Beyond the Borderlands

Debra Lattanzi Shutika

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780520950238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last three decades, migration from Mexico to the United States has moved beyond the borderlands to diverse communities across the country, with the most striking transformations in American suburbs and small towns. This study explores the challenges encountered by Mexican families as they endeavor to find their place in the U.S. by focusing on Kennett Square, a small farming village in Pennsylvania known as the "Mushroom Capital of the World." In a highly readable account based on extensive fieldwork among Mexican migrants and their American neighbors, Debra Lattanzi Shutika explores the issues of belonging and displacement that are central concerns for residents in communities that have become new destinations for Mexican settlement. Beyond the Borderlands also completes the circle of migration by following migrant families as they return to their hometown in Mexico, providing an illuminating perspective of the tenuous lives of Mexicans residing in, but not fully part of, two worlds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• One: Introduction, New Borders and Destinations
• Two: “I Give Thanks to God, After That, the United States”, Everyday Life In Textitlán
• Three: La Casa Vacía, Meanings and Memories in Abandoned Immigrant Houses
• Four: In the Shadows and Out, Mexican Kennett Square
• Five: Bridging the Community, Nativism, Activism, and the Politics of Belonging
• Six: There and Back Again, The Pilgrimage of Return Migration
• Seven: The Ambivalent Welcome, Cinco De Mayo and the Performance of Local Identity and Ethnic Relations
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index