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So. . . I got this book (an older one, published in 2007 and deaccessioned at my own library, because, grrr, they\u2019re like that, so I had to borrow it through interlibrary loan) because I wanted to challenge my preconceptions about immigration, and figured that this book written by a journalist who lived and worked in Mexico for 10 years, and whose book about the opioid epidemic, Dreamland<\/em>, I had previously read, would do this.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, it didn\u2019t, really.<\/p>\n The book is in the form of, as the subtitle says, \u201ctales\u201d \u2013 that is, extended profiles of people and communities affected by the past several decades\u2019 wave of immigration to the United States and, in one case, trade between the two countries:\u00a0 an immigrant who, after becoming wealthy in the United States as the \u201ctomato king,\u201d returned to his village to run for mayor; an inner-ring suburb of L.A. which, upon becoming populated by new citizens unaccustomed to American democracy, came to be run by kleptocrats until those citizens, joining together with the remaining native-born white voters, removed them from office; the rise and fall of velvet painting in the town of Juarez; the emergence of Mexican taco-restaurant entrepreneurship in Chicago; the transformation of a small Kansas town from football to soccer fans when the high school\u2019s soccer team found success for the first time; and, told in several parts, a small-town boy finding his future first working on construction sites in Mexico City, then in the U.S., and finally in a tourist part of Mexico.\u00a0 The stories are free-standing, and the copyright page says that \u201cversions of some of these stories appeared\u201d elsewhere \u2014 since these are fairly long stories, I don\u2019t know whether these were multi-part reports or were expanded for the book, or whether they just seemed long.<\/p>\n And some of the reports are inspiring, at least to a certain degree.\u00a0 The town of South Gate, much as vast sums of money were simply lost due to the corruption of its mayor for a several-year stretch (and it\u2019s just not clear how they withstood all that; Quinones says the rainy day fund was depleted \u2014 does that mean that there was simply enough money built up in that fund that the city could absorb the corruption while still continuing to function?), had, as a positive end result, greater civic engagement as the immigrant new citizens understood that, unlike their experience back in Mexico, voting meant more than just pulling the lever for the candidate with the more generous pre-election giveaways; in addition, the native-born white elderly long-term residents and the new arrivals had to work together to remove the thieves from office, and those newly-formed connections strengthened the community.\u00a0 And it\u2019s nice enough that one arrival from Atolinga to Chicago went from working at a restaurant to running his own, and then mentored others from that immigrant community.<\/p>\n But the reporting on the Garden City High School soccer team in Kansas, had its discouraging elements.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the feel-good part.\u00a0 Garden City, as it happens, is a town the demographics of which were transformed by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador and (to a lesser extent) Vietnam beginning in the 90s to work in the meatpacking plant.\u00a0 The high school\u2019s tradition of celebrating football waned as, with a declining white\/native-born population, fewer and fewer of the boys tried out for the team, and the team\u2019s record got worse and worse, to the point when teens arrived at the games late and left early, as soon as they had identified the location of that night\u2019s party.\u00a0 But in 2003, the soccer team, comprised of children of immigrants, was what was finding success and, as the season went on, greater support from the school, including cheerleaders attending the games, and a pep rally before the postseason playoff game.<\/p>\n But along the way, Quinones can\u2019t present these students as the picture of high-achieving Americanized, ready-to-conquer-the-world young men \u2014 that is, the narrative that we\u2019re fed about the \u201cDACA kids\u201d \u2014 because there are too many cultural differences that get in the way.\u00a0 Even though immigrants had to be daring in order to cross the border in the first place, once here, he says, they tended to stay in their Mexican enclaves, with students afraid to stand out or take risks or push themselves too hard in school; in the years prior to that 2003 season, Quinones reports, few students, much as they enjoyed soccer on their own time, were willing to participate in the school\u2019s team.\u00a0 As one consequence of the isolation of the Mexican community, one of the students that Quinones profiles didn\u2019t even learn English until the third grade.