BiblioVault - Books about Migration

The Saints of Progress

A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity

Carmen Kordick

University of Alabama Press, 2019

A reshaping of traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national identity

The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity chronicles the development of the Tarrazú Valley, a historically remote—although internationally celebrated—coffee-growing region. Carmen Kordick’s work traces the development of this region from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century to consider the nation-building process from the margins, while also questioning traditional scholarly works that have reproduced, rather than deconstructed, Costa Rica’s exceptionalist national mythology, which hail Costa Rica as Central America’s “white,” democratic, nonviolent, and egalitarian republic.

In this compelling political, economic, and lived history, Kordick suggests that Costa Rica’s exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology emerged during the Cold War, as revolution, civil war, military dictatorship, and state violence plagued much of Central America. From the vantage point of Costa Rica’s premier coffee-producing region, she examines local, national, and transnational processes. This deeply textured narrative details the inauguration of coffee capitalism, which heightened existing class divisions; a successful armed revolt against the national government, which forged the current political regime; and the onset of massive out-migration to the United States.

Kordick’s research incorporates more than one hundred oral histories and thousands of archival sources gathered in both Costa Rica and the United States to produce a human history of Costa Rica’s past. Her work on the recent past profiles the experiences of migrants in the United States, mostly in New Jersey, where many undocumented Costa Ricans find low-paid work in the restaurant and landscaping sectors. The result is a fine-grained examination of Tarrazú’s development from the 1820s to the present that reshapes traditional understandings of Costa Rica and its national past.

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Saving Migrant Birds

Developing Strategies for the Future

By John Faaborg

University of Texas Press, 2002

In the 1980s, numerous scientific surveys documented both declining bird populations, especially among Neotropical songbirds that winter in the tropics, and the loss of tropical rain forest habitat. Drawing the seemingly obvious conclusion, scientists and environmental activists linked songbird declines to loss of tropical habitats and alerted the world to an impending ecological catastrophe. Their warnings led to the establishment of the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Program, also known as Partners in Flight, the self-proclaimed largest conservation effort in history.

Looking back over more than a decade of efforts to save migrant birds, John Faaborg offers the first serious evaluation of the state of songbird populations today, the effectiveness of conservation programs such as Partners in Flight, and the reliability and completeness of scientific research on migrant birds. Taking neither an alarmist nor a complacent approach, he shows that many factors besides habitat loss affect bird populations and that Neotropical migrants as a group are not declining dramatically, though some species adapt to habitat alteration more successfully than others. Faaborg's state-of-the-art survey thus clarifies the kinds of information we will need and the conservation efforts we should undertake to ensure the long-term survival of Neotropical migrant birds.

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Separate Destinations

Migration, Immigration, and the Politics of Places

James G. Gimpel

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Natives who change residence do not settle in the same places as immigrants. Separate Destinations argues that these distinct mobility patterns, coupled with record levels of immigration from impoverished third world nations, are balkanizing the American electorate. James G. Gimpel examines the consequences of different patterns of movement and settlement on the politics of the communities in which these different groups settle.
Newer immigrants are con-strained by a lack of education, money, English literacy, and information--and frequently by discrimination--to live in areas of coethnic settlement. Domestic, native-born migrants--predominantly Caucasian--free of discrimination and possessing more money and information, move where they wish, often to communities where immigrants are not welcome or cannot afford to live. Strong evidence suggests that spatially isolated immigrants are slower to naturalize and get involved in politics than domestic migrants.
Gimpel looks closely at states with very different patterns of migration and immigration: California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York. In these states, Gimpel shows the impact of population mobility on party registration, party votes, and voter turnout and asks whether population changes have changed the dominant party in a state or produced a political reaction from natives.
Separate Destinations contains a number of thematic maps detailing the settlement patterns of internal migrants and immigrants for both counties and census tracts. Blending insights from a number of social science disciplines, including economics, demography, sociology, political science, and anthropology, this book will be of interest to a wide and diverse readership of scholars, students, and policymakers.
James G. Gimpel is Associate Professor of Government, University of Maryland.

