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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 Old and New New Englanders, Bluford Adams provides a reenvisioning of New England’s history and regional identity by exploring the ways the arrival of waves of immigrants from Europe and Canada transformed what it meant to be a New Englander during the Gilded Age. Adams’s intervention challenges a number of long-standing conceptions of New England, offering a detailed and complex portrayal of the relations between New England’s Yankees and immigrants that goes beyond nativism and assimilation. In focusing on immigration in this period, Adams provides a fresh view on New England’s regional identity, moving forward from Pilgrims, Puritans, and their descendants and emphasizing the role immigrants played in shaping the region’s various meanings. Furthermore, many researchers have overlooked the newcomers’ relationship to the regional identities they found here. Adams argues immigrants took their ties to New England seriously. Although they often disagreed about the nature of those ties, many immigrant leaders believed identification with New England would benefit their peoples in their struggles both in the United States and back in their ancestral lands.

Drawing on and contributing to work in immigration history, as well as American, gender, ethnic, and New England studies, this book is broadly concerned with the history of identity construction in the United States while its primary focus is the relationship between regional categories of identity and those based on race and ethnicity. With its interdisciplinary methodology, original research, and diverse chapter topics, the book targets both specialist and nonspecialist readers.

An examination of how time is used as a policing tactic in border and migrant policy.

Time is seldom on the migrant’s side. Migrants crossing the US southern border are “immediate threats,” according to the government agencies and politicians hell-bent on their capture and deportation, and those caught in the US are forced to endure grueling months in detention centers and in queues for judicial hearings.

On Border Time examines temporal dimensions of violence and associated ideological conditioning in an increasingly privatized and militarized immigration system. Visiting the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, Cristina Jo Pérez shows how state-supported histories of national “progress” and migrant “backwardness” manufacture political subjects. Meanwhile, the media and political narratives of imminent threat criminalize Brown men and boys, justifying Border Patrol shootings as preemptive national defense. Dramatically widening her lens, Pérez further considers how the anti-immigrant agenda bleeds into the future, through aggressive state intervention into migrants’ reproductive lives. From a heat-of-the-moment police encounter to a Houston gynecologist’s waiting room, On Border Time is a profound meditation on policies and discourses that put migrants out of sync and, by extension, out of the nation.