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Reviews
| Crossing Borders, Challenging Boundaries: Race, Ethnicity, and Migration. By Caroline Brettel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. viii + 334 pp. Map, photos, tables, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. $80.00 (cloth).
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These case studies argue for locating the observations, theories, and methods associated with migration studies more centrally in our understanding of the making of American society—slavery, detention centers, dance halls, job hopping, immigrant assimilation, ethnic identity, and residential segregation. The authors focus on areas dense with recent in-migration: Silicon Valley; Los Angeles; North Carolina; Chicago; Biafra; Washington, D.C.; and New York City. In doing so, the authors refine or undercut established theoretical observations about migration in the United States. |
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Closer readings of census and employment data challenge easy connections between ethnic enclaves and self-employment. Zumema Valdez compares tract to countywide employment and education data in Los Angeles and finds a significant connection between increases in self-employment and in the coethnic population for blacks, Koreans, and Mexicans and a decrease in self-employment when the concentration of blacks, Koreans, and Mexicans grew. Self-employment for whites also increased when their concentrations increased at the tract level, challenging the ethnic succession model. Zeltzer Zubida's analysis of labor-market data for second-generation ethnics in New York City—white; black; Puerto Rican; Colombian, Ecuadorian, and Peruvian; eastern European; and Asian—demonstrates that second-generation employees work in less coethnic workplaces than their parents. Moreover, education seems to be an engine for desegregating workplaces for everyone but whites. Johanna Shih examines the returns on education and human capital in Silicon Valley. Her informants—East Asians, South Asians, and white women—repeatedly collided with glass ceilings but maintained that Silicon Valley works on meritocratic principles. Silicon Valley conditions might be unique—as the ethnic economy seems neatly interwoven with the general economy—especially with the establishment of production facilities in India and East Asia. Outcomes in Silicon Valley substantiate Cynthia Feliciano's argument that class position before immigration—especially credentialed professional education—contributes significantly to educational and employment outcomes through the third generation. Ethnic economies explain racial dynamics better than ethnic enclaves in these two regions. |
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Other authors push us to reconsider the practices behind existing racial and religious identities. Alana Hacksaw uses ethnic difference to examine the ways first- and second-generation West Indians and African Americans envision their political community in Washington, D.C., and New York. Working with focus groups, Hacksaw points out that most of her informants believed they shared a linked fate, despite what they perceived as ethnic differences. Both native- and U.S.-born informants described hostility, ethnic distancing, and stereotyping from the other, but this distancing did not affect their commitment to a linked racial fate in the United States. Jammilla Karim examines another version of linked fate—in this case ummah (community of believers)—among South Asian and African American Muslims in Chicago. Her South Asian informants lived in the suburbs; her black Muslim informants deep within Chicago's South Side. Their shared faith brought them together, though South Siders sensed reluctance among the suburbanites to share their professional networks, to extend their ummah. Like Hacksaw, Karim describes attempts by second-generation Muslim youth in both communities to build richer, faith-based political connections. Mariel Rose uses a dance hall to examine the ways some Lumbee and Cherokee women build households with Mexican immigrants. Rose argues that these intermarriages and the current labor market place Mexicans in the in-between racial space forged by Lumbees and Cherokees in the New South. |
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Foregrounding gender, Norma Fuentes contrasts how Dominican and Mexican women are currently settling in New York to argue for the importance of household structures—as resource networks and as a pivot for racialization—which help explain differential residential segregation and labor market outcomes for Mexican and Dominican women. Her survey and residential data indicate that although Mexican individuals and families have benefited from the largesse of an earlier generation of Dominican migrants, they do not in turn assist the current wave of Dominican female arrivals. Consequently, Mexican households are dispersed across New York, while Dominican women are concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods with high levels of public housing where they are more subject to general violence and harassment. |
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Contributors also advocate the seriousness of the noncitizen status of immigrants. Alexander X. Byrd's analysis of Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano) argues that the process of becoming Igbo, in addition to being enslaved, was steeped in an ever-present structural violence that Gustavus Vassa and his contemporaries may have taken for granted and left unremarked. He demonstrates the intellectual importance of bringing Africa—and not just the slave depots—into migration studies. David Manuel Hernandez argues that our current September 11 exceptionalism obscures the ongoing immigrant detention that has accompanied the expansion of the civil rights and social privileges that accompany formal citizenship. Given that Mexican and Central American detainees currently outnumber the people directly detained under national security measures, Hernandez asks people to consider the way immigrant detention during national security crises works to discipline specific ethnic immigrant communities. |
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Constructing Borders, Challenging Boundaries would work well in graduate and undergraduate fieldwork classes and advanced seminars in ethnic studies, anthropology, and sociology. This collection demonstrates the strength of younger scholars in immigration studies and offers a strong baseline for more comparative work in migration studies.
John McKiernan-Gonzalez
University of Texas, Austin
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