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The Shadow of the Wall

Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford; Foreword by Josiah Heyman; Photographs by Murphy Woodhouse

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels, detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power of family separation and reunification and the cost of criminalization, and they call into question assumptions about human rights and federal policies.

The authors analyze data from the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS), a mixed-methods, binational research project that offers socially relevant, rigorous social science about migration, immigration enforcement, and violence on the border. Using information gathered from more than 1,600 post-deportation surveys, this volume examines the different faces of violence and migration along the Arizona-Sonora border and shows that deportees are highly connected to the United States and will stop at nothing to return to their families. The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Contributors

Howard Campbell
Josiah Heyman
Alison Elizabeth Lee
Daniel E. Martínez
Ricardo Martínez-Schuldt
Emily Peiffer
Jeremy Slack
Prescott L. Vandervoet
Matthew Ward
Scott Whiteford
Murphy Woodhouse

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Shelter on the Journey

Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Migration

Priscilla Solano

Temple University Press, 2024

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

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Solidarity without Borders

Gramscian Perspectives on Migration and Civil Society

Edited by Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen

Pluto Press, 2016

Solidarity without Borders examines the politics of migration at the ground-level, considering migrants not as an issue to be solved but as individual political agents, exploring the possibilities raised by alliances between migrants and trade unions, worker organizations, and other constituencies. Applying Gramsci’s theories of modern resistance and taking up the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey, social movements in Ireland, and the Lampedusan Libyan migrant group as case studies, Solidarity without Borders demonstrates how new solidarity relations are shaped and how these may construct a new common ground for developing political alternatives.

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Solidarity without Borders

Gramscian Perspectives on Migration and Civil Society

Óscar García Agustín

Pluto Press, 2016

Sonic Signatures

Music, Migration and the City at Night

Edited by Derek Pardue, Ailbhe Kenny, and Katie Young

Intellect Books, 2023

An anthology that evokes the music, residents, and vibrant nightlife of migrants in cities around the world.

Sonic Signatures interprets the music of contemporary migrants from Montreal to Rotterdam, Oslo to Tokyo. Drawing on research in urban musicology, international migration, and the emerging field of night studies, this edited volume illustrates that sonic signatures are fundamental to nighttime cityscapes, a way of experiencing space and belonging. Contributors to the anthology consider a wide array of genres—including EDM, batida do gueto, and iSicathamiya—to understand how migrants resist oppression, long for people and places, and shape their adopted cities through music.

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Sounds of Crossing

Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño

Alex E. Chávez

Duke University Press, 2017

In Sounds of Crossing Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigures the sociopolitical and economic terms of migration through aesthetic means, Chávez adds fresh and compelling insights into the ways transnational music-making is at the center of everyday Mexican migrant life.

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Soviet-Born

The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction

Karolina Krasuska

Rutgers University Press, 2024

In 2010, when The New Yorker published a list of twenty writers under the age of forty who were “key to their generation,” it included five Jewish-identified writers, two of whom—American Gary Shteyngart and Canadian David Bezmozgis—were Soviet-born. This publicity came after nearly a decade of English-language literary output by Soviet-born writers of all genders in North America. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction traces the impact of these now numerous authors—among others, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar—on major coordinates of the Jewish American imaginary.

Entering an immigrant, Soviet-born standpoint creates an alternative and sometimes complementary pattern of how the Eastern and Central European past and present resonate with American Jewishness. The novels, short stories, and graphic novels considered here often stage strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, genealogy, and finally, migration. Soviet-Born demonstrates how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

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Statistics and Reality

Concepts and Measurements of Migration in Europe

Edited by Heinz Fassmann, Ursula Reeger, and Wiebke Sievers

Amsterdam University Press, 2009

In the past decade, there has been a trend towards the global “harmonization” of migration statistics, largely inspired by international bodies and organizations that require comparative data. This volume provides an accessible account of the history of migration measurement in Europe and analyzes the current conceptualizations of migration and data-gathering procedures across twelve European countries. Based on this analysis, the authors provide critical insight into the migrant stocks and flows in their own countries and comment on recent trends in migration scholarship, such as the feminization of migration or the diversification of migrant’s origins.

