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Reviewed by:
  • Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
  • Ruben Flores
Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By Alicia Schmidt Camacho. New York: New York University Press. 2008.

Liberal progressives need no reminder that the US-Mexico border has been the scene over the last fifteen years of brutal violence against young women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and heat stroke in Arizona's deserts for Mexican laborers seeking work in the United States. These episodes in human tragedy (and precursors from earlier decades) provide the moral impetus for Alicia Schmidt Camacho's study of the "migrant imaginary," those social aspirations and ideals of justice that migrants and their defenders have developed as a counterweight to the economic imperatives that have forced their movement into the United States. In five chapters, Part One of her book analyzes the ethical defense of migrant Mexicans constructed by the canonical scholar-activists of the borderlands between 1920 and 1965, including Americo Paredes, Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Moreno, and Ernesto Galarza. Part Two brings those concerns closer to the last decades of the twentieth [End Page 156] century, exploring the exploitation of female labor in the Juarez maquila industry in one chapter and the narratives of loss that contemporary migrants have recorded during their transit to the United States in another.

In Schmidt's Marxian analysis, Mexican migrants have been locked in an international capitalist economy that has exploited their labor for more than 100 years without the delivery of democratic rights and social welfare from the US and Mexican states. In this model, the state has been the tool of capitalist whites whose racist assumptions have created a diaspora of Mexico-descended peoples who are not allowed to share in the privileges of liberal citizenship. Amid these repressive structures, however, Schmidt argues that migrant sojourners and their intellectual patrons have challenged capitalist subordination across the breadth of the twentieth century. Communist sympathizers Emma Tenayuca and Luisa Moreno used the international labor movement to challenge Mexican subordination during the 1930s. Folklorist Americo Paredes constructed bilingual narratives in the 1940s and 50s whose dual signifiers subverted the confines of the nation-state. Post-NAFTA feminist activism in El Paso, Texas has brought attention to globalization processes that have reduced immigrant women to an expendable labor force stretching across the US and Mexico. A single feature unites the moral visions manifested in these critiques of the capitalist order, Schmidt argues. Whether expressed in 1930s Marxist theory, the universal language of the postwar civil rights movement, or current discourses of globalization, those critiques were all premised on the inherent unity of a binational bloc of Mexico-descended people. Moreover, by consistently subordinating the conventions of the nation-state to the larger geographic and moral visions of an international constituency of laborers, migrants from Mexico have played a central role in exposing the limitations and contradictions of the nation-state in North America.

Schmidt's attention to social theory in Mexico represents a step forward in analysis that is usually centered on the United States alone. Even more impressive is her analysis of women as trade unionists, laborers, and political theorists who made fundamental contributions to liberation struggles that are usually understood as a history of men. Her use of novels, films, ethnography, intellectual history, and literary criticism also makes this one of the richest methodological texts I have ever read. Ultimately, however, these strengths do not respond to the weaknesses of the argument. First, although Schmidt has set out to chart the oppositional ideals of justice crafted by immigrant laborers, there are few migrant voices in the text. Americo Paredes and Emma Tenayuca—both US born—defended an international diaspora of people across the US and Mexico, but Schmidt presents little evidence that migrant sojourners created ethical worlds that were equivalent to the ones crafted by these border intellectuals. Even when border intellectuals had themselves migrated into the United States, as in the case of Luisa Moreno or Ernesto Galarza, Schmidt does not suggest why their visions of justice adequately represented the ideals of the hundreds of thousands who were simultaneously flowing northward. Mexico's people crafted wondrous moral...

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