GIVEN the historical role of the Latin American chronicle as a genre that helps both author and reader to make sense of emerging social realities, it is fitting that the chronicle style has been adopted by contemporary journalists who write about Mexican migration to the United States. In the last three decades, journalists from both sides of the border have increasingly drawn on literary traditions first employed by the conquistadores and later used by the American New Journalists of the 1960s and 70s and contemporary Mexican chroniclers of the 70s and 80s, to interpret the dramatic, tragic and at times shocking realities of the U.S.-Mexico border crossing experience for American and Mexican readers. Although journalists have been using the chronicle form to interpret the Mexican migration experience through a creative lens since at least the Bracero period, the publication of book-length migration chronicles increased dramatically since the advent of Operation Gatekeeper and similar border security measures in the early 1990s. Migration chronicles published during the post-Gatekeeper period provide a narrative footprint that has influenced numerous subsequent migration chroniclers by demonstrating how the literary and creative influences of the chronicle genre can help to bring discursive visibility to the figure of the undocumented migrant.