Undocumented Lives
The Untold Story of Mexican Migration
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist
Winner of the David Montgomery Award
Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award
Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award
Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize
Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award
“A deeply humane book.”
—Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects
“Necessary and timely…A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.”
—PopMatters
“A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.”
—PRI’s The World
In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compassionate study, Stanford University history professor Minian provides an elaborate account of Mexican immigration to the United States, particularly from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Using a wide range of sources migrants' private correspondence, organizational records, personal collections, secondary sources, and more than 200 interviews Minian plumbs "the intimate world of migrants" and the role of gender, sexual, and cultural norms in Mexican migration to the U.S. (for example, women and gay men tended to face less pressure at home to emigrate, and consequently the migrants were mostly straight men). Minian notes that Mexicans' "circular migration" has been a longstanding feature of the two societies and that U.S. border fortification, more than migrants' desires, encouraged permanent settlement in the U.S. The book sympathetically analyzes the exclusion these migrants have experienced from the United States, from Mexico, and from their local communities within Mexico and highlights the various forms of community-building and activism that migrants and others have engaged in, such as "hometown clubs" in which migrants send money home to fund public works. Though primarily a work of scholarship, this history provides a rare window into "the messy complexity of lived experience" of Mexican migrants and contributes much-needed nuance to contemporary debates on immigration.
