Contributors to the Special Issue

Contributors to this issue have lived transnational lives, pursuing their intellectual interests across and between different political sovereignties and cultures. As we at the Journal put together the issue, we found that transnational studies often call for crossing boundaries between history and other disciplines, and the contributors' biographies record that kind of border crossing as well. And they show that in Mexico, amid political transformation, historians and other scholars are helping to shape public discussion of the future of that nation-state—and perhaps of others.

Sergio Aguayo, a scholar and teacher at El Colegio de México in Mexico City who was educated in Mexico and the United States, is internationally known as a champion of democracy and human rights. He most recently published Myths and [Mis]Perceptions: U.S. Elite Visions of Mexico (1998) and 1968: Los archivos de la violencia (1968: The archives of violence, 1998). He helped found and lead important Mexican human rights groups and advises the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. The MacArthur and Ford foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy have honored his work. Since 1984 he has written a weekly column that now appears in sixteen Mexican newspapers.

Carlos Rico Ferrat has combined at least two careers while crossing and recrossing many borders. After studying at universities in Mexico and the United States, he taught and wrote about international politics—particularly relations between Mexico and the United States—for sixteen years. He has taught in Mexico, the United States, and Europe and throughout Latin America. Meanwhile, he advised the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1992 he became a full-time diplomat, successively heading the ministry's Latin American and North American activities. He is now consul of Mexico in Boston.

David G. Gutiérrez has done much to develop the field of Chicano history, thereby raising questions about the history of the American West as a region and the United States as a nation. An associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, he has received many honors for his scholarship and teaching. The Western History Association chose his Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity as the best first book in western American history, 1995-1997. He is at work on a book about ethnicity and citizenship in recent United States history.

Jorge Durand, professor of geography and anthropology at the University of Guadalajara, studies migrations across the United States-Mexico border in ways that transcend the usual borders of social science. He was educated in Mexico and France, and his books have been published in Mexico, the United States, and France. With Douglas S. Massey (who also collaborates with Durand in this issue), he assembled and commented on retablos, paintings by Mexicans offered in thanksgiving for supernatural help, often help in crossing the United States-Mexico border. The result was the prize-winning book Miracles on the Border (1995). He and Massey direct the Mexican Migration Project.

Douglas S. Massey is Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has made prize-winning contributions to scholarship and public policy making on racial segregation in the United States and international migration, particularly between Mexico and the United States. On migration, he has published not only Miracles on the Border (coauthored with Jorge Durand) but also Return to Aztlán: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico (1987) and, with colleagues, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at Century's End (1998). Massey has advised private and public organizations on migration issues, and he has testified before the United States Congress on issues both of race and of migration.

Emilio A. Parrado is assistant professor of sociology at Duke University. A demographer, he received his undergraduate education in Argentina and his graduate education at the University of Chicago. His many publications attest to a range of interests—from gender roles in contemporary Venezuela to the growth of the slave population in nineteenth-century Guyana to schooling, economic growth, and regional inequality in Argentina. Much of his current work focuses on marriage, family, and schooling in contexts shaped by international migration. . . .