The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

by Kimball Taylor

Overview

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 those that would cross.

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across 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, only a small cadre of human smugglers—coyotes—and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. And only through Taylor’s obsession did another curious migratory pattern emerge: the bicycles’ movement through the black market, Hollywood, the prison system, and the military-industrial complex. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at 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 help of an unlikely source, he reconstructs the rise of one of Tijuana’s most innovative coyotes. Touching on immigration and globalization, as well as the history of the US/Mexico border,The Coyote’s Bicycle is at once an immersive investigation of an outrageous occurrence and a true-crime, rags-to-riches story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941040201
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	02/22/2016
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Kimball Taylor is the author of Return by Water: Surf Stories and Adventures, as well as, Drive Fast and Take Chances: Fair Warning from Surfers. He’s a long-time contributor to Surfer Magazine. Taylor has co-authored history books on Pipeline and Jeffreys Bay. Taylor holds a BA in Journalism and a MFA in Creative Writing. He has taught writing courses at San Diego State University and is an alumnus of The Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Editorial Reviews

11/23/2015
Journalist Taylor (Return by Water) deftly guides readers over la frontera and back again, many times, to unravel the story behind the thousands of bikes of all shapes and sizes found abandoned over the years along the Mexican-U.S. border. The book’s sympathetic narrative traces the rise of El Indio, a young Mexican, to the top of a prosperous but dangerous business that smuggles migrants into the U.S. He leaves his village in Oaxaca as a teenager with his sight set on the U.S. In Tijuana, he hits upon a wildly successful and quite lucrative mode of sneaking people across the heavily enforced border: traveling via bicycle, streaking down the perilous canyons between the wall and a brighter future. Kimball splices El Indio’s epic (recreated from secondary sources) into an as-it-happened investigation into the life cycles of the bicycles he used. Shrewd ranchers, state environmentalists, a seasoned newspaper reporter, an obsessed documentary photographer, an activist, a sleazy film exec, a desperate actor, military contractors, and a bathroom attendant turned makeshift research assistant all come to life on the page. Kimball assembles these voices to report on the social, economic, and political factors that shape and reshape the border, and to vivify the big paradoxes at the center of a place that’s as complex as it is enchanting. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"What an improbable, richly peopled saga! Kimball Taylor follows his hunch so deep into the world of polleros and the borderlands where they do their human smuggling that you’ll forget you’re reading non-fiction. El Indio, his clients, the authorities, and the harsh country they all do battle with—not to mention all the merry, ubiquitous bicycles rolling through the story—this completely original concoction reads like Latin American magical realism, except it’s reported-out and grounded in fact. Wonderful stuff."

William Finnegan

"Just when you think you know every border story imaginable, Kimball Taylor shows up with this book of madness. It's an audacious tale told with great elan. I loved everything about this story—mostly because it's true. Can one bicycle change the world? Maybe not, but Kimball Taylor knows with love, no border is impermeable."

author of THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY: A True Story Luis Alberto Urrea

"Just when you think you know every border story imaginable, Kimball Taylor shows up with this book of madness. It's an audacious tale told with great elan. I loved everything about this story—mostly because it's true. Can one bicycle change the world? Maybe not, but Kimball Taylor knows with love, no border is impermeable."

author of THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY: A True Story Luis Alberto Urrea

2015-12-07
A journalist explores how "several thousand bikes…made an incredible journey" across the border between Mexico and the United States. When Taylor (Drive Fast and Take Chances: Fair Warning from Surfers, 2013, etc.) discovered the "ownerless piles" of bikes that littered the Tijuana River Valley, he was as awed as he was curious. The bikes, which included mountain, racing, BMX, utility, clown, and children's models, had been made all over the world and were in varying states of disrepair. Determined to uncover who had left the bicycles there and why, the author embarked on a multiyear private investigation. He met a motley assortment of individuals ranging from ranchers and environmentalists to ex-cons and a man who collected the bicycles to sell, no questions asked, to everyone from Mexican migrants to film studios. While it became clear that the bikes were used to help illegal immigrants negotiate the difficult, often dangerous terrain between Southern California and Mexico, Taylor became fascinated by the trajectory they had traveled, drawing "rude diagrams and flow charts" to help him better envision the journey. He discovered that, though pedaled over the border by illegal aliens, the bicycles had come from all over the U.S. and had also been ridden by farmers, convicts, actors, and soldiers. The author's ultimate answers to the borderland bicycle riddle did not emerge until he stumbled into an unlikely friendship with an ex-con who had been gathering information from Tijuana smugglers about a mysterious young man named El Indio. Over the span of a few short years, he had built a multimillion-dollar business as a coyote who brought illegal immigrants into the U.S. on bicycles. As colorful and interesting as the characters and story are, the narrative is at times digressive and unevenly paced. But Taylor still manages to make the salubrious, if disturbing, point that no matter how divorced readers believe they are from border issues, they are still implicated in a system of human trafficking and exploitation. Intriguing but occasionally rambling reading.

Kirkus Reviews

"Kimball Taylor brings us along on a deeply researched and richly detailed journey to our southern border, and in the process enlightened me with every turn of the page. The Coyote's Bicycle is not unlike a swift downhill mountain bike ride through no-man's land."

Eric Blehm

"Kimball Taylor’s gift at capturing human stories in a manner as captivating as fiction transforms this Quixotic journey into a landmark work on the recent history of human smuggling into the United States."

World Literature Today