[Access article in PDF] Book Review
Between Two Worlds:
Mexican Immigrants in the United States
General
Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Edited by David G. Gutiérrez. Jaguar Books on Latin America. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996. Tables. Notes. xvii, 271 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $16.95. Between Two Worlds consists of 11 essays written by different scholars on the subject of Mexican immigration and brought together by David G. Gutiérrez, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. In his well-written introductory essay, Gutiérrez provides a useful summary of the important subjects covered by the respective authors' contributions. Gutiérrez also prefaces each contribution with a brief introduction, affording the reader background information and a summary of the issues raised.
The book is carefully organized into three thematic parts. The first part, titled "Historical Antecedents," includes essays by Mary Collette Standart, Mark Reisler, and Manuel García y Griego. These scholars examine the development of prejudice against Sonoran migrants to California in the mid-nineteenth century, the origin of negative stereotypes of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s, and Mexican contract laborers during the postwar Bracero Program, respectively.
The second section, titled "Political and Cultural Contestation," contains articles by Mario T. García, Luisa Moreno, Vicki L. Ruiz, Manuel Peña, and David G. Gutiérrez. Each documents the significance of the border as both a symbol and a reality for Mexican immigrants and their children, how Mexican workers transformed the meaning of citizenship and community in American society, gender roles and generational conflicts over Mexican cultural values, the emergence of class differentiation, and the interrelationship between border, culture, social class, and ethnic identity.
Part 3, titled "Contemporary Perspectives," is the book's strongest part. The articles by Saskia Sassen, Dolores Acevedo and Thomas J. Espenshade, and Roger Rouse address transnational population movements as but one of many global exchanges of capital, commodities, and information across borders. Rouse's analysis of the "border" and the "circuit" of migration reconceptualizes the migration process. The international world system and the circular movement of Mexican migrants and their families, between their receiving communities in the United States and their sending communities in Mexico, reflect the nature of contemporary global inequality as capital flows from the rich to the poor countries and labor flows from the less developed to the more developed regions.
Between Two Worlds, one of the better and more engaging essay collections on Mexican immigration, investigates the complex patterns of cultural continuities and changes affecting Mexican and Mexican Americans living in Mexico and the United States. These writings reflect the diverse interpretations and methods that characterize contemporary Mexican immigration historiography. The essays by Standart, Reisler, and García y Griego provide a historical context for contemporary debates over Mexican immigration. The essays on political and cultural contestation demonstrate that the U.S.-Mexico border is a contested terrain shaped by changing individual and collective [End Page 162] definitions of Mexican culture, ethnic identity, citizenship, and national loyalty. Between Two Worlds does not include an adequate representation of the growing body of scholarship on the relationship between a global economy and the emergence of gendered immigration patterns. For instance, undocumented and unskilled women are the source of cheap labor in a growing informal sector fueled by foreign competition and the demand for low-cost goods and services in the American economy. The essays in part 3 provide models for further work on this theme.
Nonetheless, both specialists and general readers will be enriched by the past and current thinking about Mexican immigration contained in Between Two Worlds. It is an important contribution to the literature on Mexican immigration studies. Gutiérrez offers ways to develop discussion about the historical legacy of Mexican immigration, its long-term consequences, and its social, political, and economic implications.
Zaragosa Vargas
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States (review)
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