Book Review: How Mexicans Have Taken History into Their Own Hands

I’m Neither Here nor There, by Patricia Zavella, and A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration, by David Fitzgerald, both focus on Mexican migration and migrants, but their interpretive frames and some of their substantive concerns differ. Four Generations of Norteños, edited by Wayne Cornelius and Scott Borger along with Fitzgerald, elaborates on the perspective and substantive issues addressed in Fitzgerald’s book.

Zavella focuses on Mexican migrants in Santa Cruz County, California. She draws on life histories, focus groups, participant observation, a survey, and an analysis of performances by cultural activists. She views the migration experience through a neo-Marxist feminist lens, highlighting class, gender, and racial forces and overarching power relations that serve to keep migrants impoverished. In particular, she addresses what she calls the new nativism and the racialization of the immigrant experience in constricting migrant opportunities. In this context she describes anti-immigration politics such as the infamous California Proposition 187, which banned unauthorized migrants from access to education and most health services, and other propositions in the late 1980s and 1990s that contributed to criminalization and policing of immigrants, deportations, and militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border. She suggests that the new nativism rests on an “investment in whiteness” reinforced by racial profiling in immigration enforcement since 9/11. She points to contradictions in U.S. immigration policy and to the fact that the 1986 immigration act, designed to reduce immigration, had the unintended effect of fueling first new authorized migration through family reunification and then new unauthorized migration against the backdrop of a downturn in work opportunities in Mexico. Politics aside, in her view there is an underlying economic logic that keeps migrants an underclass; U.S. demand for cheap Mexican labor ultimately outweighs the impetus for exclusionary politics.

Zavella adds that the logic of capitalism has subjected Mexican migrants to exploitation and discrimination, institutional marginalization, and exclusion based on race, class, and gender. In so doing it has channeled Mexican migrants into “brown-collar jobs”—unskilled, poorly paid, and nonunionized informal-sector work. Globalization (by which I believe she means global capitalist dynamics) wiped out better-paying manufacturing jobs as factories in California moved to Mexico and to other lower-cost places of production. At the same time, implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement spurred (unauthorized) Mexican migration because small-scale producers could not compete with U.S. agricultural imports.

Zavella argues that, while globalization offers few pathways out of poverty, the logic of capitalism contributes to regional variations in opportunities for immigrants. Her structural analysis notwithstanding, she argues that migrants are not passive subjects. When dissatisfied with officially sanctioned opportunities, for example, they turn to illicit means to achieve what they want. Accordingly, when the 1986 immigration reform required employers to hire only authorized immigrants, Mexicans who had entered the United States without authorization created an underground economy in false documents. Some of them were also politicized, lending support to immigration-rights protests.

Zavella notes that before the 1965 and especially the 1986 immigration reforms immigration policy favored men. This was especially true of the Bracero Program of 1942–1964. Only when family reunification officially became an important criterion for immigrant admissions did women in large numbers become authorized to move to the United States. Even the informal cultural norms that took hold privileged unauthorized male over female migration. Successful border-crossing affirmed masculinity.

Zavella is at her best when she addresses the impacts of migration on the family. She argues that migration has challenged the work-family and gender relations with which Mexicans were familiar before their uprooting. Migration has resulted in women doing work that in Mexico had been defined as men’s (e.g., in agriculture). It also has led men to do work conventionally conceived as women’s, particularly unpaid work within the household, when women have joined the paid labor force. These changes have been structurally induced rather than the result of a feminist awakening. Zavella also argues that when working in the United States women gain autonomy from the patriarchal relations to which they were subjected in Mexico. At the same time, though, she talks of homes becoming “divided” and “borderlands,” fractured by emergent differences among family members as gender and also generational roles have been redefined. She mentions that children may gain authority vis-à-vis their parents as they serve as translators and intermediaries in dealings with U.S. institutions.

Zavella ends the book with a chapter on what she calls “transcultural memory,” involving musicians—“cultural activists”—who address the structural problems that push Mexicans into poverty and migration. The lyrics narrate Mexicans’ painful lives on both sides of the border. According to Zavella, the cultural activists contribute to the formation of “transnational archives of feelings” and help build an imagined community to “cope with the realities of capitalism and state repression” among migrants and U.S.-born Mexicans in their everyday lives. However, she presents no data on the impact of these “cultural activists” on ordinary Mexicans.

