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A review by qiaosilin
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez
4.0
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail is about Óscar Martínez, a journalist from El Salvador, who goes along the Migrant Trail (the usual route migrants from Central America take up through Mexico and to the USA) to tell their stories.
This book really shocked me when I read it. I honestly didn't know much about the lives of migrants before reading it with much of my knowledge coming from distanced news reports about things in Mexico that didn't affect me. But The Beast changed that. It brought these people's lives to light so I could actually empathize with them. I didn't know much about the strife in Central America either. Now, the internal issues the countries in that area have are something I actually understand.
Martínez doesn't take sides in his book; he doesn't say the USA is right for severely restricting the access undocumented migrants have to gaining a better, safer life, and he doesn't say the migrants are right to try to get across illegally. However, it's clear from the way he humanizes the migrants, how he empathizes with them, that the migrants are not necessarily in the wrong either. Politics, government and economics are huge driving factors in keeping undocumented migrants out of the USA even though the USA went into Central America first and fucked their shit up. But as the Border Patrol agent in the book says, it's just a big game of cat and mouse. No one really wins.
This book really shocked me when I read it. I honestly didn't know much about the lives of migrants before reading it with much of my knowledge coming from distanced news reports about things in Mexico that didn't affect me. But The Beast changed that. It brought these people's lives to light so I could actually empathize with them. I didn't know much about the strife in Central America either. Now, the internal issues the countries in that area have are something I actually understand.
Martínez doesn't take sides in his book; he doesn't say the USA is right for severely restricting the access undocumented migrants have to gaining a better, safer life, and he doesn't say the migrants are right to try to get across illegally. However, it's clear from the way he humanizes the migrants, how he empathizes with them, that the migrants are not necessarily in the wrong either. Politics, government and economics are huge driving factors in keeping undocumented migrants out of the USA even though the USA went into Central America first and fucked their shit up. But as the Border Patrol agent in the book says, it's just a big game of cat and mouse. No one really wins.