Los Coyotaje's de Nuevo Austin

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Smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. It is a major chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches all the way back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment since the United States’ and Mexico’s trade concerns focused primarily on tariff collection. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, upcoming smugglers continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of the act as just. The Rio Grande border, long a central character in numerous historic accounts of smugglers and revolutionaries, remains a focus for contemporary concerns about security. Fronterizos (person who lives on a national border) negotiated the rules and regulations imposed on them by distant capitals and subsequent events, both worldwide and in the United States, which led to a new emphasis on smuggling guns, drugs, and alcohol. These smugglers, called Enganchadores (literally translated to “hooker”), were labor recruiters who convinced Mexican peasants to make the trip north into the United States on the newly completed Mexican-American railways, guaranteeing jobs once in the U.S. Despite the fact that the border was not well guarded, the enganchadores were still breaking U.S. law. An 1891 law “prohibited the importation of alien laborers by the use of advertisements circulated in foreign countries which promised employment.”

In light of this comes the term Coyotaje, which is the Mexican cultural practice of hiring an intermediary, known as a coyote, to get around an inconvenient or burdensome government regulation. Same time, the term also refers to the brokerage of commodities. In both these senses, coyotaje has played a fundamental role in facilitating mass Mexican smuggling and migration to the U.S.A. since passage of the Chinese exclusion and contract labor laws of the 1880s. El diccionario breve de mexicanismos defines a coyote as un intermediario ilegítimo de trámites burocráticos [an illegitimate facilitator of bureaucratic procedures]. Whereas according to El diccionario breve de mexicanismos, the term coyotaje refers to the “ocupación y actividad del coyote” [the occupation and activity of the coyote]. With regard to border-crossing, coyotaje may be thought of as the set of strategies and practices engaged in by coyotes to facilitate migrants’ and unauthorized goods entry into the United States. Coyotajes act much like enganchadores in that they are middlemen between Mexico and the United States for hopeful immigrants and traders. Though while coyotaje weren't directly recruiters for specific American companies like the enganchadores were, their existence is undoubtedly a continuation of the enganchadores’s legacy throughout Mexico and America.

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This thread will showcase the growth and development of a new age of coyotajes/smugglers in New Austin, South Tahoma. Roleplay showcased will include interactions with Mexican banditos, contractors, fences, law enforcement officials and every-day citizens. As this is not a faction, involvement in said roleplay comes strictly through In-Character interactions, unless you wish to roleplay out your new characters immigration from Mexico. If so, you can PM fronto on forums or wheresfronto on Discord so we can orchestrate the roleplay. 

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"The country is filled with energetic and enterprising men, rendered desperate by being reduced from affluence to poverty through the vicissitudes of the times. That's why these smugglers were a thing, whether you supported them or not. We called them coyotajes, and this story is about how they died . . ." 

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 El Gato's Return to New Austin from Mexico, having fled after the gruesome shootout with U.S. Marshals in Armadillo.

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TUMBLEWEED, NEW AUSTIN .1900 
"A lonely, Godforsaken place; home to veterans, outsiders & wayfarers - it's decline hastened by the fallout of the Mexican-American war."

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