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REVIEWS
TRANSBORDER LIVES: INDIGENOUS OAXACANS IN MEXICO, CALIFORNIA, AND OREGON
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by Lynn Stephen
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| Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2007. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 397 pages. $23.95 paper. |
| The increased scholarly attention to diaspora, circular migration, and transnationalism has illuminated exciting ways to consider social change. It has also underscored the importance of examining the mechanics of domination in discursive practices, modes of market integration, and the mutations of state power at different spatial and temporal scales. Lynn Stephen's Transborder Lives productively engages these terms through "collaborative activist ethnographic research" to investigate the displacement, dispersal, and circulation of Zapotec and Mixtec Indigenous communities of the Mexican state of Oaxaca to rural and urban sites in California and Oregon (p. 321). |
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This work is propelled by its simultaneity and geographic scope, which can be seen in statements such as: "In order to have multisited communities, we must have multisited histories" (p. 66). Through the ethnographic information she provides about Zapotec and Mixtec communities, Stephen argues that transnationalism appears to be a subset of what she refers to as a more complex transborder experience. She argues that international migration, through the lens of transnationalism, misses different types of crossings that indigenous migrants encounter. For her, the experiences of Zapotec and Mixtec migrations suggest "the borders they cross are ethnic, class, cultural, colonial, and state borders within Mexico as well as at the United States–Mexico border and in different regions of the United States" (p. 6). It is Stephen's intent to "offer a framework for understanding such communities elsewhere," suggesting that the transborder condition is a "global phenomenon" (p. 34). In very accessible prose, she weaves thick ethnographic details with historical narratives that illustrate complex social environments, contingent identities, and the mosaic of political spaces indigenous Mexican migrants endure and create. |
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Stephen has written a well-organized text suitable for several different levels of preparation. Those familiar with the field will appreciate the attention to the formation of Zapotec and Mixtec subjectivities within Mexico and how those subject positions are articulated throughout the migratory experience. Individuals new to the subject will find an easy correspondence between personal accounts, historical narratives, and discussions of social theory. The book is organized thematically. The first three chapters ground the ethnographic work in a broader comparative historical context of United States imperialism, Mexican land reform, migration, and United States immigration and economic policy. The last two chapters demonstrate how Zapotec and Mixtec communities construct political subjectivities through the transborder migration experience. The remaining middle chapters seem to focus on different elements of the transborder experience. Class borders are explored in Chapter Four as both constructed and maintained through the forms of labor that Zapotec and Mixtec workers engage in. The chapter, literally, maps the chain of circumstances and migratory decisions made through the formation of transnational labor markets such as agricultural and domestic work. According to Stephen, racial hierarchies in Mexico ensure that Zapotec and Mixtec communities experience land reform and neoliberal trade policy differently. Their displacement and migration to the United States, for example, was conditioned by the experience of internal migration to northwestern Mexican agricultural sites and racialization by Mexican labor recruiters in domestic settings. Stephen emphasizes, furthermore, that Mixtec experiences are also differentiated from Zapotec by monolingualism and access to education, thus making it more difficult for Mixtec workers to accumulate enough entrepreneurial surplus capital to break out of agricultural labor markets. Chapter Five recounts the all too familiar story of surveillance and paranoia in undocumented migration to the United States.Stephen uses these narratives to, again, point out the experience of being located among the intersections of both a Mexican and U.S. "hierarchy of power differences" (p. 176). Chapter Six illustrates how indigenous Oaxacan women are gendered through economic and social reproduction expectations and how their lives are further complicated by poverty, isolation, and neglect. Chapter Seven draws from the previous material to drive home her thesis on the transborder condition, highlighting the "ways in which indigenous migrants themselves have invoked shared experiences of racial oppression as a basis for constructing broader panethnic and panindigenous identities" (p. 212). The personal narratives of the text and Stephen's analysis make the important point that identities do not travel well and that their relational character requires us to be attentive to different regions of race and patriarchy. This chapter, "Navigating the Borders of Racial and Ethnic Hierarchies," makes a strong case for the transborder condition because Stephen illustrates how individuals are constituted as different historical actors and political subjects depending on the different hierarchies that propel and integrate their migrant itineraries. Stephen's emphasis on the transborder, however, may be a result of not engaging the body of literature on diaspora, as similar proposals have been put forth in that arena. This oversight should not detract from the call that Stephen makes for greater attention to the interaction of different historical structures of alterity and how they condition the migrating subject. |
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| Jason Oliver Chang
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| University of California, Berkeley |
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