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Reviewed by:
  • I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty
  • Paloma E. Villegas
Patricia Zavella, I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2011)

Patricia Zavella’s book is the result of thirteen years of research in the Santa Cruz area of northern California. Drawing on transnational, assimilation, queer, feminist, and border theories, Zavella tracks the trajectories, in terms of time and mobility, of differently situated Mexicans. Her respondents include undocumented migrants, migrants who have received permanent residence and Mexican-Americans or Chicana/os who grew up in the US. In addition to migration, both internal and international, Zavella’s respondents have another factor in common: they come from working-class communities and encounter day-today struggles to make ends meet. This is one of the strengths of the book. The diversity in respondents disrupts the image of undocumented migrants living apart from those who are documented and the idea that their struggles are diametrically different. In fact, Zavella demonstrates the tensions among Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants as well as their ties. For instance, many Mexicans in California are part of mixed-status families where some are undocumented and some are documented.

The book makes other important contributions. The first is that it focuses on one site, Santa Cruz County, and follows the lives of migrants as well as the changing politics, economics, population and infrastructure. For instance, in Chapter 3, “The Working Poor,” Zavella takes time to describe the living conditions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Santa Cruz county, with its high housing costs, large number of temporary residents who work in the agricultural sector, and networks of people who come from the same town in Mexico. She also discusses the work opportunities available to the working poor, migrants, and undocumented in the region (of course these are not mutually exclusive categories), which she argues are organized along racial and gender lines. Finally, she links the context of Santa Cruz county with transnational processes, particularly with the implementation of the nafta and the subsequent moving of agricultural and canning operations abroad. Zavella demonstrates how workers, specifically in the canning industry, mobilized both modes of resistance to restructuring and solidarity with workers in Mexico where their employment moved.

The second strength of the book is conceptual. Zavella develops “peripheral vision” as a way to describe the transnational subjectivity of many of her respondents. She proposes peripheral vision as a response to arguments that migrants experience a “social death” when they migrate to a new place. Echoing the work of transnational migration scholars, Zavella demonstrates that migrants are not uprooted; they produce ties with “home” and “host” countries, however tenuous. This peripheral lens demonstrates how [End Page 329] the Mexican diaspora in the US is invested in what happens in Mexico, even if they were not born there. It also demonstrates that people experience trans-national ties and peripheral vision even if they have not migrated. Put differently, peripheral vision, as a transnational subjectivity, is not unidirectional. Like other sites in the US, Santa Cruz County has a large number of migrants from specific towns in Mexico due to the extensive networks that have been produced through continuous migration. Residents of those small towns experience peripheral vision through their interests in US politics and current events, which affect their family members and co-nationals abroad. Finally, Zavella argues that the ties produced through peripheral vision extend beyond family affiliations to also include political and cultural connections.

One of the drawbacks of the book is the large amount of interview data that appears in early chapters, which in my opinion the author could have engaged more extensively. This approach changes in the last two chapters, which for me were the most nuanced and developed. Chapter 5, “The divided home,” delves into the family lives of Zavella’s respondents, focusing on how “the family often becomes [both] a site where surveillance and struggles for social control take place and is also viewed as a refuge from the vicissitudes of a cruel world.” (157) The chapter does not offer a romanticized notion of...

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