Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
- Book Review,
by Ruben Martýnez
Amazon.com
Not since Ted Conover's Coyotes has a book revealed the underground culture of illegal immigration from Mexico as well as Crossing Over by Rubén Martínez. This up-and-coming author writes of what he calls "a Mexican Manifest Destiny" that continually pierces the southern borderline of the United States--a "line [that] is still more an idea than a reality." Martínez begins with the awful story of the three Chávez brothers, all killed when a truck carrying them and some two dozen other illegal aliens tried to outrace border patrol agents and flipped. Martínez learns of their fate and travels to their peasant hometown in southern Mexico to distil the motives of migrants. Then he follows the rest of the family north as they fan into the United States. Crossing Over is written in the first person and is highly anecdotal, but Martínez constantly makes observations that break free from these narrow confines. "Mexicans have always had an uncanny instinct for finding the soft spots of the American labor economy," he notes at one point, explaining how it is that millions of poor people who barely speak English can thrive, in their way, north of the border. Crossing Over is an outstanding book, and required reading for anyone interested in Hispanics and the new America. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Chronicling a family that lost three sons to a border crossing gone horribly wrong, Martinez travels repeatedly from San Diego to the city of Cheron, in the state of Michoacin, about 200 miles west of Mexico City. Though treated by some of the Mexicans he meets as more of a gringo than a norteno (a Mexican who has lived in the north), Martinez, an American of Mexican emigri parents, gets terrifically close to his subjects, following them from stultifying poverty in Mexico to mortally dangerous illegal crossings and harsh and also dangerous (and illegal) work in Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri and California. Martinez draws a wealth of social, ethnic, linguistic and economic nuance in completely absorbing narratives. Each of the 13 chapters begins with a facing-page photo by Joseph Rodriguez (with whom Martinez collaborated on East Side Stories), showing us the cholos (gang members), coyotes (crossing guides) and pollos ("chickens" being led across), and also the everyday people whose lives are spread, one way or another, across the border. Martinez is now at Harvard on a Loeb fellowship, has won an Emmy for his work as a journalist, is associate editor of Pacific News Service and a correspondent for PBS's Religion and Ethics News Weekly. His book is heroic in its honesty and self-examination, and in its determination to tell its story completely and fully. (Oct. 3)Forecast: With the legal status of Mexican workers apparently on the White House front burner, this will be a huge book for policy wonks; look for terrific reviews, and for Martinez to do many a news chat. This will be a big seller on campus and with left-leaning readers (possibly for years), but the topicality and the quality of the writing make a major breakout likely.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-The U.S.'s persistent effort to prevent undocumented workers from crossing its border with Mexico has cost thousands of lives in recent years. Among them were Benjamin, Jaime, and Salvador Chavez, three brothers killed in a single infamous incident. Why do people repeatedly risk their lives to make the illegal crossing? What is it like for them on both sides of the border? Some of the answers found here will surprise many readers, but few will be able to resist this remarkable account once the book has been opened. Martinez traveled to the Michoacan town of Cheran to find the Chavez family. This also proved to be a personal journey for him, triggering insights into his own cultural roots. Cheran is "an Indian town with one foot in pre-Columbian times and the other leaping toward the twenty-first century." Its deforested hills can no longer support its traditional logging-based economy, and each spring a third of its inhabitants travel-most of them illegally-to the U.S. to work, returning again for the town fiesta in the fall. The name of the ancient language that most residents still speak-Purepecha-actually means "a people who travel." Their medicine, music, religion, language, and family customs are a mixture of Indian traditions with Catholicism and modern globalization and, in highly colorful style, Martinez shows how this "negotiation of cultural identity continues to this day" on both sides of the border. At the fiesta, Martinez writes, "All of Cheran is spinning around me as I try to stand still." Reading his book feels a lot like that. It must be experienced.Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Emmy Award-winning journalist Martinez here captures the human story of Hispanic migrants drawn north by a hunger for la vida mejor. Hundreds of "illegals" die each year attempting to cross the invisible line between Mexico and the United States. Among them were the Ch vez brothers, three undocumented farm workers who died in 1996 after a coyote's speeding truck flipped and crashed. Martinez spent a year traveling with the brothers' extended family, chronicling a four-generation-long journey northward. They begin in the family's hometown of Cher n, Michoac n, and travel across the southwestern desert to timber mills in Arkansas, meat-packing plants in Wisconsin, and greenhouses in Missouri, eventually arriving near the strawberry fields in California, the brothers' original destination. As he relates the passionate story of this migrant family on its never-ending search for identity, Martinez identifies components that contribute to the cultural swirl of the migrant experience and predicts the creation of a multiracial future. Martinez honestly articulates both the ideals and the enormous risks taken by migrants, showing how la tradici"n has foiled assimilation and the "melting pot" myth even as migration creates change on both sides of the border. Recommended for large public and academic libraries. Sylvia D. Hall-Ellis, Denver P.L. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The U.S. is "a nation of immigrants," but most Americans don't know much about the experience of immigration today. Martinez, an associate editor at Pacific News Service and correspondent for PBS' Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, aims to illuminate that experience in this involving story of an extended Mexican family's journey. Three of the Chavez brothers died in a border incident; Martinez goes to their small town in Michoacan and describes their funeral. But other family members have not given up hope, and Martinez documents what they find across the border, in Arkansas, Missouri, California, and Wisconsin. This is one of the strengths of Martinez's narrative: so much of the literature about Mexican immigrants, legal and undocumented, focuses on the Southwest, it's all too easy to forget that midwestern slaughterhouses and orchards also depend on immigrant labor. Martinez captures the terrors and small victories of the immigrants' journey, as well as the inexorable reciprocal flow of culture between a Mexican village and the new homes the immigrants find in el Norte. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Through these beautifully written and important stories, Martínez shows us how "America" is being re-imagined by its uninvited, its disrespected, its invisible, and he shows us that they will change us, whether we like it or not." --Los Angeles Times
"To read Crossing Over is to read not the history of the foreign other, but to read the story of America, to understand the dynamic that renews the strength and hope of the American Dream even as it reshapes it.. . . [Martínez] has depicted a deep, enduring commonality that may change the way we understand immigration" --Chicago Tribune
Review
"Through these beautifully written and important stories, Martínez shows us how "America" is being re-imagined by its uninvited, its disrespected, its invisible, and he shows us that they will change us, whether we like it or not." --Los Angeles Times
"To read Crossing Over is to read not the history of the foreign other, but to read the story of America, to understand the dynamic that renews the strength and hope of the American Dream even as it reshapes it.. . . [Martínez] has depicted a deep, enduring commonality that may change the way we understand immigration" --Chicago Tribune
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