Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants by Hilary Parsons Dick (review)

Hilary Parsons Dick's long-awaited ethnography, Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants, provides novel and astute insight into the dynamics of the well-examined sphere of Mexican migration. In spite of the book's title, the book focuses primarily on the perspectives of those who do not migrate in the town of Uriangato, an industrialized small city in the state of Guanajuato, in the neighborhood she calls La Libertad.

Building on an initial role in Douglas Massey's Princeton-based longitudinal study, the massive Mexican Migration Project, Dick effectively positions herself in the first months of research as an "apprentice," thus enabling her to credibly inquire about the details of the lives of her interlocutors while living among them, without violating the norms and expectations of decent female personhood and sociality germane to the community. She makes visible the ways that the ethnographer's best and primary instrument is herself, attentive always to the ways that she is perceived, moves, and interacts, which is as revealing as anything else in her field sites.

Uriangato is to Mexico what the Plains states are to the United States. It is a town in the Bajío region of Central Mexico, and is "posited in state-endorsed imaginaries of national belonging as the heartland of the country: populated by straight-shooting and humble people of faith" (197). By situating herself in a place as central in symbolic and geographic visions of Mexico as this, Dick demonstrates the fragility at the heart of the imagined nation. Even these salt-of-the-earth folks struggle to communicate and embody fully enfranchised Mexicanness, acquisition of which relies on spatial mobility at the same time that migration is perceived always as an abandonment of the national project. By noticing the fragility of Mexican identity in Mexico, she enriches and deepens her readers' understandings that are perhaps inevitably shaped primarily by scholarly, artistic, and activist accounts of the struggle for citizenship rights and belonging by Mexican people in the US. In this way, like Alex Chávez's recent virtuosic ethnography, Sounds of Crossing (Duke University Press, 2017), she recenters Mexico in the imaginary of Mexicans and defies facile oversimplification of what, in migration literature, are often glossed as "communities of origin." Identity and notions of nationality are, we see clearly in this book, not only precarious but also inherently classed, gendered, and racialized in ways that continually challenge her interlocutors' sense of well-being and social mobility, vis-à-vis each other and ideals of personhood that are always impossible fully to occupy.

This cultural and linguistic anthropology book is of inherent interest to Mexican migrationists, even though it is in many ways more of an ethnography of nonmobility than of mobility. Her interlocutors hold down their homes, their families, and the spaces in which they live by creatively laying claim in neighborhood dynamics, the physical layout of their homes, and the nightly sojourns sitting in chairs on the sidewalk out front. Dick is often the one who moves, always careful to do so in a visibly "respectable" fashion, and knows she's getting things right when she's invited to see a bedroom or bathroom, the inner sanctum of homes reserved only for the most trustworthy. In this way, in the vein of ethnographies of contemporary Mexican social relations like those by Kristen Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Matthew Gutman, she demonstrates that physical movement is perhaps less important than it might seem, and that going deeper is as important as going farther.