While teaching the TPRS Publishing novel, Esperanza, we watched an interview with a Honduran coyote. The coyote talks about the business of human trafficking and bribing officials along the way as well as how much the coyotes charge. We watched this at the end of chapter 9 where the parents suddenly need to bring their children to the US

Then, we watched clips from a documentary that Mike Peto shared on his blog. While we didn’t watch the actual documentary, we did watch several clips available from the documentary’s website. It shows the Tapachula Detention Center in Chiapas. We watched a portion of about 4 clips. These clips show the faces and voices of children, who are in the same situation as Ricardito and Liliana.

We talked about how scared the kids looked and their only desire was to be with the family. It was a really eye-opening experience for my students. Seeing these kids showed them that the experiences from the book are real. Listening to “Jose’s best friend in El Salvador” nearly broke my heart when the kid said “Ya no juego mucho como jugaba antes con él” and when the interviewer asks him if he could have anything in the world that would make him happy and responds that it would be for his friend to be reunited with his mother.