosa, 41st Mayor of Los Angeles

In the thick of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, and through the travel bans his administration issued in 2017, journalist Kelsey Freeman spent nine months interviewing Central American and Mexican migrants in a shelter in central Mexico, along the migrant path. No Option But North interweaves their stories with research and anecdotes from Freeman’s experiences to reveal the fundamental moral quandaries involved in contemporary migration—from the expanding gang violence that drives migrants out of their home countries, to their dearth of legal options on both sides of the border, and more. In the process, Freeman takes us on a harrowing journey that strikes at the heart of the human ability to endure.

A timely chronicle of contemporary migration from Central America and Mexico that peels back the layers of privilege underlying American and Mexican migration policies, No Option But North adds powerful color and force to the immigration narrative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632460974
Publisher:	Ig Publishing
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,060,628
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

As a writer and educator, Kelsey Freeman focuses on immigration policy, Indigenous rights, social justice, and public policy. After graduating from Bowdoin College, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English and study migration in central Mexico. She currently runs a college-readiness program for Native American high school students through Central Oregon Community College.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Part 1 Por Necesidad

1 Divided by Law 21

2 La Vioencia 35

3 "Mis niños comen y visten" 57

Part 2 The Privilege to Cross the Border Legally

4 Race, Class, and Nationality Matter 71

5 The Complications of Asylum 87

Part 3 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Migration Sea

6 La Bestia 109

7 Polleros and Other Delincuentes 121

8 The New Cartel Industry: Kidnapping 147

9 Los Centroamericanos y la migra mexicana 161

Part 4 Because Power Matters

10 Gender, Whiteness, and Privilege 183

11 Chronicles of Post-election Days in Mexico 209

Part 5 Leaving the Shelter, Coming Home

12 La Delincuencia on the Inside 233

Afterword: Corruption in All Corners, I Turn to Stories 251

Acknowledgments 255

Notes 259

Editorial Reviews

02/24/2020

Journalist Freeman’s earnest and self-reflective debut advocates for “a more sensible, decent approach to immigration policy” by telling the stories of Mexican and Central American migrants passing through the city of Celaya in central Mexico on their way to the U.S. border. Interviewing her subjects, some of whom are making their third or fourth journey north, at a local migrant shelter (which she later learns has been selling migrants to kidnappers), Freeman documents their experiences of sexual assault, poverty, and extortion in their home countries; untangles the web of connections between drug cartels, corrupt government agents, and human traffickers who prey on migrants; and documents how U.S. and Mexican policies make legal avenues of migration practically impossible, thereby forcing people “to put themselves at extraordinary risk to climb the ladder toward safety and prosperity.” Freeman routinely scrutinizes her “enormous privilege” in relation to her subjects, juxtaposing their lack of options with her own freedoms; though these asides raise useful questions about the ability of outsiders to accurately portray the migration experience, they fail to deliver essential insights and distract from the book’s central aims. Nevertheless, this respectful, carefully documented account succeeds in humanizing an issue that often gets obscured by political rhetoric. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2020-01-21
An earnest advocacy piece concerning the immigration crisis at the southern border.

Why do migrants travel north from Central America and Mexico to the U.S.? For many reasons, writes Freeman, a former Fulbright fellow in Mexico. Some have to do with economics, with migrants seeking better opportunities in the richer country instead of the $5.45 daily minimum wage in Mexico or the $0.37 in El Salvador. Many are forced to flee from gangs, drug cartels, and sex traffickers, groups that implicate everyone in a community, not just the foot soldiers. As the author notes, “these gangs run through the currents of everyday life, and efforts to avoid them are impossible.” Freeman is strong on sociological data and statistics. She also delivers meaningful portraits of migrants on the move from the vantage point of a shelter in central Mexico. In that business, no one’s hands are clean: One of the workers in that shelter, for example, is caught up in the human trafficking trade while many U.S. agents are nothing short of sadists, energized by Trumpian rhetoric. “If migration were actually a game,” writes Freeman in an apt passage, “it would be a life and death affair where ‘winning’ meant boarding a moving train without getting maimed, killed or assaulted. And the prize for winning would be to be sent home in handcuffs, only to have to play again and again.” Parts of the narrative are less graceful than all that, and too often the story is about the author and not the migrants. Her criticism of writers who have committed “the sort of immersion journalism that pretends that observing the migration phenomenon doesn’t affect it” is unfortunate given her too-frequent presence in the narrative as more than just narrator. For a clearer, more memorable portrait of “the twisted knot of migration,” readers should turn to Kathryn Ferguson’s The Haunting of the Mexican Border (2015) instead.

An intermittently insightful but marginal addition to the literature on the immigration crisis.

Kirkus Reviews