Most of us worry about what can go wrong when traveling, even if those of us who are United States citizens realize the phenomenal privilege that we have in crossing most borders. We might lose our passports, get kidnapped, get lost, miss our flights, spend more money than we intended. Recently I fretted about letting my teenage son travel alone because some countries have cracked down on unaccompanied minors due to amplified concerns about human trafficking. But for most Americans, ending up in a Mexican detention center in the middle of a global pandemic isn’t, even in our most neurotic moments, among these intrusive fears.

Yet this did happen to Jacobin contributing editor Belén Fernández (who is also a friend of mine). Through a series of screwups — she had been living in Mexico since the beginning of the pandemic, and her migration paperwork was not up to date — Fernández landed in one of the worst places one can imagine: a prison that has been singled out for criticism by human right monitors for overcrowding, detainees’ lack of access to water and many other vital human needs, and detainees committing suicide.

“Before I ended up in Siglo XXI,” she writes, “it had not occurred to me that my own movement through Mexican territory might ever be curtailed in any way — such being my shameful normalization of gringo privilege even as I opposed it in theory.” Fernández’s singularly bad travel luck is good fortune for the reading public. Her book Inside Siglo XXI is a hilarious and deeply humane account of imperial violence by one of our most astute socialist critics of US capitalism.