Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle, and Transnationalism among Mexican Migrants in the United States

Abstract

Mexicans have been migrating to the United States in significant numbers for more than a hundred years. From the outset, the great majority of this migration has been temporary and circular. Contrary to popular opinion, people have generally come for periods ranging from a few months to a couple of years and then returned home (Cockcroft 1982; Cornelius 1979). Since the late 1960s, however, there has been a marked growth in settlement. While temporary migration continues to predominate, it has become increasingly common for people to stay for extended periods and to establish new homes north of the border (Chavez 1988; Cornelius, in press). How should we understand the experiences of these recent settlers? What kinds of influence have they faced, and how have they responded? More importantly, how should we theorize and conceptualize their relationship to the contexts in which they have lived? For more than forty years, the ethnographically based literature on Mexican migration has been dominated by two closely related tendencies.' First, migration in general has been analyzed