Abstract
In the field of immigration it is often difficult to find books that combine the three main features of a good book: readable, informative, and allowing readers to wander with their minds beyond the book’s written content. With no doubt, Ronald Mize and Grace Peña Delgado have skillfully mastered these goals.
Latino Immigrants in the United States offers a comprehensive and instrumental introduction of value to any person at his/her first steps in the field of immigration. Unlike many other scholarly works in this area, this book succeeds at understanding Latinos beyond economic analyses of migration and multiculturality. By adopting a ‘comparative and intra-ethnic approach’ (p. 11), the authors portray the more human face of migration without losing perspective of the complex historical and political elements involved in the lives of immigrants. Because of this, this book will appeal to students in various disciplines, like sociology, psychology, anthropology, political sciences, and social work among others. The book’s seven chapters form a coherent portrayal of the main challenges that immigrants face in American society. Although a few parts offer too much data at once, the authors make them accessible by illustrating their points through individual cases. This presentation style facilitates the reading flow and transforms what would have otherwise been an arduous policy-based text into a practical guide for understanding people on the move and the societies that receive them.
Chapter 1 frames Mize and Peña Delgado’s idea of Latinidad or Latino’s identity which serves as the narration thread for the following chapters. The authors critically analyze Latinidad as a social construction that acquires important personal and social meaning. Beyond the debate on its ambivalent ability to limit and/or increase personal ethnic identification, immigrants from Latin America have been able to transform the concept of Latinidad into a tool for social change. Mize and Peña Delgado underscore how the instrumental makeover of Latinidad goes hand-in-hand with immigrants’ active role in changing the American landscape.
Chapter 2 illustrates and problematizes the different attempts by the Census and other agencies to enclose Latinos into specific labels of measurement. Is Latino a category defined by national origin, language, culture, race, or all of these? The fact that important ethnic and class divisions are present within the Latino group contributes to the need to think critically about the reliability and usefulness of this label. Intra-group variety requires immigrant scholars and agencies to adopt different and more flexible interpretation of Latinos in the United States.
Chapter 3 gives a historical look at the ways in which particular groups have obtained different rights in the American territory. Of particular interest is the case of Salvadorans. Their struggles to obtain refugee status reveal how international political alliances shape the rights and privileges of immigrants in the United States. In spite of numerous and well-documented reports on civilian massacres, the Reagan administration tacitly supported the Salvadoran right-wing dictatorial regime. This political interest represented the main bias in considering Salvadorans economic immigrants rather than war refugees.
Chapter 4 focuses on the crossroads of gender, labor participation, and the construction of a cultural citizen. The chapter would benefit from a better explanation of the meanings of cultural citizenship and how exactly it may differ for women and men. Also, and considering that most chapters link the Latino’s situation in the States with the main political and social events back in their countries of origin, it lacks the necessary acknowledgment regarding Latinas’ activism in Latin America. In fact, many Latinas come to the US having already some experience of work unions and labor leadership. Nonetheless, Chapter 4 provides interesting examples for class discussion on working Latinas, labor activism, and gender rights. As the authors note, for women in vulnerable positions, to be part of the workforce does not always translate into more equal rights in the private sphere. Still, the chapter explains well the ways in which working Latinas have been instrumental for the success of Latino social movements in the United States.
Chapter 5 moves to the complex topics of transnational identity and new global citizen. The authors offer a review of some important sociological work on these issues. But they present specific examples based on economic factors like remittances, which travels far from the idea suggested in the chapter title concerning identity. Chapter 6 expands the idea of transnationalism to the international political arena and the global economy. The authors offer striking examples to show the ways in which such international interests actually change the national panorama in terms of demographics, culture, and immigration. Nonetheless, free trade policies find the equivalent to their southern international expansion in the massive immigration moves occurring in the last decades, or what the authors call ‘globalization from below’.
Based on the information gathered in previous chapters, the book ends with a necessary question for debate: How does the future look for Latinos and Latinas in the United States? And as Ronald Mize and Grace Peña Delgado maintain, such a question cannot be answered without taking into consideration the most relevant topics concerning Latinos/as such as health, education, language, pop culture, and mass media among others.
Although Latino Immigrants in the United States would benefit from a more detailed index, it remains an easy to read introduction to immigration studies. It will capture the attention of readers unfamiliar with the literature on immigration, while also providing useful and up-to-date information to experts. It is versatile enough to be adopted as a textbook for introductory classes or as a source of thought-provoking readings for both undergraduate and graduate courses that address the phenomena and experiences of migration. Despite its main discipline being sociology, this work will contribute to the learning and practice of students in other disciplines as well.
Latino Immigrants in the United States is an ambitious project that cannot compete with more topic-specific books on immigration when it comes to statistical information or depth of arguments. Yet, this book does something that most of the classic and established immigration manuals forget to do: it connects Latino immigrants in the United States to Latin America. Mize and Peña Delgado’s work is more than a book about transnational immigrants: its approach is transnational itself. A necessary move that most immigrant scholars should start taking seriously into consideration.