Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

The story of migration from Central America to the United States over the past few decades—especially in the last decade—is almost unutterably complex, and the misery driving it, and the misery further caused by the border's cruelty, are almost unutterable as well. But Blitzer makes a coherent and moving story out of this history, both by tracing the larger political forces across the region and by finding personal stories inextricable from those politics, especially of those, like Juan Romagoza, a Salvadoran health worker who is tortured by his home government, escapes north to work as an activist and clinician in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and returns home to continue his work, who find they can only respond to the crisis with labor and love. In the world Blitzer describes—our world—borders are everything, and are at the same time constantly blurred by the human connections made across them.