Transborder Lives

Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities.Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

“Lynn Stephen’s multisited ethnography insightfully unpacks globalization from below, revealing the contours of cross-border communities as they reweave the social fabrics of twenty-first-century North America.”—Jonathan Fox, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Where most research on things ‘transnational’ is anchored on one side of the border or the other, Transborder Lives is conceptually and empirically well grounded throughout the geographic, national, social, political, and economic spaces within which its subjects are dispersed in both Mexico and the United States.”—Michael Kearney, author of Changing Fields of Anthropology: From Local to Global, “Transborder Lives confirms Stephen’s reputation as a leading contributor to North American transnational and migration studies. Stephen’s nuanced, empathetic—and, I would add, physically and temporally demanding—ethnographic work undergirds the study’s elegantly narrated exploration of how indigenous Oaxacans articulate and understand their own individual and collective experiences of daily routines. . .”, “[Transborder Lives] is a must-read for anyone interested in indigenous migration to the United States, Oaxacan studies, political economy, the construction of race and ethnicity in a bi-national context, indigenous knowledges, and transborder studies writ large. And its clear prose makes it accessible to undergraduates as well as non-academics interested in policy studies. Certainly, for members of communities such as those described by Stephen, the book will be cherished as a historical and ethnographic document.”, “Stephen certainly knows her stuff. . . . The real intimacy and trust she shares with her respondents and her rich understanding of their lives come across powerfully in her frank conversations. Her commitment to telling migrants’ stories and to using social science to promote social change is also clear. . . . This book is valuable for many reasons. . . . Transborder Lives also does an excellent job of placing migration dynamics within the context of broader political-economic factors on both sides of the border and analyzing how these have changed over time.”

Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca, also published by Duke University Press; Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico; and Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below.