Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches, and Civic Institutions

Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, this open access book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers' pathways and draw links between the town's earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Intersecting Migrant Histories 2. Schools: Three Divergent Individual Mexican Pathways 3. Churches: An Emerging Irish-Mexican Community 4. Neighborhoods: Divergent Stories of Decline 5. Public Spaces: Victims, Revitalizers and Competition 6. Community Organizations: Three Imagined Mexican Pathways 7. Powerful, Limited Stories References Index

About the Author :
Stanton Wortham is the Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, USA. He is a W.T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow and an American Educational Research Association Fellow. Briana Nichols is a PhD student in the Department of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Katherine Clonan-Roy is Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Foundations at Cleveland State University, USA. Catherine Rhodes is Assistant Professor of Ethnology at the University of New Mexico, USA.

Review :
This book offers an ambitious, sociohistorically-informed examination of Mexican migrants' trajectories within an East Coast community, revealed through participant observation in diverse spaces and analyses of narratives told about immigrants in this town. Complex, nuanced and compelling: a must-read for anyone interested in how local histories intersect to shape contemporary experiences of migration.