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Reviewed by:
  • Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants
  • David G. Gutierrez
Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants. By Robert Courtney Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. x, 375. Illustrations. Maps. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Over the past several years, scholars of migration have begun to question some of the basic conceptual tools of their research endeavors. Increasingly frustrated by the loose usage of macro-analytical terms like "transnationalism," "globalization," and "transnational community," they have sharpened their focus to test the conceptual and empirical premises underlying such ideas. With this important study, sociologist Robert C. Smith has established himself as one of the most thoughtful and provocative of these revisionist thinkers. Based on close ethnographic research at both ends of an important migration circuit joining a small municipio in Puebla, Mexico with its satellite migrant community in New York City, the study provides insights into a number of vital questions. These include the social dynamics involved in the establishment and consolidation of transnational social networks over time, the impact of such networks on gender roles and the socialization of the young in both contexts, and, perhaps most centrally, the potentially powerful implications of the activities of expatriates in both Mexican homeland and U.S. politics.

Although a number of recent studies have begun to map how the rapidly growing Mexican expatriate population in the United States has influenced Mexican domestic politics, Smith's richly detailed ethnographic research provides one of the clearest views of how this process has worked in a specific locale. Smith takes issue with those who have suggested that ongoing global economic restructuring and attendant labor migration are indications of a diminution of the reach of the nation-state and its institutions. To the contrary, Smith suggests that what is actually occurring in Mexico is a much more complex process in which transnational actors are clearly influencing events, but only within the very real local constraints imposed by traditional organs of state power. Smith develops his argument by analyzing the often uneasy relationships between members of the hometown association based in New York and local residents in Puebla, and concludes that although migrants are clearly changing structures of local life in Mexico, "the institutions of the [Mexican] [End Page 284] state and political parties, even on a local level, [continue to] matter a great deal in the emergence of the larger forces of transnationalization and globalization" (p. 90).

Smith comes to similarly nuanced conclusions in provocative sections on migration's impact on extant gender systems and on the life-course among so-called second-generation youth in both locales. Indeed, in what are perhaps the most provocative chapters of the study, the author explores the ways in which both U.S.-born and Mexican-born offspring of the migrants are compelled to negotiate the tricky social and cultural terrain created by deeply rooted networks joining communities-of-origin in Mexico with satellite communities in the North. Smith is particularly good is teasing out how traditional, Mexican notions of respect, family honor, and what he calls "rancho masculinity" (and femininity) are transformed by the process of transnational migration and community formation. Again, he suggests that while physical mobility between the United States and Mexico has undoubtedly changed gendered hierarchies for both adults and children, the direction of change is not linear and reflects the ambivalence individuals feel when they make choices between different cultural values and orientations.

As the author notes himself, the study leaves some important questions unanswered. Chief among these are the questions, on the one hand, of how the integration will play out for permanent residents in the United States and, on the other, just how durable transnational ties will be for second- and third-generation family members as they periodically visit Ticuani. This reader would have liked to read more of Smith's views of the implications of both the ongoing economic polarization transforming Mexico and the United States and more on the demographic revolution currently transforming U.S. society, but these are minor quibbles. Indeed, given the distorted nature of too much of the academic and political debate on "globalization" and immigration...

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