Review by Choice Review
Long overdue is this examination of Mexican migration to the US from multiple Mexican perspectives--federal, provincial, and county (municipio) governments, the Church, and the migrants themselves, through their homeland associations. Fitzgerald (sociology, Univ. of California, San Diego) explores how Mexico manages the outmigration of some 10 percent of its population, focusing on Mexico's policies toward emigration and emigrants since the Mexican Revolution (1910), as well as intermittent efforts at migrant control. The latter includes attempts at forging bilateral temporal workers agreements with the US, such as the controversial Bracero program of WW II and postwar period involving several million Mexican agricultural workers. The author collected household survey data from the same county, Arandas (of the Los Altos highlands of Jalisco state in central Mexico) that formed the basis of agricultural economist Paul Taylor's pioneering study of Mexican migrants in the 1920s (A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community, 1933), and from Arandas migrants in Chicago and in Orange County, California. Fitzgerald contends that questions of labor control, remittances, documentation, human rights and social welfare, political stability, education, and transnational citizenship in the context of emigration illuminate the process of state and nation building in modern Mexico. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. E. Hu-DeHart Brown University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
