New Immigration Book
There’s No Jose Here: Following the Hidden Lives of Mexican Immigrants by Gabriel Thompson 2007, Avalon Publishing Group, $14.95, www.nationbooks.org
From the back cover of the book:
Mexican immigration has become one of the most polarizing issues of Bush’s second term and will remain a central topic in the coming years. Whereas Mexicans once had a sizable presence in a few select states like California and Texas, today the fastest growing populations are in places like North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Seemingly overnight, Americans across the country are finding their new neighbors to have names like Gonzalez, Paulino, Sosa, and Aguilar. Despite the intense passions that the immigration debate evokes, we remain largely ignorant about the actual lives behind the newspaper headlines and talk-show bluster. Why don’t Mexicans just “play by the rules” and enter legally? How do they cope, living in a strange country among people that speak a language they can’t understand? And after everything they have gone through, do they see immigration as a blessing, a curse, or something in between? There’s No Jose Here answers such questions by giving voice to a group usually ignored: immigrants themselves. The central narrative follows the engaging figure of Enrique, a thirty-four-year-old livery cab driver who came to the United States illegally at the age of sixteen and has since seen his daughter poisoned by lead, his mother abandoned in Mexico by his father, his cousin murdered on the streets of Brooklyn, and his best friend deployed to Iraq. The result is a behind-the-scenes account of normally invisible Mexican immigrants that allows readers to witness the harrowing, inspiring, and complicated stories of people struggling to survive in a new and often hostile land. From the floors of hidden sweatshops in New York City to the impoverished rural villages of Mexico, Enrique and his family continue a seemingly endless search for economic opportunity and stability — and in the process force us to take a hard look at the immigration drama as it plays out in the real world.
KJ