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Street Corner Secrets

Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai

Svati P. Shah

Duke University Press, 2014

Street Corner Secrets challenges widespread notions of sex work in India by examining solicitation in three spaces within the city of Mumbai that are seldom placed within the same analytic frame—brothels, streets, and public day-wage labor markets (nakas), where sexual commerce may be solicited discretely alongside other income-generating activities. Focusing on women who migrated to Mumbai from rural, economically underdeveloped areas within India, Svati P. Shah argues that selling sexual services is one of a number of ways women working as laborers may earn a living, demonstrating that sex work, like day labor, is a part of India's vast informal economy. Here, various means of earning—legitimized or stigmatized, legal or illegal—overlap or exist in close proximity to one another, shaping a narrow field of livelihood options that women navigate daily. In the course of this rich ethnography, Shah discusses policing practices, migrants' access to housing and water, the idea of public space, critiques of states and citizenship, and the discursive location of violence within debates on sexual commerce. Throughout, the book analyzes the epistemology of prostitution, and the silences and secrets that constitute the discourse of sexual commerce on Mumbai's streets.

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Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture

Convivial Tools for Research and Practice

Edited by Mette Louise Berg and Magdalena Nowicka

University College London, 2019

Antimigrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighborhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration among scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions.
Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the United Kingdom. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured—in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.

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Sucking Salt

Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival

Meredith M. Gadsby

University of Missouri Press, 2006

It is a persistent image in Caribbean literature. But for Caribbean women especially, salt—particularly the image of sucking salt—has long signified how they have endured hardship and found ways to transcend it.

In this study of Caribbean women writers, Meredith Gadsby examines the fiction and poetry of both emigrant and island women to explore strategies they have developed for overcoming the oppression of racism, sexism, and economic deprivation in their lives and work. She first reviews the cultural and historical significance of salt in the Caribbean, then delineates creative resistance to oppression as expressed in the literature of Caribbean women writing about their migration to the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

From British poet Dorothea Smartt to Edwidge Danticat of New York’s Haitian community—and with a special emphasis on the creative artistry of Paule Marshall—Gadsby shows how, through migration, these writers’ protagonists move into and through metropolitan spaces to create new realities for themselves, their families, and their communities. Her work draws on critical and ethnographic studies as well as creative works to take in a range of topics, not only considering the salty sexuality of calypso songs and offering new insights into Jamaican slackness culture but also plumbing her own family history to weave the travels of her mother and aunts from Barbados into her studies of migrating writers.

Through these close readings, Gadsby shows that Caribbean women express complex identities born out of migration and develop practical approaches to hardship that enable them to negotiate themselves out of difficulty. Her innovative study reveals that “sucking salt” is an articulation of a New World voice connoting adaptation, improvisation, and creativity—and lending itself to new understandings of diaspora, literature, and feminism.

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A Suitable Enemy

Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe

Liz Fekete

Pluto Press, 2009

Liz Fekete is a leading authority on issues of racism, Islamophobia and national security legislation. A Suitable Enemy draws on sixteen years of research to present a comprehensive overview of EU immigration, asylum, race and security policies.

Fekete argues that at the same time as the EU introduces selective migration policies, it closes its borders against asylum seekers who were the first victims of the growth of the security state which now embraces Muslims. She explores the way in which anti-terrorist legislation has been used to evict undesirable migrants, how deportation policies commodify and de-humanise the most vulnerable and how these go hand in hand with evolving forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia.

At the heart of the book is an examination of xeno-racism -- a non-colour coded form of institutionalised racism -- where migrants who do not assimilate, or who are believed to be incapable of assimilation, are excluded.

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