Rubén Hernández-León

Restructuring at the source: High-skilled industrial migration from Mexico to the United States

This article deals with a largely overlooked consequence of Mexico’s process of economic restructuring in the past 2 decades: the incorporation of the country’s skilled industrial workers into U.S.–bound migratory flow. In Mexico, restructuring has transformed workplaces and undermined employment stability and wage and benefits systems that used to keep industrial workers from migrating to the United States. By studying a working-class neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico, this article seeks to show how migration has become part of the structure of labor market opportunities of displaced manufacturing operatives and how these workers have managed to transfer skills to the oil technology and extraction industries at their main U.S. destination, Houston, Texas.

Making Los Angeles Home: The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United StatesMaking Los Angeles Home: The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States, by AlarcónRafaelEscalaLuisOdgersOlga. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. 280 pp.

Mexican immigration has been the most consequential sociodemographic phenomenon transforming Los Angeles and southern California over the past half century. In Making Los Angeles Home: The Integration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States, authors Rafael Alarcón, Luis Escala, and Olga Odgers set out to investigate how these newcomers labor to find a place for themselves and their offspring in a new home. The title of the book references the gradual yet fundamental change of the Mexico-U.S. flow from circular migration to settled immigration. The authors, scholars affiliated with Mexico’s preeminent migration studies institution, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, eschew the traditional assimilation lens and the ascending racialization perspective in favor of a framework based on the concept of integration. There are multiple understandings of integration, from the more normative, which privilege convergence of immigrants and members of the host society, to those that recognize a diversity of paths and outcomes. The authors of Making Los Angeles Home adopt a dynamic understanding in which integration is ‘‘not a state to be achieved’’ (p. 32) but a process that might entail distinct and even contradictory experiences across different social spheres. While they recognize the vital role that the host society plays in crafting policies to incorporate newcomers or, alternatively, marginalize them, Alarcón, Escala, and Odgers embrace a perspective centered on the strategies immigrants deploy to integrate into the United States. The empirical analysis in Making Los Angeles Home draws from statistical data from the 2007 American Community Survey and 90 interviews conducted in 2008 with Mexican immigrants from three states: Zacatecas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. These states represent different waves of Mexican migration to Los Angeles, occurring from the 1970s to the 1990s. Given that the characteristics of these migrants interact with the different political and socioeconomic contexts they encounter, these states also represent distinct paths of incorporation. This is in fact one of the most important contributions of the book: to demonstrate that there are varied and nuanced experiences of Mexican immigrant integration in the United States. Arriving in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s, immigrants from Zacatecas, a state with a century-old migration to the United States, display relative occupational mobility. Most Zacatecans migrated without documents and began their employment careers at the bottom of the labor market, often as dish washers in restaurants and low-level operatives in local factories. Today, they have regularized their migratory status, and many have become small-business owners and skilled technical workers. In contrast with the mostly mestizo (mixedrace) Zacatecans, migrants from Oaxaca hail from a state with a large and diverse indigenous population. Many Oaxacans entered the United States as laborers in California’s agricultural valleys to subsequently move to service jobs in Los Angeles. Men worked low-end jobs in restaurants, and women cleaned houses and took care of children. Prior employment in agriculture allowed these immigrants to regularize their status through the provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. According to the authors, legal status has not always allowed Oaxacans the occupational mobility enjoyed by Zacatecans. Instead, Oaxacans continue to hold low-level jobs in construction, transportation, and gardening, often as self-employed contractors; some have advanced within the ranks

29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520284869.

L’articolo sintetizza due decenni di ricerca sulla migrazione messicana a Dalton, una piccola citta in Georgia, Usa. L’analisi si focalizza sui risultati del lavoro di campo e li colloca nel contesto dello studio della crescente rilevanza delle destinazioni piccolo-medie per la migrazione messicana e latina negli Stati Uniti. L’articolo presenta innanzitutto l’approccio induttivo, costruzionista e interazionista che e stato usato. Con questi strumento analitici si e studiato il processo sociale dell’immigrazione nelle piccole e medie citta come una rete di interazioni fra immigrati e residenti di ungo periodo, come protagonisti e non solo vittime di forza strutturali di ampio respiro. Questo approccio ha permesso di scoprire diverse e inaspettate interazioni, che includono alleanze, cooperazione, fratture, tensioni, conflitti, aggiustamenti, adattamenti e ri-defnizione dei confini fra immigrati e nativi. L’articolo si chiude con una breve analisi della seconda generazione messicana in questo contesto. I risultati di questa ricerca sono un invito ad approfondire lo studio dell’arrivo dei migranti in destinazioni non metropolitani in altri paesi.

Due decenni di ricerca sulla migrazione messicana in una nuova destinazione non-metropolitana: riflessioni di campo dagli Stati Uniti

Asian churches” to refer to pan-ethnic churches, instead of “pan-Asian churches.” Religion and Immigration is far more comprehensive in scope and far more informative than the other two books. Moreover, most chapters, written by eminent historians or theologians specializing in particular religious groups under consideration, offer penetrating historical and/or theological insights, not available in social science studies of contemporary immigrants’ religious practices. As such, the book can be a valuable source of reference for a few different fields. For the International Migration Review readers, this book will be of great value to researchers of contemporary immigrants’ religious experiences. Studies of new immigrant congregations show Muslim immigrants’ religious institutions have gone through significant structural transformations by adopting the Christian congregational and community service center models. However, for understanding Muslim immigrants’ religious practices it seems more important to examine how Muslim immigrants view American society in light of their theological principles than simply to investigate the structural transformation of mosques. The only drawback of this book is its failure to include discussions on the discriminatory and violent reactions to Muslim immigrants after 9/11 and their mobilization in self-defense in the Muslim chapters. Any comprehensive chapter on Muslim Americans published in 2003 should have information about these issues.