Robert Courtney Smith: Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants.
Hellman, Judith Adler
Robert Courtney Smith Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New
Immigrants Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, x + 375 pp.
This book was 18 years in the making but the wait has been well
worth it. Based on a longitudinal study of a place Smith calls
"Ticuani," a poor, migrant-sending Mexican town in the arid,
impoverished Mixteca region of southern Puebla, the volume follows a
community of migrants as they set out for the United States, are
received there by the "pioneer migrants" from their town, and
struggle to find not only jobs, housing, and schooling, but also a moral
and psychological space in which to live their lives. Robert Courtney
Smith, Associate Professor of Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public
Affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York, has
studied these people both in Mexico and in the receiving communities of
Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Upper Manhattan. His focus is on the
variety of ties that bind them to their place of origin. These
connections include regular travel to Ticuani for school vacations and
festivals, religious rituals that are practiced in both settings, and,
in particular, the activities of the Ticuani hometown association, an
immigrant benevolent society formed by men who have settled in New York
and who tax themselves to raise funds for social spending in their
community of origin. It is this organization of U.S.-based ticuanenses
that, over time, has become equally, or more, important in influencing
the course of development in Ticuani than the elected officials of the
municipal government who--not by accident--turn out to be adherents of
the PRI and followers of the local cacique.
In the process of highlighting these experiences, Smith provides us
with a dense and rich ethnographic account of lives lived
transnationally between Ticuani, roughly five hours south of the Mexican
capital, and New York City. Deeply embedded in both settings, Smith
engages in the first instance with first-generation migrant men and
their political struggle to exercise some control over the course of
events in their hometown. They do so in spite of rejection and hostility
of local non-migrant men who have many reasons to want to exclude the
migrants from positions of influence. The men who remain in Ticuani
often work to delegitimize those who have moved to New York, even though
these remittance-sending migrants provide the material means by which
families left behind in Mexico can survive and by which the community as
a whole may prosper. Smith gained excellent access to both groups, and
his detailed descriptions of the power struggle between the migrants who
hold monetary resources and the local cacique and his followers--all set
against the background of clientelistic priista politics in the state of
Puebla--are worth the price of the book.
But there is much else that will illuminate and entertain
readers--in particular, the attitudes of second-generation migrants
toward their hometown and the role of that far-off place in forming
their identity as Mexicans in New York. Also very telling is
Smith's account of the continued importance of religious festivals,
the transformation in gender relations in the town prompted by the
return of migrants bringing new attitudes and practices with them, the
way in which the migrants' stage in the life cycle shapes their
responses to their bi-national settings, and the meaning of Ticuani for
adolescents who were born in the United States or who were brought to
the U.S. when they were very young.
Growing out of Smith's interest in adolescents, their
formation of identity, and their ideas about masculinity/femininity are
two chapters focused on gangs. These pandillas are formed in New York by
Mexican migrants in public school who are seeking protection from those
most likely to commit acts of violence against them: Puerto Ricans,
Dominicans, and AfricanAmericans, in short, the most proximate groups at
the bottom of the economic and social ladder. With the description of
the "return migration" of these pandillas to Ticuani, and the
values and practices that gang members bring with them, readers will
find much to compare with the gangs of returned refugees and migrants
that terrorize poor neighbourhoods in cities and towns throughout
Central America. One significant difference, however, between gang
members in Central America and ticuanenses is that the former often have
been deported from the United States for criminal activity and may never
hope to return. In contrast, a relatively high proportion of ticuanense
gang members have papers as a consequence of their family ties to
immigrants who were resident in the United States in 1986 when President
Ronald Reagan offered his amnesty package. Many ticuanense gang members
are free to move between the two countries and Smith is very clear about
the great cost that the appearance of pandillas has had on Ticuani.
Migration studies is a field that seems perpetually in search of
persuasive theoretical models, and Smith does what he can with the
concept of "transnationalism," both highlighting its utility
and appropriately critiquing its overuse. But Smith has been at his
labours long enough to witness the birth of a third generation of
ticuanense-New Yorkers who are unlikely to live the transnational life
of their parents. For these U.S.-born children, Ticuani and its rituals
may become no more real or relevant than the nostalgia trip of a
suburban-based Italian-American to eat a sausage sandwich at the
Festival of San Genaro on Mulberry Street in New York's Little
Italy, an "old Italian neighborhood," that today is almost
entirely engulfed by Chinatown and the fashionable and expensive
neighbourhood of "NoHo." Thus readers may anticipate a
paradigm shift in Smith's own thinking as he builds on this
excellent work and follows--as we must all hope he will--the new
generations of ticuanenses in both Mexico and the United States.
Judith Adler Hellman, York University
