Immigration Books of the Year: Bad Mexicans, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success
Two amazing immigration books stood out in 2022. They have earned Immigration Book of the Year honors.
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández
On Fresh Air on NPR, Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández talks about her book, which tells the previously untold story of the rebels who fled Mexico to the United States and helped incite the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Hernández spoke with guest interviewer Tonya Mosley about Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. “People who were being disparaged at that time as ‘bad Mexicans’ in the United States were those who organized, those who protested against the conditions of what was then known as Juan Crow, a similar form of social marginalization as Jim Crow,” Hernández says.
The publisher’s blurb about Bad Mexicans describes the book as follows:
“Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by U.S. imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The U.S. Departments of War, State, Treasury, and Justice as well as police, sheriffs, and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the FBI’s first cases.
But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code, and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century.
Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas’ story integral to modern American life.”
Bad Mexicans is a brilliant look at an important, and largely forgotten, part of U.S./Mexico history.
The second book explains Why Immigrant Children Excel More than US-Born Kids. This important fact gets little play in the national discussion in the U.S. about immigration.
The Voice of America spoke to economic historians Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky, who have thoroughly studied the data comparing today’s migrants to those who came to the United States a century ago. Their findings are laid out in an important book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.
“One big surprise was how well the children of immigrants are doing, and how (children of) immigrants from nearly every sending country are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S.-born. And how that stays constant over 100 years, regardless of the sending country,” says Abramitzky.
The reason many children of immigrants do better than their American-born counterparts can come down to location, said Boustan. “They’re locating in very dynamic cities with a lot of good job opportunities, and that’s helping set up their kids for success,” Boustan says. “We find that the children of the internal migrants — the U.S.-born families that move somewhere else — actually look a lot like the children of immigrants. And so, what’s really happening is that immigrants are willing to move to good places, and a lot of U.S.-born families stay in the location where they were born.”
Another less-apparent advantage for children of immigrants in low-paying jobs, is that their parents might have college degrees and professional skills honed in their home countries that they cannot apply in the United States, but they instill a drive for education and professional success in their children.
As a whole, the data suggests that the children of today’s immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Mexico or Guatemala who grew up in relatively poor families are doing just as well as the children of Norwegian, German and Italian immigrants of the past. Like them, they are more likely than the children of equally poor U.S.-born parents to make it into the middle class or beyond.
KJ