The Coyote's Bicycle Quotes

“It seems odd that a story about a gift-the possibility of a new life in a new and prosperous country-begins with a thief, but in some ways this one does.”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“This was the very role of the bicycles that wheeled over this same topography Just as seawater defined the tidal lands, the bicycles revealed America's economic and social systems by floating though its bloodstream and coloring-with sparkling chrome, metallic paints, a whir of spokes and flicker of handlebar ribbons-the murkiest corners and furthest reaches.”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“I didn’t need to follow these particular bicycles anymore.They’d found their rightful place. They’d descended through the seven rings of fire--of importation, sale, impoundment, auction, contraband, confiscation, and donation--and here they were again in the hands of fresh new cyclist. It was as if the bikes had graduated from weird times on the traveling freak show, having filled the roles of the reptile man, the fire-eater, the sword-swallower, and now in retirement they’d become staid, calm, dutiful, and serviceable again--like postal workers, customs clerks, and crosswalk guards with colorful, secret pasts.”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“On satellite images of the globe at night, the Baja peninsula is one of the last regions of the world—in a league with the Amazon, Central Africa, and Siberia—that recedes into a blackness as deep and thick as the oceans. The two main exceptions on this thousand-mile strip of mountains and deserts are the light clusters of the Tijuana-to-Ensenada corridor on the north end, and the state capital La Paz and resort towns of Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip. In contrast to the Age of Discovery, however, nowadays the lightless, roadless places of the map are not the lands where monsters lurk.

By 2007, the monsters lurked in the cities.

(p. 93)”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“Yet in 2012, as Fernandez was ushered through a new eighteen-foot-tall steel gate that had been erected around Pat Nixon’s park, a Mexican looking through the fence said to her, “Hey, who do you think is more free? You in America, or me over here? You are being guarded by men with guns. I just walked over here from the taco cart.”

(p. 70)”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“Abandoned bicycles hold the unique ability of reflecting the desires of their finders. They are equally junk and prizes. Art and vehicles. They move people and goods and plans along. They become machines in the service of their riders’ willpowers and destinies. By following the mass of these bikes that caught my eye even as they rested, I thought I’d discover just where that collective willpower and destiny led.

Everybody likes bikes.

(p. xvi)”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“Dios o Diablo?" he asked. I was confused. What was he really asking?"Dios o Diablo?" he repeated. A riddle? Or was he demanding that I choose a side? God or the devil. God or the devil. I saw the pen in his hand like a dagger. "Dios o Diablo?" I knew that God was the answer, in this Catholic country especially. But this man looked like he worked for the devil. Directly. The repetition of the question acted on me with the fury of a carnival tornado. I sat in a shiver of shiver of sensory confusion, unable to reply.”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire

“El Indio’s gang pulled in over thirty-one million tax-free dollars in under three years.” Taylor writes, “Everybody along the chain was paid: the customs agent, the police, the American police departments that sold the bikes, the truck drivers, bike mechanics, recruiters, checadors, comunicadors, ganchos, guias, and levantons...a child whose parents left him with an elderly grandfather in an impoverished village, who attended school part-time to the seventh grade, came to the border, lost everything dear to him, and became a millionaire...then he vanished.”
― Kimball Taylor, The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire