Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Immigration

In this compassionate study, Stanford University history professor Minian provides an elaborate account of Mexican immigration to the United States, particularly from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Using a wide range of sources—migrants’ private correspondence, organizational records, personal collections, secondary sources, and more than 200 interviews—Minian plumbs “the intimate world of migrants” and the role of gender, sexual, and cultural norms in Mexican migration to the U.S. (for example, women and gay men tended to face less pressure at home to emigrate, and consequently the migrants were mostly straight men). Minian notes that Mexicans’ “circular migration” has been a longstanding feature of the two societies and that U.S. border fortification, more than migrants’ desires, encouraged permanent settlement in the U.S. The book sympathetically analyzes the exclusion these migrants have experienced—from the United States, from Mexico, and from their local communities within Mexico—and highlights the various forms of community-building and activism that migrants and others have engaged in, such as “hometown clubs” in which migrants send money home to fund public works. Though primarily a work of scholarship, this history provides a rare window into “the messy complexity of [the] lived experience” of Mexican migrants and contributes much-needed nuance to contemporary debates on immigration. (Mar.)