Crossing over : a Mexican family on the migrant trail /

The U.S. is "a nation of immigrants," but most Americans don't know much about the experience of immigration today. Martinez, an associate editor at Pacific News Service and correspondent for PBS' Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, aims to illuminate that experience in this involving story of an extended Mexican family's journey. Three of the Chavez brothers died in a border incident; Martinez goes to their small town in Michoacan and describes their funeral. But other family members have not given up hope, and Martinez documents what they find across the border, in Arkansas, Missouri, California, and Wisconsin. This is one of the strengths of Martinez's narrative: so much of the literature about Mexican immigrants, legal and undocumented, focuses on the Southwest, it's all too easy to forget that midwestern slaughterhouses and orchards also depend on immigrant labor. Martinez captures the terrors and small victories of the immigrants' journey, as well as the inexorable reciprocal flow of culture between a Mexican village and the new homes the immigrants find in el Norte. --Mary Carroll

Chronicling a family that lost three sons to a border crossing gone horribly wrong, Martinez travels repeatedly from San Diego to the city of Cheron, in the state of Michoacin, about 200 miles west of Mexico City. Though treated by some of the Mexicans he meets as more of a gringo than a norteno (a Mexican who has lived in the north), Martinez, an American of Mexican emigri parents, gets terrifically close to his subjects, following them from stultifying poverty in Mexico to mortally dangerous illegal crossings and harsh and also dangerous (and illegal) work in Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri and California. Martinez draws a wealth of social, ethnic, linguistic and economic nuance in completely absorbing narratives. Each of the 13 chapters begins with a facing-page photo by Joseph Rodriguez (with whom Martinez collaborated on East Side Stories), showing us the cholos (gang members), coyotes (crossing guides) and pollos ("chickens" being led across), and also the everyday people whose lives are spread, one way or another, across the border. Martinez is now at Harvard on a Loeb fellowship, has won an Emmy for his work as a journalist, is associate editor of Pacific News Service and a correspondent for PBS's Religion and Ethics News Weekly. His book is heroic in its honesty and self-examination, and in its determination to tell its story completely and fully. (Oct. 3) Forecast: With the legal status of Mexican workers apparently on the White House front burner, this will be a huge book for policy wonks; look for terrific reviews, and for Martinez to do many a news chat. This will be a big seller on campus and with left-leaning readers (possibly for years), but the topicality and the quality of the writing make a major breakout likely. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Emmy Award-winning journalist Martinez here captures the human story of Hispanic migrants drawn north by a hunger for la vida mejor. Hundreds of "illegals" die each year attempting to cross the invisible line between Mexico and the United States. Among them were the Ch vez brothers, three undocumented farm workers who died in 1996 after a coyote's speeding truck flipped and crashed. Martinez spent a year traveling with the brothers' extended family, chronicling a four-generation-long journey northward. They begin in the family's hometown of Cher n, Michoac n, and travel across the southwestern desert to timber mills in Arkansas, meat-packing plants in Wisconsin, and greenhouses in Missouri, eventually arriving near the strawberry fields in California, the brothers' original destination. As he relates the passionate story of this migrant family on its never-ending search for identity, Martinez identifies components that contribute to the cultural swirl of the migrant experience and predicts the creation of a multiracial future. Martinez honestly articulates both the ideals and the enormous risks taken by migrants, showing how la tradici"n has foiled assimilation and the "melting pot" myth even as migration creates change on both sides of the border. Recommended for large public and academic libraries. Sylvia D. Hall-Ellis, Denver P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Both an award-winning journalist and a poet, Mart'nez should have the skills for this assignment: tracking a migrant family from Mexico and showing how migrant culture is changing America. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A thoughtful, politically charged narrative of travel in a little-known but much-discussed American subculture. There are now, writes Pacific News Service editor and NPR correspondent Martinez, as many as seven million Mexican migrant laborers living in the US. A disproportionate number come from small, mostly Indian villages and towns in the state of Michoacan, such as the small city of Zamora. "No one," he writes, "believes that there's a future here, neither the big-time landowner nor the cholo. There's a past: this is where your folks were born, where the streets smell like childhood and the traditional fiestas are still celebrated more or less the way they were before the Conquest. But a future? The more Zamora is aware of the world beyond the little green valley . . . the more Zamora wants to shed its skin." It does so by sending its people, young and old, across the border, mostly illegally, where the hardships are many but the potential rewards-including citizenship for the lucky few and rates of pay that are princely by Mexican standards if unimaginably low to middle-class gringos-outweigh the risks. Martinez begins and ends his voyage in Michoacan, visiting with the mother of a large family most of whose members have crossed the line; three of her sons died after a cocaine-snorting smuggler crashed his truck while fleeing US Border Patrol agents. (By the end, she too will have left Zamora, for a new home in St. Louis.) Other points in his eventful narrative find Martinez at home in California, walking the Arizona desert, talking with farmhands in Texas shantytowns. He resists the temptation to moralize, instead writing plainly-but with obvious sympathy-for people moved by economic disaster to flee their homes for an uncertain new country that often seems to hate them but that needs them all the same. First-rate reporting on an important, controversial subject. Author tour