Summary Of Transborder Lives

The United States is a diverse country that hardly leaves gaps for minorities to shine through. Immigration and Latin American immigration in particular, helps shape a picture of what a modern U.S. looks like. Over the past decades, the Mexican population in the U.S. has become increasingly diverse with regard to national origins. The book Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California and Oregon by Lynn Stephen is an ethnography of Mixtecs from San Agustín Atenago and Zapotecs from Teotitlán del Valle now living in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Stephen focuses on the structural settings that frame migrant and labor relations. Through the use of interviews, she provided the readers with human relations, experiences in labor
Whether it is fear of deportation or of speaking up, undocumented individuals are always dominated and limited to what they can say or do. Therefore, “Transborder Lives” experiences can be evaluated through the lenses of internal colonialism. With the recurring cycle of the oppressed and the oppressor, the concept of internal colonialism becomes present. The dominant society has and still creates political and economic inequalities to exploit minority groups. Stephen provides the Bracero Program as an example, which was designed to recruit Mexican laborer to substitute for those who left the farm labor industry to serve in the U.S. armed forces. The program played an important role in the arrival of the Mixtecs and Zapotecs in California and Oregon, since their migration decision was a result of labor recruitment. Just like all those indigenous people were recruited, my grandfather, Jose Regalado Yepez also formed part of the Bracero program. He was recruited at a young age, but the desire for a better life and the need to go back and be an impact for those he left behind was what guided him. However, accompanying the Bracero Program was also Operation Wetback, a program that focused on deporting and preventing undocumented people from entering the U.S. Similarly, the poem I am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzales captures the unity and pride of Indo-Mexican culture, along with the struggles against racial prejudice and social injustice they experienced. The poem states “Lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society, confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes, suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society”. With their policies once again we can see the U.S. dominance and the lack of consistency, where the U.S. approves immigrants for cheap labor, but discards them when they are no longer