Transborder Lives: Indigenous
Oaxacans in Mexico, California,
and Oregon
Lynn Stephen,
Duke University Press, 2007
A DISTURBING and highly important revelation emerges from this detailed and well researched study of indigenous Oaxacans in the United States, and that is the way indigenous identities are belittled according to a subliminal hierarchy of race inherited from the colonial era that persists among Mexican migrants themselves in the areas studied, Oregon and California. Moreover, this racial-ethnic hierarchy is overlaid both with US racial categories and the expression of racialised categories within the US Latino population itself – now the largest and most rapidly growing ethnic minority in the country. Mexican-born immigrants, for example, have to struggle also with a complex and at times uneasy relationship with Chicanos – Mexicans born in the US who don’t speak Spanish. These and other observations make this detailed and insightful ethnographic study a valuable contribution to social anthropology in the US and Mexico, as well as highlighting just how difficult surviving in the north can be for many Mexican immigrants. – GO’T
