Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

So Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there's no worry that will make a difference in either direction.

They perceive each other, the unspoken trauma they've both endured, their reasons for being here. It's as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.

If there's one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it's that it's more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what's happened, but for now, the possibility of what might happen still serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish.

a few miles outside Culiacán, the monotony is broken by screaming. A lone voice repeats the words over and over, like a siren: ¡la migra, la migra!

When the coyote herds the migrants back to their route,

In short, Nicolás has never had a fundamental change of heart. So he's unaware of the way Newton's third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.

como «plática motivacional con crisis de identidad»

We have to help them. If the suffering of our friends means nothing, if those kids can't be allowed to see us, to see Mexico as it really is, then what are they even doing here? Are they just drive-by Samaritans?

If a tourist mecca like Acapulco could fall, then nowhere in Mexico was safe.

También de este lado hay sueños.

Acapulco always had a heart for extravagance, so when at last she made her fall from grace, she did so with all the spectacular pageantry the world had come to expect of her. The cartels painted the town red.

Lydia's always been a devoted mother, but she's never been the codependent kind who misses her child when he goes to school or to sleep. She's always treasured that time to herself, to inhabit her own thoughts, to have a break from the nonstop emotional clamoring of motherhood.

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. If love comes from the heart, where does hate come from? Children aren't born knowing how to hate. They must be taught. Therefore, the lesson is simple. Let's not teach our children hatred and prejudice, because what they don't know won't hurt them — or others. PEACE IS PATRIOTIC.

Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.

That night they left the tooth beneath his pillow and El Ratoncito Pérez came to retrieve it, leaving Luca a poem and a new toothbrush in its place.

what's left is only the beloved, familiar shape of him, empty of breath.

and at the hour of our

that line his abuela's street. He's

which she leaves)

She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.

Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper into the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it's not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces.

She knows how dangerous it is to trust anyone on La Bestia. There are thugs and rapists and thieves and narcos hidden in the ranks of la policía in every town, but it's not only the police who deserve their suspicion. It's every single person they meet—shopkeepers, food vendors, humanitarians, children, priests, even their fellow migrants.

It's a common tactic for bad actors to ride the trains posing as migrants, working to gain the trust of unsuspecting travelers, so they can lure them into a secluded place where they can commit some violence against them.

Lydia knows a little about las colonias of Tijuana because she's read the books, because Luis Alberto Urrea is one of her favorite writers, and he's written about the