Abstract
Assimilation is a contested concept. Yet, in 2008, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a right-leaning think-tank, compiled the Index of Immigrant Assimilation, a measure to quantify the assimilation of immigrants. Using US census data, the index compiled household data on a number of factors including employment, educational attainment, homeownership, English proficiency and naturalisation status. According to this measure, Mexicans and other Latin Americans, accounting for half of the 40 million immigrants living in the US, tend to assimilate more slowly than other groups. Additionally, it revealed that they also exhibited the lowest civic assimilation.
It is this immigrant group, Mexican and Latin Americans, that is the focus of Brokered Boundaries. Authors Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez, scholars known for their expertise in Latin American culture and migration, examine the extent to which recent Latino immigrants embrace the constructed identities of ‘Latin American’ and/or ‘American’. Their book is particularly timely in the context of the increasing securitisation of US migration policies in the past 10 years and the increasingly migrant-averse nature of American society.
The book offers an extremely rich and in-depth analysis of the multiple of elements characterising Latino immigrants and their position in the US, such as their legal status, employment patterns and experiences of discrimination and social inequalities, as well as self-perceptions of identity. By conceptualising assimilation and identity formation as a process of boundary-breaking, the authors investigate how these immigrants apprehend and react to these boundaries that segregate them from others in their host country.
After reviewing recent empirical and theoretical work on immigrant identity and assimilation (ch. 1), the book introduces the ethnographic sample of the study—159 first- and second-generation Latin American immigrants (Caribbean, South American, Central American or Mexican in origin) living in the Philadelphia–New York corridor of the US. More than half of the sample was made up of undocumented migrants—one of the greatest achievements as well as one of the greatest methodological challenges of this research. Considering the population of interest, it was both highly significant and important to work with hard-to-reach, undocumented migrant groups; particularly as previous research on US migration has underrepresented these populations, rendering the experience of undocumented migrants missing from the spectrum of migrant realities.
After reviewing the characteristics and motivations of the interviewees, the following chapter, chapter 3, explores the impact of the recent economic, social and political conditions that have created a particularly unwelcoming reception for immigrants in their newly adopted country. Experiences of hostility in the labour market were reported as a common recurrence (ch. 4) and their perceptions of opportunity, inequality and discrimination before and after migration are detailed (ch. 5). The picture drawn is rather bleak, with most respondents mired in a succession of poorly paid jobs in the secondary labour market, offering little or no hope of upward social mobility. Despite the superior earning opportunities and objectively lower levels of income inequality, most of the immigrants interviewed reported personal experiences of discrimination, perceived US society to be more unequal and that social inequality was worse in the US than in their home country.
Drawing on the respondents’ own words and pictures of how they perceive American society and conceptualise their place within it, chapters 7 and 8 examine the extent to which recent Latino immigrants embrace a ‘Latin American’ or ‘American’ identity. These chapters constitute the most thought-provoking part of the book, as the various testimonies gathered indicate that Latino ethnicity among immigrants is indeed reactive. As the authors explain
Rejection of an American identity stems from the exclusion and discrimination that immigrants experience the more time they spend in the United States (p. 212).
While three-quarters of the participants expressed a Latino identity alone or in combination with American identity, nearly two-thirds categorically rejected an American identity. To add to the textual data, selected participants were asked to take pictures of the people, situations and objects of their everyday lives that seemed ‘American’ or ‘Latino’. While the respondents viewed American identity as having to do with power and monolith (reflected in the pictures of cars and Skype scrapers), they viewed Latino identity as focused on people—who appeared in the majority of the shots—and composed of intimate social relationships. These conflicting representations confront the notion often held up of the US as a ‘melting pot,’ whereby a number of ethnicities live side-by-side harmoniously. The book offers a sobering account of a society where the longer immigrants remain in the US, the more likely they are to experience discrimination. Resistance to an American identity is a construction which is seen to be ‘made in the USA’ through the accumulation of negative experience with US people and institutions.
Latin American immigrants living in the US today are more exposed to vulnerability and exploitation than at any point in American history. Thus, Brokered Boundaries successfully serves two purposes. First, it provides a rich and compelling contribution to the broader literature on Latino identity, giving detailed insights into how identity is constructed and elaborated by immigrants. Secondly, Douglas and Sánchez’s work gives a voice to immigrants at a time when the global recession and the intractable opposition of nativist groups relentlessly pressure the Obama administration to pursue the hard line of strict internal and border enforcement. Given this hostile context, the stage is set for the formation of a reactive ethnicity, one that categorically rejects an American identity. Assimilation, the authors conclude is a two-way street and
the greatest threat to the creation of a strong, vibrant, forward-looking American identity among immigrants comes not from immigrants but from American citizens themselves (p. 252).