Mass migration, displacement, economic pressures, and conflict will continue to involve large numbers of people crossing borders at a variety of scales. At the same time, the United States is experiencing a recently intensified white supremacist and fascist insurgency. These considerations frame the timely and innovative scholarship in Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches, and Civic Institutions (Wortham, Nichols, Clonan-Roy, & Rhodes 2020).
In Migration Narratives, the authors discuss an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. This 1000+% increase in Mexican residents between 1995 and 2016 ended with the Mexican population being almost a third of the town’s population. The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian, and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and traveled pathways from struggle to success—“up and out” of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods. The authors trace how these stories were often inaccurate but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant lives.
The book also documents how the descendants of earlier migrants interacted with Mexican newcomers and describes how experiences of and stories about migration unfold across institutional spaces—residential neighborhoods, politics, businesses, public spaces, churches, schools, and community organizations. The analysis emphasizes the ongoing changes in prior migrant communities and the interactions these groups had with Mexicans, showing how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways. The book richly represents the voices of Irish, Italian, African American, and Mexican residents.
The town in which this ethnography took place represents similar communities across the United States and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The book vividly illustrates the complexities that migrants and hosts experience, and it suggests ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators, and communities can respond to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.