Frederick Jackson Turner Award Finalist Winner of the David Montgomery Award Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Book Award Winner of the Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award Winner of the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize Winner of the Américo Paredes Book Award “A deeply humane book.” —Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects “Necessary and timely...A valuable text to consider alongside the current fight for DACA, the border concentration camps, and the unending rhetoric dehumanizing Mexican migrants.” —PopMatters “A deep dive into the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States.” —PRI’s The World In the 1970s, the Mexican government decided to tackle rural unemployment by supporting the migration of able-bodied men. Millions of Mexican men crossed into the United States to find work. They took low-level positions that few Americans wanted and sent money back to communities that depended on their support. They periodically returned to Mexico, living their lives in both countries. After 1986, however, US authorities disrupted this back-and-forth movement by strengthening border controls. Many Mexican men chose to remain in the United States permanently for fear of not being able to come back north if they returned to Mexico. For them, the United States became a jaula de oro—a cage of gold. Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexican migrants who were compelled to bring their families across the border and raise a generation of undocumented children.

Monographic anthology on Mexican migrant workers (incl. Irregular migrants) in the USA - covers both historical and contemporary trends in Mexican immigration, labour supply and labour demand relationships to undocumented immigration, economic conditions of migrants, struggle over trade unionization of woman workers, ramifications for US-Mexico international relations, migration policy and human rights issues, etc., and includes texts of President Carter's message and the bill of rights on undocumented workers. Photographs and references.

Monograph comprising a collection of readings on issues related to Mexican migrant worker flows (including irregular migrants) to the USA - presents historical and political aspects of foreign worker employment, and discusses forced return migration of Mexican nationals during the 1930's, the impact of legal border commuting frontier workers as well as Mexico's reaction to USA migration policy measures against illegal Mexican workers, etc. Bibliography pp. 285 to 289, references and statistical tables.

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.