This book imagines a hypothesis: what happened during the year and a half in which Benito Juárez, who would end up being the first indigenous president of Mexico, lived in exile in New Orleans? Accompanied by a small group of political exiles, Juárez landed in 1853 in that stinking city that, located on the banks of a swamp, absorbed them like a sponge. There they surrender to the mud, the jasmine flowers, the music, the strangeness of the language and the unbearable summer, but, above all, they come face to face with the stark reality of the trade in human beings, a market that never ends. stops. They will discover that New Orleans is a hive of heterogeneous identities where imprisoned women are sold in the streets and where capitalism shows its primitive, most grotesque drive.