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Migration from Mexico to the United States has become an increasingly volatile topic. The news is filled with stories of deaths, protests, and amnesty debates. With the constant buzz about migration in the political, economic, and legal spheres, the migrants themselves easily become a de-humanized multitude. “I Know It’s Dangerous”: Why Mexicans Risk Their Lives to Cross the Border strives to put a human face on the issue of migration and effectively turns the statistics we hear so often into individuals with real lives, needs, and desires.

As an Australian national, Lynnaire Sheridan brings a refreshingly neutral voice to this hot-button topic. With data gathered over two years of living in Baja California, Mexico, Sheridan draws out individual stories, motivations, and conceptions of risk that ultimately allow us a deeper understanding of migration. Sheridan enriches the migrants’ stories with examinations of popular songs, graffiti art on the border, analyses of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews with migrants. Together these narratives show us that risk has become a strong motivating factor for migrants and that stricter border policies have not necessarily stemmed the rates of migration; they have merely changed how people migrate.

Sheridan’s findings have broad implications for both those interested in migration from Mexico to the United States and international migration scholars. This book will appeal to a range of disciplines in the humanities, from anthropology and criminology to art and ethnic studies. It will also resonate among legal professionals, policy makers, and social workers.

While numerous books have focused on the act of migration and its ripples across both the United States and Mexico, this book is unique in its attention to migrants in Mexico and its ability to draw out their individual stories.

I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Patricia Zavella describes how poor and working-class Mexican Americans and migrants to California’s central coast struggle for agency amid the region’s deteriorating economic conditions and the rise of racial nativism in the United States. Zavella also examines tensions within the Mexican diaspora based on differences in legal status, generation, gender, sexuality, and language. She proposes “peripheral vision” to describe the sense of displacement and instability felt by Mexican Americans and Mexicans who migrate to the United States as well as by their family members in Mexico.

Drawing on close interactions with Mexicans on both sides of the border, Zavella examines migrant journeys to and within the United States, gendered racialization, and exploitation at workplaces, and the challenges that migrants face in forming and maintaining families. As she demonstrates, the desires of migrants to express their identities publicly and to establish a sense of cultural memory are realized partly through Latin American and Chicano protest music, and Mexican and indigenous folks songs played by musicians and cultural activists.

Five hundred years ago, the army of conquest led by Hernan Cortés marched hundreds of miles across a rugged swath of land from Veracruz on the Mexican Caribbean to the capital city of the Aztecs, now Mexico City. This journey was the catalyst for profound cultural and political change in Mesoamerica. Today, many Mexicans view the Ruta de Cortés as a symbol of an event that forever changed the course of their history. But few U.S. Americans understand how the conquest still affects Mexicans’ national identity and their relationship with the United States.

Following the route of Hernán Cortés, In the Shadow of Cortés offers a visual and cultural history of the legacy of contact between Spaniards and indigenous civilizations. The book is a reflective journey that presents a diversity of voices, images, and ideas about history and conquest. Specialist in Mexican culture Kathleen Ann Myers teams up with prize-winning translators and photographers to offer a unique reading experience that combines accessible interpretative essays with beautifully translated interviews and dozens of historical and contemporary black-and-white and color images, including some by award-winner Steven Raymer. The result offers readers multiple perspectives on these pivotal events as imagined and re-envisioned today by Mexicans both in their homeland and in the United States.

In the Shadow of Cortés offers an extensive visual narrative about conquest and, ultimately, about Mexican history. It traces the symbolic geography of the conquest and shows how the historical memory of colonialism continues to shape lives today.