Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration

by Ana Raquel Minian

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674244832
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	05/12/2020
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ana Raquel Minian is Associate Professor of History and of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: From Neither Here nor There 1

1 An Excess of Citizens 14

2 "A Population without a Country" 47

3 The Intimate World of Migrants 77

4 Normalizing Migration 104

5 Supporting the Hometown from Abroad 125

6 The Rights of the People 157

7 A Law to Curtail Undocumented Migration 183

8 The Cage of Gold 208

Afterword 233

Appendix A Note on Sources 239

Appendix B Queer Migration 247

Notes 251

Acknowledgments 313

Index 317

Editorial Reviews

Necessary and timely…By unearthing 50-year-old narratives, Minian draws a straight line to today’s racist and acerbic anti-immigration policies in America…A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.

PopMatters

Well-written and gripping, this book rigorously and imaginatively shows us how changes in immigration policy on both sides of the border dramatically affect peoples’ lives. Based on an impressive number of oral histories conducted in both Mexico and the United States, Undocumented Lives is a valuable contribution to the history of both countries and a revelation of the experience of those who can claim neither as home.

Margaret Chowning

Minian traces today’s unauthorized migration to the years between 1965 and 1986, when the disruption of Mexican circular migration trapped unauthorized migrants on US soil. The book explores Mexican and US policies as well as media resources and intimate testimonials to show how migrants thought about home and how they were treated, as well as discussing their financial limitations, child-rearing challenges, and relationships with romantic partners and family.

Latin American Research Review - Ana Hontanilla

Undocumented Lives explores the double exclusion of Mexican men from their respective homes of national belonging—Mexico, by making it impossible for families to subsist without husbands’ and fathers’ migration and remittance; the United States, by exploiting undocumented laborers while forcing them to live in the shadows lest they be deported. This is a deeply humane book that focuses on the lives of migrants who endure and navigate these exclusions.

Mae Ngai

A truly impressive accomplishment that combines political and economic analysis with personal narratives of love, loss, and belonging to offer a holistic, deeply humane look at Mexican migration in the late twentieth century. If you read only one book about the roots of immigration debates today, this should be it.

Geraldo Cadava

Minian’s aching and timely book clearly lays out the political and cultural forces on both sides of the border that have placed millions of Mexicans in the golden cage that is the U.S.’ immigration policy…Minian has conducted exhaustive research, which includes copious oral-history interviews, to produce a work providing historical context and perspective for the current debate raging about immigration.

Booklist - Sara Martinez

An important book that will have an immediate impact on the history and historiography of Mexican migration to the United States in the twentieth century and beyond.

David G. Gutiérrez

Undocumented Lives is a deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States and how, many times, migrants can feel ni aquí, ni allá, neither here, nor there—not fully recognized by any one place.

PRI’s The World - Monica Campbell

An important book that will have an immediate impact on the history and historiography of Mexican migration to the United States in the twentieth century and beyond.

David G. Gutiérrez

04/23/2018
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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

An important book that will have an immediate impact on the history and historiography of Mexican migration to the United States in the twentieth century and beyond.

David G. Gutierrez