Border Hacker

”[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…Border Hacker is a singularly courageous book.“–Jacobin

“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.”

“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.” ​

“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.”

Levi Vonk is a writer, photographer, and anthropologist who lives with Central American migrants traveling through Mexico. Levi is a doctoral student in the UC Berkeley/UCSF joint program in Medical Anthropology and a former Fulbright Fellow in Mexico. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and on NPR.