Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (review)

Mexican immigrants are a recent addition to New York City's enormous and venerable melting pot. Most of New York's Mexicans hail from the Mixteca region of southwestern Mexico. Smith offers an ethnography of Mixtecans from a single sending village, Ticuani. Although the network linkages between New York City and Ticuani are quite powerful, with 84 percent of Ticuanis abroad residing in New York City, Smith is not interested in migrant networks. Rather, Smith has undertaken to document two generations of migrant transnationalism on both sides of the border. By transnationalism Smith means "practices and relationships linking migrants and their children with the home country."(6) Transnationalism became a serious focus of immigration research in the 1980s when anthropologists introduced not only the term, but also the claim, still the literature's main contention, that contemporary immigrants were living simultaneously in home and host county whereas, in the past, immigrants to the United States had broken ties with their home countries and built lives in and around their host countries. The consequence was expected to be retardation of cultural and structural assimilation, possibly for very protracted periods of time.

Ironically, although Smith is addressing transnationalism, a hyper-contemporary phenomenon, the design of his research somewhat resembles The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which was written by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki back in 1921 (p. 298, n. 10). This is praiseworthy. Like those luminaries of yore, whose example ought to have been more frequently emulated, Smith operates on both sides of the international border, not just on the U.S. side. This bi-national presence enables Smith to evaluate the simultaneous effect of American experience upon the cultural climate of a Mexican village that is still shipping greenhorns to the Big Apple – without losing track of the conventional interest in peasants' adaptation to urban life. However, this international coverage required hard work. Smith's ethnography took 17 years to complete.

Because his field work spanned so many years, Smith was able to track individual second generation youths as they passed from childhood to adolescence. He maintained ties with them throughout, and knew their names and life stories. This is most unusual. His interest in youth opens with the worry, taken from Portes and Rumbaut, that immigrant Mexican youth will assimilate into a hostile underclass culture rather than into the middle-class mainstream. Results only partially support that expectation as some youths fall into the underclass while others steer clear. For those interested in juvenile gangs, Smith's text reproduces the mental life of immigrant youths in rich detail and in two languages. All the Mexican youths employ the term "stepping up" to designate how one maintains face when disrespect is perceived. These youths are status conscious in the original sense: they care about how others rank them.

Gender roles receive close attention as well. Smith demolishes the simplistic expectation that, when transplanted to New York City, Mexican men collapse into a crisis of failed machismo or that Mexican women leap into liberation. Some do, but others do not. No matter which gender ideology they adopt, Mexicans apparently cope with New York rather well. Mental illness is not in Smith's text or index. The Mexicans also cope effectively with return visits to Ticuani where divorce and organized crime are now part of the cultural landscape thanks to the baleful influence of the United States. Few Mexicans abroad mix gender strategies becoming macho today and egalitarian tomorrow. It's one or the other, and the prime justification for embracing gender egalitarianism is still the money it brings. Discussing gender ideologies, Smith introduces the gender relationships of Mexican immigrants of the first and second generation in the Spanish terminologies the immigrants themselves employ. For example, the Mexicans' concept of vergüenza referred to a female's laudatory incapacity for action in the face of badgering men folk.(97-98) Americans who have read Smith's text acquire...