About the Book
Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call "transcultural societal studies," an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns. They describe the ways that people have fashioned cross-border lives, as well as the effects of shifting labor markets in facilitating or hindering cross-border movement, the place of formal and informal politics in migration processes and migrants' lives, and the creation and transformation of borderlands economies, societies, and cultures. This collection offers rich new perspectives on migration in North America and on the broader study of migration history.
Contributors. Jaime R. Aguila. Rodolfo Casillas-R., Nora Faires, Maria Cristina Garcia, Delia Gonzales de Reufels, Brian Gratton, Susan E. Gray, James N. Gregory, John Mason Hart, Dirk Hoerder, Dan Killoren, Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu, Catherine O'Donnell, Kerry Preibisch, Lara Putnam, Bruno Ramirez, Angelika Sauer, Melanie Shell-Weiss, Yukari Takai, Omar S. Valerio-Jimenez, Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez
Table of Contents:
List of Maps xi
Preface / Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires xiii
Introduction. Migration, People's Lives, Shifting and Permeable Borders: The North American and Caribbean Societies in the Atlantic World / Dirk Hoerder 1
Part I. Intersocietal Migrations
1. Mirando atrÁs: Mexican Immigration from 1876 to 2000 / Jaime R. Aguila and Brian Gratton 49
2. Through the Northern Borderlands: Canada-U.S. Migrations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries / Bruno Ramirez 76
3. The Making and Unmaking of the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere: Mobility, Sex across Boundaries, and Collective Destinies, 1840–1940 / Lara Putnam 99
Part II. Connecting Borderlands, Littorals, and Regions
4. Population Movements and the Making of Canada-U.S. Not-So-Foreign Relations / Nora Faires 129
5. Greater Southwest North America: A Region of Historical Integration, Disjunction, and Imposition / Carlos G. VÉlez-IbÁÑez with Dirk Hoerder 150
6. Independence and Interdependence: Caribbean-North American Migration in the Modern Era / Melanie Shell-Weiss 174
7. Migration to Mexico, Migration in Mexico: A Special Case on the North American Continent / Delia GonzÁlez de Ruefels with Dirk Hoerder 188
8. The Construction of Borders: Building North American Nations, Building a Continental Perimeter, 1890s–1920s / Angelika E. Sauer 210
9. The United States-Mexican Border as Material and Cultural Barrier / Omar S. Valerio-JimÉnez 228
Part III. Complicating Narratives
10. Migration and the Seasonal Round: An Odawa Family's Story / Susan E. Gray 253
11. Market Interactions in a Borderland Setting: A Case Study of the Gila River Pima of Arizona, 1846–1862 / Dan Killoren 264
12. Paying Attention to Moving Americans: Migration Knowledge in the Age of Internal Migration, 1930s–1970s / James N. Gregory 277
13. The Black Experience in Canada Revisited / Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu 297
14. Circumnavigating Controls: Transborder Migration of Asian-Origin Migrants during the Period of Exclusion / Yukari Takai 313
15. Migration and Capitalism: The Rise of the U.S.-Mexican Border / John Mason Hart 333
Part IV. Contemporary and Applied Perspectives
16. Central American Migration and the Shaping of Refugee Policy / MarÍa Cristina Garcia 347
17. Central American Transmigrants: Migratory Movement of Special Interest to Different Sectors within and outside Mexico / Rodolfo Casillas-R. 364
18. Interrogating Managed Migration's Model: A Counternarrative of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program / Kerry Preibisch 377
19. 1867 and All That . . .: Teaching the American Survey as Continental North American History / Angelika Sauer and Catherine O'Donnell 391
About the Contributors 399
Index 401
About the Author :
Dirk Hoerder taught North American social history, the history of global migrations, borderland studies, and the sociology of migrant acculturation at Arizona State University. He is the author of many books, including Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, also published by Duke University Press. Hoerder lives in Salzburg, Austria.
The late Nora Faires was Professor of History and of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University and co-author of A History of Women in America.
Review :
"This excellent collection is easily the best effort to date to interpret North American migrations. It takes seriously the inclusion of the Caribbean and Central America in its purview, successfully integrates analyses that range from the micro- to the macro-levels, and incorporates a long-term perspective that connects studies of 'pre-historic' Native America and the early modern slave trade to modern studies of 'immigration' and 'refugees.' Best of all, it provides readers with a marvelous introduction to the ways that a North American perspective on human movement differs, often remarkably so, from the national perspectives developed within the historiographies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico." Donna Gabaccia, author of Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History "This volume achieves a feat of thematic and conceptual integration. It explores the demographic, socioeconomic, political, and symbolic role of migration in the formation of North American nations. Yet it transcends national borders and categories with examinations of the local, regional, borderlands, and hemispheric mobility of indigenous peoples, Asians, Europeans, Afro-descendants, Latinos, Anglo- and French-Canadians, among other sub- and supra-national groups. The result is a combination of macro and micro perspectives that illuminates both the forest and the trees." Jose C. Moya, author of Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 "The editors aim to develop what they call "transcultural social studies" in this integrated view of migration in North America via an interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminating the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and the US over the past two centuries. Contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across the continent in relation to changing cultural, political and economic patterns."- Times Higher Education, May 24th 2012 "Recent scholarship on borderlands has illuminated the ways in which the migration of diverse groups of peoples have both been influenced by and shaped economic, political, societal, and cultural patterns across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. In Migrants and Migration in Modern North America, coeditors Dirk Hoerder and the late Nora Faires have compiled a collection of essays that move beyond the boundaries of nation-states, offering a broader framework within which to understand translocal and transregional population movements... Certainly, most of the chapters apply this broadened perspective to examine elements of continuity/change and cross-currents of convergence/divergence in North American history while remaining complex and rich in detail. This integrationist approach serves as an exemplar for teaching and research in both migration and borderlands studies. Migrants and Migration in Modern North America presents a kaleidoscopic picture of human mobility by analyzing migration patterns from precontact to the present, from the "top down" and from the "bottom-up," and by considering a range of movement among local borderlands communities to sweeping diasporic experiences of First Peoples, Mexicans, Canadians, Americans, Asians, and Caribbean migrants." - Dominique Bregent-Heald, H-Borderlands
