Prueba

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 85, October 2008 | 121-132

Review Essay/Ensayo de Reseña
Searching for Work, Striving for Justice: New Perspectives on Latin American Migrations to the United States
Robert V. Kemper

– Corridors of Migration: The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933, by Rodolfo F. Acuña. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2007. – Impacts ofBorder Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending Communities, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and Jessa M. Lewis. La Jolla, SD: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2007.1 – Four Generations of Norteños: New Research from the Cradle of Mexican Migration, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, David Fitzgerald, and Scott Borger. La Jolla, SD: Center for ComparativeImmigration Studies, University of California, 2008. – Mayan Journeys: The New Migration from Yucatán to the United States, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, David Fitzgerald, and Pedro Lewin Fischer. La Jolla, SD: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, 2007. – In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities, by Patricia Foxen. Nashville, TN: VanderbiltUniversity Press, 2007. From the earliest social science works concerned with the northward migration of Mexican citizens and other Latin Americans to the United States (Gamio 1930, 1931; McWilliams 1942; Taylor 1928, 1933), questions have been posed about who migrates, where do they come from and where do they go, what are their characteristics compared to those who stay behind, what successes do theyenjoy and what failures do they endure (Durand, Massey, and Zenteno 2001). Over the decades, the number of persons involved in this population flow has grown dramatically, so that now virtually every community in Mexico – and many in Central America – can count its fathers and wives, its sons and daughters among the Hispanic-origin population spreading throughout the United States. It is no surprisethat as new ideas, theories, and paradigms emerged they have been put to the empirical test in the domain of migration. In the 1930s and 1940s, an ‘acculturation’ framework was popularized and widely contested; in the 1950s and 1960s, many scholars used a ‘modernization’ model, then in the 1970s and 1980s others employed ‘dependency theories’ and ‘historical-structural’ approaches (Kemper 1979,1995). By the 1990s, and continuing to the present, many scholars have focused on specific issues, such as gender, health, ethnicity, and even religion, often within a ‘transnational’ project in which individual agency is set against governmental and corporate power. Whatever approach is adopted, whatever level of analysis is pursued, we still
Published by CEDLA – Centre for Latin AmericanResearch and Documentation | Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, Amsterdam; ISSN 0924-0608; www.cedla.uva.nl

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struggle to comprehend the impact of migration upon individuals, their families, and their households, as well as its effects on the political economies of sending and receiving regions.Social scientists also have striven to appreciate the complicated relationships among individual decisions about migration, local and regional conditions, and national and international governmental policies. Recently, a number of scholars and social critics have recast the phenomenon of migration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as a human rights and social justice matter. With a socialscience literature already numbering in the tens of thousands of articles, book chapters, monographs, theses, and dissertations, what more can be written about the northward migration to the United States? Is there anything to inspire new research and new policy directions? If the five volumes under review here are any measure of current research, then the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. Each volume...