Border Hacker: A Tale of Treachery, Trafficking, and Two Friends on the Run

by Levi Vonk

Overview

An unlikely friendship, a four-thousand-mile voyage, and an impenetrable frontier—this dramatic odyssey reveals the chaos and cruelty US immigration policies have unleashed beyond our borders.

Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.

Levi soon discovered that Axel was no ordinary migrant. He was harboring a secret: Axel was a hacker. This secret would launch the two friends on a dangerous adventure far beyond what either of them could have imagined. While Axel’s abilities gave him an edge in a system that denied his existence, they would also ensnare him in a tangled underground network of human traffickers, corrupt priests, and anti-government guerillas eager to exploit his talents for their own ends. And along the way, Axel’s secret only raised more questions for Levi about his past. How had Axel learned to hack? What did he want? And was Axel really who he said he was?

Border Hacker is at once an adventure saga—the story of a man who would do anything to return to his family, and the friend who would do anything to help him—and a profound parable about the violence of American immigration policy told through a single, extraordinary life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781645037064
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	357,235
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Levi Vonk is a writer, anthropologist, and professor at the University of Virginia. He is usually somewhere between the US South and Mexico.
 
Axel Kirschner is a hacker and stateless migrant. He grew up in New York but is now in hiding. Axel Kirschner is not his real name. 

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Maps xvi

Part I The Priest

1 The Viacrucis Migrante 3

2 Wake Up, White Boy 18

3 The Middle of the Nowhere 36

4 Only Desperate People 53

5 The Kidnapper 62

6 Brown Recluse 78

7 The Battle of Ixtepec 94

8 Ruffrider Quest 98

9 The Fight of the Century 107

Part II The Mechanic

10 Too Much Blood 123

11 Godforsaken Chahuites 131

12 The Power of Technology 144

13 Hot Spots 152

14 Dogs and Wolves 161

15 The American Axel 169

16 The Auto Shop 174

17 The Breakout 190

18 Freer in Mexico 197

Part III The Attorney

19 The Martian 211

20 A Phone for Nestora Salgado 214

21 The Right Kind of Traumatized 222

22 Salmon and Asparagus and Brie 229

23 Mind Body Problems 238

24 MAGA 248

25 Isabeia 260

Part IV The Anthropologist

26 Tocayos 271

27 Lopez Obrador 285

28 Across 307

Acknowledgments 317

Notes 319

Editorial Reviews

If this book were a novel, you’d say it was too implausible: an unlikely friendship, a dangerous journey, an apparent benefactor who turns out to be the opposite. But it’s all true, and Levi Vonk brings this extraordinary story to life with verve and zest.” ​

—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

“Our twenty-first-century American hero is a deported hacker, cruelly cast out from the only country he’s ever known into the lawless labyrinth of statelessness, surviving on bravado and genius skill, while forming the most improbable partnership with a young string-bean ‘cracker’ academic whose generosity and courage never fails—and whose initial naivete is honed on this journey into the knowing, thoughtful voice of the chronicler of this book. Border Hacker is by turns heartbreaking, terrifying, hilarious, enraging, and inspiring. To say it humanizes contentious issues is a profound understatement.”

—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy

“Jack Kerouac, move over. In Border Hacker, Levi Vonk and Axel Kirschner’s unlikely friendship makes for the ultimate on-the-road buddy story. Suspenseful, intimate, and superbly told, Border Hacker is an amazing book, and as a tell-all account of the modern migrant experience, it kicks ass and takes no prisoners.”

—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che: A Revolutionary Life

“Combining Vonk’s in-depth reportage on U.S. border policy, predatory shelter operators, and the links between cartels, kidnappers, and the police with Kirschner’s first-person testimony, the two unspool a riveting and disturbing story. Readers will be aghast.”—Publishers Weekly

“An inspiring, timely border story…a significant addition to the literature on an ongoing humanitarian crisis…An engaging work of on-the-ground journalism that exposes root causes of a chronic problem.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Axel and Levi are likable characters, which makes rooting for them easy. This is a cultural anthropology story that’s well-told and eminently readable.”—The Bibliophage

“[A] thrilling, troubling, and wholly unique hybrid of confessional memoir and intrepid reportage…Border Hacker documents the phenomenon of migrant caravanning in the Americas more ably than any other book to my knowledge…is a singularly courageous book.”—Jacobin

“[T]he importance of Border Hacker is not in its allegations of activists’ wrongdoing but in its illustration of the material and bureaucratic challenges of moving through Mexico, which incentivize all sorts of grift.”—The Nation

“We too, after reading these vibrant pages, want to be capable of writing books as necessary and generous as this.”
 —Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet

From the Publisher

01/31/2022

Anthropologist Vonk and undocumented Guatemalan immigrant Kirschner deliver a harrowing account of exploitation along the migrant route from Central America to the U.S. In 2015, Vonk joined a caravan organized by associates of the humanitarian activist Fr. Alejandro Solalinde. The plan was to travel 300 miles from the Guatemala border to Ixtepec, Oaxaca, through some of the most heavily patrolled areas in Mexico, to call attention to a secret “quasi-army” that was “catching and deporting as many Central American migrants as possible... at the behest of the United States.” During the journey, Vonk met Kirschner, who grew up on Long Island and was deported to Guatemala after he got in a traffic accident and the other driver reported him to the police. The two form a fast friendship, though inconsistencies in Kirschner’s story begin to make Vonk suspicious. After the caravan ends, Kirschner reveals to Vonk that he is a computer hacker; he also alleges that activists and politicians associated with Father Solalinde conspired to keep him from reaching the U.S. in order to exploit his hacking skills. Combining Vonk’s in-depth reportage on U.S. border policy, predatory shelter operators, and the links between cartels, kidnappers, and the police with Kirschner’s first-person testimony, the two unspool a riveting and disturbing story. Readers will be aghast. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly