Making Sense of Latin American Immigrant Experiences in the United States

From the 1960s through the 1980s, scholarship on Latin American immigrants to the United States focused largely on their working lives, depicting these immigrants as a necessary albeit exploited labor force. Since then, along with implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and the expansion of global capitalism in the twenty-first century, there has been growing recognition in academic and policy-making circles of the ever-greater movement of labor, capital, goods, information, and ideas across international boundaries. These flows should be understood in a post-9/11 political climate, which tends to justify anti-immigrant sentiment and antiterrorist policies. In response, migration scholars have searched for new paradigms to make sense of the experiences of today's immigrants in the United States and to understand these immigrants not only as laborers in an underclass. The goal is to grasp the wider panorama of their lives betwixt and between, both here and there.

This review examines five recent additions to a growing body of scholarship informed by theoretical gazes "from below" on transnational processes and by a methodological shift toward qualitative research and the use of personal narratives. The authors are scholar-activists overtly committed to bringing to public attention the everyday lives and struggles of immigrants from Mexico, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and other points south of the United States. All five books draw heavily on long-term, multisited ethnographies by researchers who spent from seven to ten years eliciting stories from migrants bound northward. Their stories deal with the (often dangerous) decisions taken and their causes; they chart the dreams and struggles of immigrants to overcome poverty, to survive with a dose of dignity, and hopefully to carve out a better life for their children. In a very real sense, the ethnographer-authors—almost all working in California and the Pacific Northwest, where many immigrants have formed ethnic enclaves—become their subjects' storytellers. They do so compelled by the hope of improving the lives of their interviewees by informing public opinion and ultimately immigration, trade, and welfare policy in North America.

The works reviewed here do not, however, simply give voice to the often invisible and downtrodden immigrant who made the trek to El Norte catapulted by the heavy toll of neoliberal economic restructuring on poor and working-class families in the cities and countrysides of Latin America. Rather, in a methodological departure from prevailing scholarship that too often treats research subjects as passive informants, these authors all foreground their collaboration with immigrants as individuals and groups increasingly organized to move forward collectively. It is thus fitting that two books (Marchevsky and Theoharis; Smith and Bakker) are also collaborative in authorship. All five works discuss at length their theoretical and methodological points of departure, study design, the ethics of their research, and their engagement with social justice for Latin American immigrants to the United States. In a nutshell, readers are briefed as to the authors' trajectories and biases, and learn how the contradictory nature of the everyday lives of immigrants has guided the analytical gaze from below of research on transnationalism. Smith and Bakker explicitly develop what they dub "transnational ethnography" in the search to "make sense of the power relations and meaning-making practices of [their] ethnographic subjects" (216–217...