Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

by Alicia Schmidt Camacho

Overview

Migrant Imaginaries explores the transnational movements of Mexican migrants in pursuit of labor and civil rights in the United States from the 1920s onward. Working through key historical moments such as the 1930s, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary globalization and neoliberalism, Alicia Schmidt Camacho examines the social and cultural practices sustaining migrant social movements. Combining sustained historical engagement with theoretical inquiries, she addresses how struggles for racial and gender equity, cross-border unity, and economic justice have defined the Mexican presence in the United States since 1910.

Schmidt Camacho covers a range of archives and sources, including migrant testimonials and songs, novels and manifestos, as well as ethnographic research. Throughout, she demonstrates how Mexicans and Mexican Americans imagined their communal ties across the border, and used those bonds to contest their noncitizen status. Migrant Imaginaries places migrants at the center of the hemisphere's most pressing concerns, contending that border crossers have long been vital to social change.

About the Author:
Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900814716495
Publication date:	07/24/2008
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
A Note on Language     xiii
Introduction     1
Border Crossers in Mexican American Cultural Politics
These People Are Not Aliens: Transborder Solidarity in the Shadow of Deportation     21
Migrant Modernisms: Racialized Development under the Bracero Program     62
No Constitution for Us: Class Racism and Cold War Unionism     112
Bordered Civil Rights: Migrants, Feminism, and the Radical Imagination in El Movimiento Chicano     152
Tracking the New Migrants: Richard Rodriguez and Liberal Retrenchment     193
Border Crossings: Frontiers of New Social Conflict
Narrative Acts: Fronteriza Stories of Labor and Subjectivity     237
Migrant Melancholia: Emergent Narratives of the Border Crossing     283
Afterword: A traves de la linea/Across the Line     314
Notes     319
Index     361
About the Author     375

Editorial Reviews

"Notably, Schmidt Camachos comprehensive interdisciplinary work lends insight into the current immigration crisis, one wrought from more than a century of failed national policiesCamacho offer[s] complementary strategies for rethinking the relationship between history (broadly defined) and cultural production."

American Literary History

"A landmark book. . . . Highly recommended."

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