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Reviewed by:
  • Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon
  • Ruth Trinidad Galván (bio)
Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon by Lynn Stephen. London: Duke University Press, 2007, 375 pp., $84.95 hardcover, $23.95 paper.

Based on eight years of research, Lynn Stephen narrates a telling story of migration and transborder existence and identity. She spotlights the experiences of Indigenous Oaxacans who have journeyed back and forth between the United States and Mexico in the last six decades. Her contribution to the literature on transnational migrants lies in the concept of transborder existence and drawing our attention to the myriads of borders, geographic as well as sociocultural, that many Mexicans cross. Their movement within Mexico, the United States, and the U.S.-Mexico border requires that they not only transcend gender, racial, ethnic, class, and state borders but also form collective efforts, interlinked networks, and transborder identities. Ultimately, her analysis moves beyond identities and relations defined by any one nation-state—Mexico or the United States—to the multiple ways people are read physically, legally, and otherwise. Because Indigenous Oaxacans on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border are consistently read as indigenous (physically), undocumented (non-citizens), and poor (rural), they are not recognized as full citizens of either nation-state. Hence, in addressing the multiple ways transmigrants negotiate their livelihood and identities, Stephen casts a wide net and addresses numerous topics and issues related to these communities and their transborder existence. Three themes stand out in Stephen's analysis of Mixtec and Zapotec Oaxacans' transborder existence: The actual movement and history of migration for Mexicans in general and Oaxacans in particular, economic globalization and the incorporation of Mexicans into the United States' labor force, and questions of individual and collective ethnic and racial identity.

Transmigration

The migratory history of Zapotec and Mixtec Indigenous peoples portrayed in Transborder Lives contributes to the well-established field of migration studies, cultural citizenship, and globalization. The book does an excellent job of revisiting Mexican migration in relation to the U.S. immigration policies since the early twentieth century and reminding readers that 9/11's militarization of the border and demonizing of undocumented immigrants is not new to U.S. history. Critical analyses of such policies as the Immigration Act of 1917, Bracero Program (post–WWII to 1964), Operation Wetback (1954 to 1959), and the Immigration Reform [End Page 204] and Control Act (IRCA, 1986) demonstrate quite profoundly the persistent movement of Mexicans in and out of the United States, their continued incorporation into numerous U.S. communities, and the ways in which they have transformed specific national spaces into communal Mexican territories of the imaginary.

This history of migration is especially pertinent in areas such as Los Angeles, Oxnard, and Santa Ana in California, Salem and Woodburn in Oregon, and San Agustín Atenango and Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, the area from which the study's participants originally migrated. As early as the 1940s with the Bracero Program, Mixtecs and Zapotecs were actively recruited to work as laborers and agricultural workers. Since then, their physical presence in multiple spaces in both nation-states has changed the cultural fabric of these places. The cultural, economic, and political ties created via people's movements are some of the dimensions Stephen highlights in her attempt to demonstrate the transborder existence of Oaxacans. Other dimensions she analyzes, and which I discuss below, include the manner in which Oaxacans' labor and identities transcend borders.

By revisiting the various immigration acts and policies, Stephen addresses the roots of anti-immigrant sentiment most recently felt in the post–9/11 U.S. context. The book makes clear that the surveillance Oaxacan farmworkers in Oregon are subjected to, as well as their invisibility, are deeply connected to the conditions that initially drive them to migrate. That is, their surveillance is connected to the U.S. labor market that demands their employment and their invisibility to immigration policies that hinder their safe entry and residency in the United States. Stephen argues for a racialized reading to expose the racial perceptions underlying immigration policies and attitudes that place immigrants under constant surveillance from...

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