Brokered Boundaries: Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times

Preface

Preface A book of this length and complexity necessarily owes its existence to many people besides the authors. Our first debt of gratitude goes to Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation, whose faith in the project and extension of a presidential award to the investigators made data collection possible in the first place. We also thank our field workers, Karen A. Pren and Gabriela Portas, who collaborated with us in doing much of the interviewing. We likewise owe a debt of thanks to Irena Paola Cubides, who undertook the arduous task of transcribing the interview tapes to create machine-readable text files that could be entered into qualitative databases and subjected to systematic analysis; she also helped us a great deal by later going through the texts to remove identifying information so that the data could be made available to users via the Internet. Chang Chung and Karen Pren worked with us to create the qualitative and quantitative databases and make them publicly available through links to the Immigrant Identity Project on the websites of both the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project (see http:/ /opr.princeton.edu/archive/ iip/). Suzanne Nichols, the director of publications at the Russell Sage Foundation, was very helpful and encouraging in all stages of preparation and production, and two external reviewers offered detailed and very helpful comments on two separate drafts of the book. While we owe all of the foregoing people a great debt for making the book possible , we are most indebted to the many migrants we interviewed and interacted with in the course of our fieldwork. All of the textual material reproduced here was translated from the Spanish by Douglas Massey, with assistance from Magaly Sánchez R. on Portuguese texts. Our respondents and informants donated considerable time and effort to the project and freely shared their words and images to help us understand the construction of immigrant identity. It is to them and their future welfare in the United States that we dedicate this book. ...