\u00a0 Another consequence:\u00a0 in the mid-1990s, a white couple attempted to form a racially-mixed travel soccer team and found some short-term success \u2014 until, all-at-once, the immigrant parents pulled their kids and placed them in a Latino-only team instead, and the white kids left to play other sports instead, turning soccer into an exclusively-Latino sport.\u00a0 Quinones writes,<\/p>\n To the Musicks, wrapped up in the episode were Mexicans\u2019 complicated feelings toward America and toward white people whom they perceived as wealthy by definition. . . .<\/p>\n Americans talk often about racial diversity, but it isn\u2019t an idea that seems to appeal to many Mexican immigrants. . . .<\/p>\n Sidni Musick also thought the experience a result of Mexican immigrants\u2019 unwillingness to let go of Mexico and be absorbed into America.\u00a0 She saw this in the vehemence with which her ESL students \u2014 with better futures and better educations in Kansas than ever possible in Mexico \u2014 spoke of the United States taking Mexican territory 160 years earlier.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What happened to the soccer players after this season?\u00a0 Quinones writes about a community college soccer coach who tries to recruit players and then tries to get them to move on to a four-year college, using sports scholarships and loans as funding.\u00a0 But he struggles to find takers, as their parents want them to start contributing to the family\u2019s finances, and the young men themselves are too eager for the quick $13\/hour paycheck of the meatpacking plant, and the car and other expenses it can fund; besides, too many of them have already fathered children they need to support.\u00a0 Quinones attributes this in part to the fact that the generation of Mexicans moving to America were able to dramatically boost their living standards without any education, imparting the wrongly-learned lesson that education didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 And this stands in sharp contrast to the Vietnamese immigrant families at the plant, whose children moved on to bigger and better things.<\/p>\n There were some exceptions to this \u201ceducation doesn\u2019t matter\u201d attitude, and Quinones profiles a woman, mother of one of these soccer players, who was determinedly attending college to get a degree, to set an example, but these were exceptions.<\/p>\n In fact, in the introduction to the collection, Quinones describes the consequences of emigration on the home towns of the emigrants and the country as a whole.\u00a0 To begin with, emigrants imagined that they would stay in the United States only for long enough to send money back to build a Dream House, then return \u2014 but as they became more settled, they abandoned that dream, and the villages became filled with unoccupied often-unfinished houses, empty of young men, and dependent on the dollars sent home, as those dollars drove up prices so that families could no longer provide for themselves without those dollars.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, the fact that it was unskilled work that awaited them in the United States destroyed any education-seeking ethic that may have existed, or, if there was none, certainly prevented one from forming.\u00a0 He profiles a village called Jaripo, and writes,<\/p>\n Immigration didn\u2019t create many solutions for Mexico, I realized.\u00a0 On the contrary, it stifled development and simply created more immigration.\u00a0 Through it, Mexico lost its most energetic young blood.\u00a0 Immigrant dollars were godsends to villages like Jaripo, but they also kept these villages from finding any economic alternative to leaving for the United States.<\/p>\n In time, this crated a culture of departure that was tough to break.\u00a0 Teenage boys, above all, ached to leave.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As a result, the village and others like it have so hollowed out that their economic development projects have failed due to lack of expertise or ability or ambition among those remaining.<\/p>\n Now, this is not a comprehensive report.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t talk about whether particular areas were more or less affected by emigration.\u00a0 And the book is old enough that any new trends aren\u2019t picked up upon.\u00a0 But it is a less-than-rosy story.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image:\u00a0By Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler \/ Grid Engine (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So. . . I got this book (an older one, published in 2007 and deaccessioned at my own library, because, grrr, they\u2019re like that, so I had to borrow it through interlibrary loan) because I wanted to challenge my preconceptions about immigration, and figured that this book written by a journalist who lived and worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[463,890,539],"class_list":["post-8471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-mexican-emigration","tag-mexico"],"yoast_head":"\n