Mexican Migrants: The Attractions and Realities of the United States

By and large, the most recent economic recession significantly reduced employment opportunities for thousands of Mexican migrants settled in the United States, prompting many to return to their homeland in the midst of heightened anti-immigrant rhetoric and increased immigration raids at the U.S. workplace. This in turn decreased remittances from Mexican migrants abroad.¹ Yet many Mexican migrants (both documented and undocumented) decided to weather the recession in the United States, supported by solidarity ties and social networks: many nodes of friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, paisanos, compadres, and related forms of kinship.

According to official estimates, there were 11.7 million Mexican migrants in the United States in 2007, comprising 31 percent of the total foreign-born population. In 1995, only 20 percent of those eligible to become citizens had done so; this percentage rose to 35 percent by 2005. This 75 percent increase compares to the 20 percent increase for all other migrants.² By 2007, there were 2.5 million naturalized U.S. citizens claiming Mexico as their birthplace. These figures suggest that Mexican migrants are increasingly interested in incorporating themselves into the social fabric of the United States. However, a great many are also interested in maintaining a distinct ethnic and racial identity (on the self-designation of indigenous migrants, see Stephen, 209-230).

The books under review in this essay attempt to disentangle the complex dynamics of Mexican migration to the United States. They outline the critical distinction between migrants from urban and rural areas; the push and pull of expulsion and reception in urban contexts; the effectiveness of border enforcement as a deterrent to migration; racial and ethnic discrimination among Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mayan indigenous migrants; and transnational civic and political engagement. All draw on regional, community, and local studies to unpack migrant journeys and their continuities and differences, using multisited ethnographies in their analyses.

In Metropolitan Migrants, Rubén Hernández-León analyzes the structural origins of international migration among working-class households in the Monterrey-Houston circuit. With empirical evidence from surveys, participant observation, life histories, and interviews at several sites in Monterrey and Houston between 1995 and 2005, Hernández-León offers a glimpse of the social construction of transborder networks in two sending and receiving metropolitan areas.

Most classic and contemporary studies of the social dimension of Mexican migration to the United States have focused on journeys originating in rural areas. This emphasis is possibly explained by the slow emergence of distinct patterns in rural versus urban migration. Such patterns are difficult to trace because many studies consider only birthplace or current residence without linking internal and international migration histories.³ Hernández-León notes that it was not until the late 1980s that researchers found that 30 percent of the labor migrants crossing Mexico's northern border came from cities of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. This percentage grew in the 1990s, yet rural migrants still predominated. Seeking to provide a more dynamic account of Monterrey's emergence as a sending region, Hernández-León traces its historical roots, also citing surveys of hundreds of workers from La Fama, a typical working-class neighborhood in Monterrey. By the end of the 1990s, he finds, Monterrey, Mexico's third-largest city, had changed from a "magnet for immigration . . . into a source...