Scholars love to invent their own terminology, and Zavella is no exception. Her concept of choice is “peripheral vision” (PV), a concept that she feels “illuminates the power relations involved in a strategic bifocal point of view. For Mexicans on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border, PV is based on frequent reminders that one’s situation is unstable in comparison to those on the other side” (p. 8). Elsewhere she claims that PV reflects a sense of being displaced alongside a transnational imagery that includes comparisons of life on the two sides of the border (p. 22). At another point she argues that Mexican American migrants experience PV as they experience racialization and marginality (p. 87). PV, she adds, is gendered when women migrants see themselves as performing “men’s work” and men see themselves as performing “women’s work” (p. 98). She concludes by noting (p. 228) that the term “peripheral vision” is

an effort to illustrate how subjects respond to what scholars call the peripheralization of the core. . . . Clearly the Santa Cruz County region contains some peripheralized sectors. . . . I argue that, for many Mexicans, “seeing double” within the United States goes . . . toward transnational subjectivity. Migrants who feel displaced in the United States and in Mexico or who feel at home in both places experience peripheral visions. . . . For Mexican Americans, peripheral vision invokes memories of racism, cultural insensitivity, disapprobation of the Spanish language, or feeling like an outsider within the United States despite their U.S. citizenship.

In my estimation, the term obscures more than it clarifies and explains. If Zavella is trying to argue that migrants compare their new with their former lives, this is already well established. Ironically, she presents little information on migrant comparisons. Minimally, her conceptualization, in its various iterations, obscures my vision and understanding of the Mexican migrant experience.

Whether or not it entails peripheral vision, the focus here is almost exclusively on how bad life in America is for Mexican migrants. We can only hope that structural forces and human agency will take a turn for the better and improve migrants’ lives. However, in her capitalist framework there are no signs of relief. Given the oppression that she describes, we are left wondering why the migrants remain in the United States even if, in their minds (and eyes, with their PV!) they are “neither here nor there.” Indeed, although it is not discussed in the book, since 2008 Mexicans have increasingly been opting to live “there”; more Mexicans are now returning to Mexico than are migrating to the United States. In essence, Mexicans are voting with their feet, retracing their migratory steps. The explanation is rooted in the changing nature of opportunities “there” in contrast to “here.”

Fitzgerald’s A Nation of Emigrants, in contrast, is a rich, subtle, historically embedded analysis of Mexican migration, migrants, and return migrants and their impact on their homeland, especially their communities of origin. Whereas Zavella focuses on migrants on the U.S. side of the border, Fitzgerald focuses on the Mexican side. He makes use of in-depth interviews with politicians, state officials, teachers, priests, and employers, as well as surveys conducted with migrants in California and with return migrants, in the area of Jalisco, one of Mexico’s main migration source-states for over 100 years. And while Zavella focuses on capitalist dynamics, Fitzgerald focuses on the relative autonomy of the state and on noneconomic social forces. His portrayal of the Mexican government rejects mechanistic analyses of “the state,” addressing its shifting capacity (and incapacity) to regulate emigration.

Fitzgerald reminds us that Mexican migration is not new, although its scale has ballooned and the stance of the federal government toward it has changed markedly with changing demographic, political, and economic concerns and the failure of earlier efforts at regulation. He argues that, with the massive exodus of Mexicans, the state has reinvented itself. In so doing, it has come to promote dual nationalism, to hold onto emigrants, and to address emergent institutional interests. Through consular offices in the United States it has initiated programs to encourage the sending of remittances that nonmigrant families and home communities can access with minimal transaction costs. Remittances have become vital to the macro economy, the second-most-important source of hard currency. Recognizing that Mexicans may contribute more to the economy abroad than at home, the federal government has reimagined emigrants. Once perceived as unpatriotic, they are now viewed as heroes and long-distance nationals with rights but only minimal homeland obligations. The government has also reimagined governance. It now allows voting from abroad, and in some Mexican communities migrants may even run for office from abroad.

