Crossers (Vintage Contemporaries) by Philip Caputo (Audiobook)

In 2006 I’d started doing research and interviews for a nonfiction piece about border issues for the Virginia Quarterly Review. In the course of that work, I’d stumbled on historical material and was fascinated to learn that what we think of as contemporary problems on the Mexican border–illegal immigration, smuggling, violence–go back at least a hundred years. I was also struck by the similarities between the Mexican drug cartels and today’s Islamist terrorists. The former are motivated by greed, the latter by religious and political fanaticism, but they are alike in the atrocities they commit, in their utter lack of compassion and conscience. The stories illegal immigrants told me about their sufferings moved me as well. One of those tales involved a man who was abandoned by his coyote (as immigrant smugglers are called), got lost in the mountains, and nearly died before he was rescued by a rancher I know. Moral conflict and moral ambiguity are themes that have consumed me throughout my career, and there is plenty of both on the border. All of this seemed a rich vein for a novel. I never experienced a "eureka" moment, but various experiences and impressions began to flow together, like tributary streams into a river, and I started writing.