Divided by borders: Mexican migrants and their children
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D i v i d e d by bo rd e r s : Me x i c a n m i g ra n t s a n d t h e i r ch i l d r e n Joanna Dreby University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010, 311pp., $55.00, ISBN: 978-0520266605 (hardcover); $21.95, ISBN: 978-0520260900 (paperback) Latino Studies (2011) 9, 502–504. doi:10.1057/lst.2011.40
The trick to learning ballet is not to train the body to jump, stretch and balance in ways that seem more than human, but to make each silent landing, whizzing turn and stunning lift look easy. The point of ballet is to conceal the effort so that the audience sees only grace and virtuosity. Joanna Dreby’s new book, Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children is based on more than 160 interviews with migrant parents, children, caregivers and community members in two countries (the United States and Mexico), 7 months of fieldwork in Mexico and more than 3 years of fieldwork in the United States, “in-depth interviews and observations with a select group of 12 transnational families” over 4 years, more than 3000 surveys of students in Mexican schools, and – a methodological quadruple pirouette – drawings by 425 Mexican elementary school students, depicting their family members at home and abroad. This is ballet in written form. Divided by Borders addresses the phenomenon of parents migrating from Mexico to the United States (specifically Central New Jersey), leaving children in the care of relatives back at
home. While migration has always created transnational families, increasingly restrictive immigration laws and the current anti-immigrant climate in the United States create unique challenges for families wishing to reunite, especially when reunification means bringing children across the border. Dreby’s analysis foregrounds the voices and experiences of the people involved in these geography-defying family formations, without romanticizing the relationships between family members. Chapters of the book focus on topics such as: the differences in how parents and children experience time apart, gender and transnational parenting practices, how children exercise power within families, and the relationships between children and their caregivers. The book is written in an accessible, jargonfree prose suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, professional academics or interested non-academics. One hopes that policymakers will also read it, and consequently inject some humanity into political debates over migration. In some cases it is difficult to see the potential real-world applications of scholarly research; however, the possible contributions of
r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3435 Latino Studies Vol. 9, 4, 502–504 www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/
Book Review
Divided by Borders to popular understandings of immigrants’ lives are clear. The photographs in the book and on its cover, most of which were taken by the author, are artful and moving in their simplicity: a migrant father calling his family from a payphone on a New Jersey sidewalk, laundry drying in a graffiti-adorned apartment whe
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