Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers' pathways and draw links between the town's earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.

Analyzes the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media, with an eye to the stylistic features of these works as well as their contributions to debates on migration

This book gives voice to the diverse diasporic Latin American communities living in the UK by exploring first and onward migration of Latin Americans to Europe, with a specific reference to London. The authors discuss how networks of solidarity and local struggles are played out, enacted, negotiated and experienced in different spatial spheres, whether this be migration routes into London, work spaces, diasporic media and urban places. Each of these spaces are explored in separate chapters to argue that transnational networks of solidarity and local struggles are facilitating renewed sense of belongingness and claims to the city. In this context we witness manifestations of British Latinidad that invoke new forms of belongingness beyond and against old colonial powers.

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Migration Studies, Post-Colonial Studies and Affect Theory, Méndez analyzes the symbolic interplay between emotions, cognitions, and displacement in the narratives written by and about Dominican and Dominican-Americans in the United States and Puerto Rico. He argues that given the historic place of creolization as a marker of national, cultural, and social development in the Caribbean and particularly the Dominican Republic, this cultural process is not magically annulled in Caribbean immigrations to the U.S. Instead, this book illustrates the numerous ways in which Dominicans’ subjective interpretation of their experiences of migration and incorporation into U.S. society, seen through the filter of multiple creolizations of the past, are woven into their written works as a series of variations on Americanness and Dominicanness. Through close readings of selected writings by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis González, Junot Díaz, Josefina Báez, Loida Maritza Pérez among others, Méndez argues that emotional creolizations operate as a psychological parameter on immigrant populations as they negotiate their transcultural status against the ideological norms of assimilation in their new host country. Consequently, he proposes that this emotional creolization is dialectical — that is, it not only affects diasporic populations, but also changes the norms and terms of assimilation as well.

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and escape, these counterstrategies are variously launched as literary, cinematic, and civic interventions in past and present constructions of diasporic, migratory, or exilic identities. The essays trace these narratives through the figure of the “exile” as it moves across times, borders, and genres, transmogrifying into the fugitive, the escapee, the refugee, the nomad, the Other. Arguing that narratives and figures of migration to and in Europe and the Americas share tropes that link migration to kinship, community, refuge, and hegemony, the volume identifies a transhistorical, transcultural, and transnational common ground for experiences of mediated diaspora, migration, and exile at a time when public discourse and policy-making emphasize borders, divisions, and violent confrontations.

In the media, migrants are often portrayed as criminals; they are frequently dehumanized, marginalized, and unable to share their experiences. Telling Migrant Stories explores how contemporary documentary film gives voice to Latin American immigrants whose stories would not otherwise be heard. The essays in the first part of the volume consider the documentary as a medium for Latin American immigrants to share their thoughts and experiences on migration, border crossings, displacement, and identity. Contributors analyze films including Harvest of Empire, Sin país, The Vigil, De nadie, Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba, Abuelos, La Churona, and Which Way Home, as well as internet documentaries distributed via platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube. They examine the ways these films highlight the individual agency of immigrants as well as the global systemic conditions that lead to mass migrations from Latin American countries to the United States and Europe. The second part of the volume features transcribed interviews with documentary filmmakers, including Luis Argueta, Jenny Alexander, Tin Dirdamal, Heidi Hassan, and María Cristina Carrillo Espinosa. They discuss the issues surrounding migration, challenges they faced in the filmmaking process, the impact their films have had, and their opinions on documentary film as a force of social change. They emphasize that because the genre is grounded in fact rather than fiction, it has the ability to profoundly impact audiences in a way narrative films cannot. Documentaries prompt viewers to recognize the many worlds migrants depart from, to become immersed in the struggles portrayed, and to consider the stories of immigrants with compassion and solidarity. Contributors: Ramón Guerra | Lizardo Herrera | Jared List | Esteban Loustaunau | Manuel F. Medina | Ada Ortúzar-Young | Thomas Piñeros Shields | Juan G. Ramos | Lauren Shaw | Zaira Zarza A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez