Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Migration of women from Mexico to the United States has dramatically increased in recent years. The book’s aim is to explore this, while simultaneously addressing how it has been underrepresented in scholarly work. In doing so, a platform is created where these women and the issues that shape their everyday lives are made visible in the academy. It is a worthy and much-needed contribution to debates about women, gender, and migration in the borderlands, which, as the editors point out, remains understudied, displaced, or at times simply ignored. Also notable is the interdisciplinary nature of the compilation, which brings a number of significant contributions into a shared space and thus sets a precedent for further interdisciplinary dialogue. Likewise, the editors’ sensitivity to modes of thought from both sides of the border is commendable, with two of the essays having been translated from Spanish.The sizeable collection of 23 essays truly is diverse and challenging. The essays in the volume find common ground through the theoretical concept of “structural violence” which women in the borderlands are collectively subjected to in various ways. This appears to refer to the institutionalization of unequal power relations in society and government that naturalize the various subordinations of women. The volume sets to work exploring both the processes by which this takes place and the possibilities for resistance or agency that it creates. However, the volume covers such a broad thematic scope that at times it is unclear how the essays connect; this lack of a fit could alienate a “beginner” audience, which is presumably among those it is aimed at captivating.The essays span a variety of topics, including but not limited to gendered violence at the border (including femicide in Ciudad Juárez); the biopolitics of female re/production and women’s construction as a biological threat to state and nation; the sexualization of female workers; women’s cross-border/hybrid identities and the challenge they pose to state-defined citizenship; the organization and regulation of sexuality at the border; women’s symbolic relationship to the nation and their inherent instability as cultural anchors; the changing role of women as wives and mothers; and the important role of music in opening public spaces of “in-betweenness” where women’s transnational identities can be celebrated. Unexpectedly, the book does not have a concluding chapter, thereby missing an opportunity to tie together numerous loose ends and flag further possibilities for research into women at the borderlands.As in any collection so diverse, some criticisms could be levied about the book’s approach. Most problematic for me is the introductory focus on Gloria Anzaldúa. The volume opens with her words, and its subsequent uncritical appropriation of her definition of the borderlands risks reinforcing a number of myths prevalent in border studies. First, it reproduces the myth that border studies began with her influential book Borderlands: The New Mestiza (1987) and thus obscures or devalues studies undertaken before that (see Pablo Vila’s conclusion in Ethnography at the Border, 2003, p. 308). Second, employing her figurative definition of the borderlands as an unspecified zone stretching to the south and north of the physical divide threatens to inadvertently obscure the significance of the physical borderlands themselves and the specificity of the struggles that take place there. Finally, and perhaps most markedly, the editors celebrate Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous metaphor of the border as an “open and bleeding wound” (p. 4) without heeding Patricia Price’s critique that this remark actually reflects the subtle feminization of the border. By reproducing what is essentially an image of female genitalia (see Patricia L. Price, Dry Place: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion, 2004, p. 55), they unwittingly reinstate the binaries that have historically constituted women’s ambiguity within hegemonic discourses of state and society (good/evil, Guadalupe/Malinche, mother/ temptress), which arguably maintain their marginal status both at the border and within academic studies of the borderlands. Conversely, many of the individual essays do recognize and critically assess these issues; this again creates a certain lack of fit.Overall, the volume is well suited to those unfamiliar with the topics it discusses owing to its clear and explanatory manner. However, it will also interest established scholars with its seemingly endless directions for more specialized research. The interdisciplinary mix makes the book attractive to a variety of academic fields such as political science and international relations, Chicana/o studies, Latin American and Latino studies, border studies, sociology, and human geography (even though the authors are predominantly sociologists). It is certainly a valuable contribution to studies of women and/or the U.S.-Mexican borderlands in each of these disciplines

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