Women's Migration Networks in Mexico and Beyond (review)

Anthropologist Tamara Diana Wilson examines the role of women's networks in internal and transnational migration. She relies primarily on oral history interviews to interpret the role of kinship networks in the migration experience of impoverished Mexican women from the squatter settlement of Colonia Popular in Mexicali, Baja California. In this interpretive work, the author draws extensively from oral histories conducted in the field from 1988 to 1992 in Colonia Popular. The interviews were conducted with 149 women who resided on the colonia's occupied lots. These were followed by thirty-eight in-depth interviews focused on migration and work histories; Wilson chose five families from these thirty-eight interviews for further investigation. Doña Consuelo and her daughters, AnaMaria and Irma, are the focus of this study.

The author immerses herself as a trained participant and observer into the lives of Doña Consuelo and her daughters. She lives among them, marries among them, and embeds herself in their day-to-day activities and lives through acts of reciprocity—she pays for AnaMaria's tuition for secretarial school, and Doña Consuelo reciprocates with invitations to dinner, family baptisms, birthdays, weddings, and quinceañera celebrations. It is this special relationship that allows the author to become an insider in the lives of these women and their families. With her status as an insider, the author is privy to all kinds of information that an outsider would not have access to. It is evident that the boundaries between interviewer and subject became blurred at times. As a Spanish speaker, I noticed nothing lost in the interview translations.

The author acknowledges the role of memory and limitations in conducting oral history interviews "slanted by selective perception and selective editing" (xi). The author's interpretations and extensive use of secondary sources ground the voices of her subjects squarely in the latest scholarship on migration. Thus, the limitations of selective memory are compensated by secondary sources. Wilson provides a detailed discussion on methodology in the introduction and expounds on the selection and interview process throughout this investigation.

The six chapters that make up the oral histories consist of conversations, interviews, interpretations, and unedited field notes that open a window into the daily lives of Doña Consuelo, her daughters, their husbands, and a select number of their network members. The author is careful to protect the identity of her subjects, several of whom are binational families. That is, some are residents, some citizens, and some undocumented. All subjects have been given pseudonyms, and the names, businesses, and locations where they work and reside in the U.S. were assigned fictitious names.

The novice historian, sociologist, anthropologist, or curious reader will not be disappointed to learn that the author has laid a solid foundation in the first three chapters and thus anchors the life stories of her subjects in history and theory. Chapter 1 provides readers with a thorough background on women's labor history in Mexico. The author has the ability to take readers through an extended period, 1876-1970, without losing their interest or confusing them with too much detail. She skillfully negotiates import-substitution industrialization, Mexico's economic crisis of 1982, North American Free Trade Agreement, and the cult of the Virgin Mary as she provides her readers with a look at the economic, social, and cultural changes that have impacted Mexican women's labor history. Chapter 2 is a succinct history of Mexican migration to the U.S. at the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848. The survey of immigration laws lacks breadth and depth. The reader may want to pursue some outside reading to be adequately informed. In chapter 3, Wilson provides a historiography of migration. She deftly introduces her readers to the most current scholarship in theories of migration, migration networks, social capital, and transnationalism with a focus on gender migration. The remaining eight chapters focus on oral histories collected in 1988 in the squatter...