Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands 

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“The Marauders is a blistering book, a hard-ass stare into the voracious mouth of the US-Mexico border. Patrick Strickland has done a fine piece of reporting from places we don’t dare to tread.” — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway 

This real-life Western tells the story of how citizens in a small Arizona border town stood up to anti-immigrant militias and vigilantes. 

The Marauders uncovers the riveting nonfiction saga of far-right militias terrorizing the border towns of southern Arizona. In one of the towns profiled, Arivaca, rogue militia members killed a man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009. In response, the residents organized and spent two years trying to push  the new militias out through boycotts and by urging local businesses to  ban  them. The militias and vigilante groups again raised the stakes, spreading Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories alleging that town residents were complicit in child sex trafficking, prompting fears of vigilante violence.   

The Marauders flips the standard formula most often applied to stories about immigration and the far right. Too often those stories are told from the perspective of the ones committing the violence. While Strickland doesn't shy away from exploring those dark themes, the far right are not the protagonists of the book. Rather, the people targeted by hate groups, and the individuals who rose up to stop them in their tracks, are the heroes of this dramatic story.

Patrick Strickland is a journalist and writer from Texas. He is the author of The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands (Melville House 2022) and Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe's Anti-Fascist Struggle (AK Press 2018). He's the news editor at the Dallas Observer and a former senior reporter at Al Jazeera English. His reportage has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Politico EU, The New Republic, and The Nation, among others.

Shane Burley is the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017). His work has appeared in places such as NBC News, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, The Daily Beast, Truthout, In These Times and Protean."

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The Marauders: An Afternoon with Patrick Strickland and Shane Burley