In the chapter “Inside the Sending State” Fitzgerald traces the evolution of the government’s stance toward emigration. While now embracing emigration and emigrants, early in the twentieth century it tried to restrict Mexicans from leaving. Only in the 1970s (in the pre-neoliberal era) did it adopt a laissez-faire stance toward emigration to relieve domestic population pressures. In the years when it was attempting to restrict emigration, local governments and local oligarchs subverted its efforts if they believed the restrictions were antithetical to their own political and economic interests. Local elites wanted (to paraphrase Albert Hirschman) “exit” rather than “voice” when faced with local rebellions that challenged their authority and when landless peasants sought to take advantage of an agrarian reform that called for a redistribution of large landholders’ property. Fitzgerald, in essence, shows “the state” to be complex and, under certain conditions, internally divided in ways that have an impact on emigration.

Fitzgerald describes how U.S. authorities have further undermined the Mexican federal government’s control over emigration. Typically the United States has had the upper hand in shaping both authorized and unauthorized Mexican migration. The two governments collaborated most closely in conjunction with the Bracero Program, initiated to meet the U.S. wartime demand for labor. Yet even the global hegemon, he notes, has not been able to control migration on its own terms. For example, humble Mexicans hoping to participate in the Bracero Program in far greater numbers than the bilateral agreement permitted bribed contractors and crossed the border illicitly. More generally, Fitzgerald argues that, as migration streams have become deeply embedded in cross-border informal social networks, official Mexican emigration policies have come to have minimal impact on migration. The state is weaker and society, transnationally embedded, stronger in shaping migrant dynamics.

Fitzgerald also points to the way the Catholic Church has shaped migration, the cultural practices of migrants, and migrant institutional ties to their home communities. He argues that the Mexican government, after its storied conflict with the Church in the nineteenth century, came to build on Church policies, programs, and migrant practices. Local priests took the lead in developing hometown associations (initially within Mexico, in the era of large-scale rural-to-urban migration), promoting migrant homeland involvements (with religious fiestas structuring the calendar of return visits), and encouraging remittances and transnational moral commitments.

Turning to the complex cultural, social, and economic dynamics that migration has unleashed in Mexico, Fitzgerald argues that, while modernization theorists envisioned that migration would have a positive impact on migrants, modernizing their values, from the vantage point of Mexican employers only in certain lines of work are return migrants considered desirable employees. In Jalisco, factory owners appreciate the work discipline that return migrants have learned abroad, while farmers are reluctant to hire returnees because they resist working for the exceedingly low wages offered. Rather than offering workers higher wages, farmers have reached out to domestic migrants from the impoverished South, who are willing to do the work for very low pay. In so doing they have created a “Chiapas niche”—a new ethnic, race-based segmented sector in the local labor market. Whereas Zavella sees racism as an American phenomenon, Fitzgerald sees it as Mexican, against its indigenous people.

Fitzgerald also addresses, from the Mexican vantage point, what he calls “dissimilation”—the process of becoming different (migrants’ becoming more like Americans and less like nonmigrant Mexicans). He discusses the fact that migration has fueled a rise in student absenteeism, school leaving, and drug use. More positively, he notes that remittances are helping Mexicans attain a lifestyle that the Mexican state has failed to provide.

The book that Fitzgerald coedited includes eight chapters, all of which are coauthored (none of them by the coeditors). These chapters address the dynamics of migration (who does and does not migrate and who settles abroad), the ineffectiveness of U.S. border control, migrant efforts to overcome legal hurdles in getting green cards, visas, and U.S. citizenship, remittances and their uses, “dissimilation,” gender dynamics in sending and receiving communities, and the myth of the migrant health paradox (namely, regarding purported adverse effects of migration on migrants’ health). The chapters are largely based on the same region (Jalisco) and the same data sources as Fitzgerald’s book. While the essays have no overarching thesis, they include interesting information on the topics on which they focus. Chapters elucidate the ineffectiveness of recent U.S. immigration policies and the adverse, unintended consequences of those policies (such as driving up the cost of paying people-smugglers as the number of Border Patrol agents has increased). They also detail how the coyote business operates, the socioeconomic background of “who migrates,” how migrants who envision the move to the United States as temporary wind up staying, and how and why the majority of residents of some Mexican communities now live in the United States. The authors of one of the chapters argue that migration does not increase egalitarianism in marriages, challenging Zavella’s argument about changing family dynamics with migration.

In essence, these three books point to the complexity of Mexican migration. While Zavella claims that migrants are “neither here nor there” when living in the United States, Fitzgerald and his collaborators show that Mexicans are currently and historically both “here” and “there.”