This book focuses on the return of the diasporic Greek second generation to Greece, primarily in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and their evolving, often ambivalent, senses of belonging and conceptualizations of “home.” Drawing from a large-scale research project employing a multi-sited and multi-method comparative approach, Counter-Diaspora is a narrative ethnographic account of the lives and identities of second-generation Greek-Americans and Greek-Germans. Through an interdisciplinary gender and generational lens, the study examines lived migration experiences at three diasporic moments: growing up within the Greek diasporic setting in the United States and Germany; motivations for the counter-diasporic return; and experiences in the “homeland” of Greece. Research documents and analyzes a range of feelings and experiences associated with this “counter-diasporic” return to the ancestral homeland.

Images and imaginations of the “homeland” are discussed and deconstructed, along with notions of “Greekness” mediated through diasporic encounters. Using extensive extracts from interviews, the authors explore the roles of, among other things, family solidarity, kinship, food, language, and religion, as well as the impact of “home-coming” visits on the decision to return to the ancestral “homeland.” The book also contributes to a reconceptualization of diaspora and a problematization of the notion of “second generation.”

Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from highland Guatemala and their turn toward language and Indigenous clothing in their homeland
 
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
 
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
 
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
 
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
 

Borderlands migration has been the subject of considerable study, but the authorship has usually reflected a north-of-the-border perspective only. Gathering a transnational group of prominent researchers, including leading Mexican scholars whose work is not readily available in the United States and academics from US universities, Mexican Migration to the United States brings together an array of often-overlooked viewpoints, reflecting the interconnectedness of immigration policy.

This collection’s research, principally empirical, reveals significant aspects of labor markets, family life, and educational processes. Presenting recent data and accessible explanations of complex histories, the essays capture the evolving legal frameworks and economic implications of Mexico-US migrations at the national and municipal levels, as well as the experiences of receiving communities in the United States. The volume includes illuminating reports on populations ranging from undocumented young adults to elite Mexican women immigrants, health-care rights, Mexico’s incorporation of return migration, the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on higher education, and the experiences of young children returning to Mexican schools after living in the United States. Reflecting a multidisciplinary approach, the list of contributors includes anthropologists, demographers, economists, educators, policy analysts, and sociologists.

Underscoring the fact that Mexican migration to the United States is unique and complex, this timely work exemplifies the cross-border collaboration crucial to the development of immigration policies that serve people in both countries.

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analogue.

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs” or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants’ experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised views with them when they return home, influencing their families and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, “Who is a migrant?”

In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home.

Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, more than two million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people who returned to Mexico was so large that, for the first time in at least fifty years, more people entered Mexico from the United States than entered the United States from Mexico. Many of these migrants were destined for urban areas, and we know little about how they fare after they return to cities. In The Returned, sociologists Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier examine the experiences of returned migrants in Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Masferrer, Hamilton, and Denier draw on interviews with former U.S. migrants living in Mexico City to better understand the experience of return migration to urban areas. Each of the migrants they spoke with lived in the United States for long periods with noncitizen status during the last four decades. During this time, U.S. immigration policy became increasingly focused on restriction and enforcement, which made it difficult for migrants to safely move back and forth across the border for work or to visit family without documentation. The authors find that upon their return, migrants in Mexico City felt disoriented and lost and had difficulty adapting to a massive urban environment where there is little support for returnees. They struggled to translate their work experience from their time in the U.S. to find quality jobs. Additionally, many found their family lives upended as they reunited with or formed families in the U.S.. Some found themselves separated from family members still in the U.S. with no ability to legally visit them. Others brought their families back to Mexico, some of whom were U.S. citizens and had never been to Mexico before. They, too, struggled to adapt and integrate to life in Mexico City.

The authors use the experiences of return migrants to discuss policies and practices that would improve their lives and ease their reintegration. To help with the disorientation they experience, returnees proposed ongoing psychological support with mental health professionals who have knowledge and training in the social and legal issues that return migrants face. Return migrants also advocated for policies to enhance skill matching, job creation, and entrepreneurship, as many felt the occupational skills they developed in the U.S. were undervalued in Mexico. To address family separation, returnees argued for legal and policy reform to accommodate family reunification.
The Returned is an illuminating account of the difficulties faced by return migrants and their families in Mexico City.
 

Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR.

Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust.

Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative.

Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

As our increasingly globalized world alters the dynamics of migration, the ideas that migrants have about returning to their home countries have evolved as well. This diverse collection examines the changes and complexities of migration patterns in a range of Asian countries and cities, exploring how globalization and transnationalism shape and give meaning to the migrant experience. From Japanese-Brazilian transmigrants and Filipina students in Ireland to skilled migrants from India, the authors address migrants’ backgrounds, ambitions, and opportunities to offer intriguing insights and propose fascinating new questions about the lives of migrants in today’s world.

Following the end of World War II in Asia, the Allied powers repatriated over six million Japanese nationals from colonies and battlefields throughout Asia and deported more than a million colonial subjects from Japan to their countries of origin.

Depicted at the time as a postwar measure related to the demobilization of defeated Japanese soldiers, this population transfer was a central element in the human dismantling of the Japanese empire that resonates with other post-colonial and post-imperial migrations in the twentieth century.

Lori Watt analyzes how the human remnants of empire, those who were moved and those who were left behind, served as sites of negotiation in the process of the jettisoning of the colonial project and in the creation of new national identities in Japan. Through an exploration of the creation and uses of the figure of the repatriate, in political, social, and cultural realms, this study addresses the question of what happens when empire comes home.