Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail [Hardcover]

Rubén Martínez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2001

A moving account of a family's odyssey by "one of the brightest voices of a new generation of Hispanic writers" (Washington Post)

The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world, breached daily by Mexicans in search of work. Yet the migrant gambit is perilous. Thousands die crossing the line and those who reach "the other side" are branded illegals, undocumented and unprotected.

In Crossing Over, Ruben Martinez puts a human face on the phenomenon, following the exodus of the Chávez clan, an extended Mexican family with the grim distinction of having lost three sons in a tragic border incident. He charts the migrants' progress from their small south-Mexican town of Cherán through the harrowing underground railroad to the tomato farms of Missouri, the strawberry fields of California, and the slaughterhouses of Wisconsin. He reveals the effects of immigration on the family left behind and offers a powerful portrait of migrant culture, an exchange that deposits hip hop in Indian villages while bringing Mexican pop to the northern plains. Far from joining the melting pot, Martinez argues, the migrants--as many as seven million in the U.S.--are spawning a new culture that will alter both countries as Latin America and the U.S. come increasingly to resemble each other.

Intimate, compelling, written with passion and engagement, Crossing Over tells the epic story of a family, a town, a world in motion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Not since Ted Conover's Coyotes has a book revealed the underground culture of illegal immigration from Mexico as well as Crossing Over by Rubén Martínez. This up-and-coming author writes of what he calls "a Mexican Manifest Destiny" that continually pierces the southern borderline of the United States--a "line [that] is still more an idea than a reality." Martínez begins with the awful story of the three Chávez brothers, all killed when a truck carrying them and some two dozen other illegal aliens tried to outrace border patrol agents and flipped. Martínez learns of their fate and travels to their peasant hometown in southern Mexico to distil the motives of migrants. Then he follows the rest of the family north as they fan into the United States. Crossing Over is written in the first person and is highly anecdotal, but Martínez constantly makes observations that break free from these narrow confines. "Mexicans have always had an uncanny instinct for finding the soft spots of the American labor economy," he notes at one point, explaining how it is that millions of poor people who barely speak English can thrive, in their way, north of the border. Crossing Over is an outstanding book, and required reading for anyone interested in Hispanics and the new America. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly

Chronicling a family that lost three sons to a border crossing gone horribly wrong, Martinez travels repeatedly from San Diego to the city of Cheron, in the state of Michoacin, about 200 miles west of Mexico City. Though treated by some of the Mexicans he meets as more of a gringo than a norteno (a Mexican who has lived in the north), Martinez, an American of Mexican emigri parents, gets terrifically close to his subjects, following them from stultifying poverty in Mexico to mortally dangerous illegal crossings and harsh and also dangerous (and illegal) work in Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri and California. Martinez draws a wealth of social, ethnic, linguistic and economic nuance in completely absorbing narratives. Each of the 13 chapters begins with a facing-page photo by Joseph Rodriguez (with whom Martinez collaborated on East Side Stories), showing us the cholos (gang members), coyotes (crossing guides) and pollos ("chickens" being led across), and also the everyday people whose lives are spread, one way or another, across the border. Martinez is now at Harvard on a Loeb fellowship, has won an Emmy for his work as a journalist, is associate editor of Pacific News Service and a correspondent for PBS's Religion and Ethics News Weekly. His book is heroic in its honesty and self-examination, and in its determination to tell its story completely and fully. (Oct. 3)Forecast: With the legal status of Mexican workers apparently on the White House front burner, this will be a huge book for policy wonks; look for terrific reviews, and for Martinez to do many a news chat. This will be a big seller on campus and with left-leaning readers (possibly for years), but the topicality and the quality of the writing make a major breakout likely.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (October 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805049088
• ISBN-13: 978-0805049084
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,193,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars los dos lados, July 15, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Hardcover)

Among this book's many strengths is Ruben Martinez's attention to both sides of the immigration story. He devotes nearly half the book to describing lives in Cheran, Michoacan, showing how immigration to the U.S. is transforming rural Mexico in a variety of surprising ways. Martinez argues that this transformation is the biggest change to hit the highlands since the Conquest. Martinez then travels "el otro lado", the other side--or the multiple other sides. He takes us into the cheranes' homes in small-town Wisconsin and Arkansas and in the working-class edge of Saint Louis, all before visiting the strawberry fields of California. Given the dispersal of recent Mexican migration throughout the U.S., beyond the expected centers of California and the Southwest, Martinez's book is timely indeed. I also commend Martinez for the way he explores culture change without judging or mourning the loss of old ways. As a reader, I effortlessly tagged along with Martinez, across the many roads traversed by mexicanos today. I enjoyed this book for its breezy, evocative, yet thoughtful writing. Martinez transports readers to places few of us will visit, but places with which we are all increasingly connected.
I highly recommend CROSSING OVER for use in college classes and for anyone who works with recent Mexican immigrants.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Profound Examination of Immigrant Life, October 14, 2001

By 

Saul Gonzalez (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Hardcover)

Ruben Martinez has written an important and ferociously passionate book that chronicles not only the epic tale of one immigrant family, but the birth pangs of a new America. He describes a country where cultural boundaries between North and Sout, the First World and Third World are collapsing, a nation where what it means to be "typically American" changes with each passing day and each arriving immigrant.

Equally important this book also honors the heroism and inner-life of immigrants. Too often in America immigrants are a population of the voiceless and invisible.They pick our crops in farm fields, sew our clothes in sweatshops, and care for our homes and children as domestic workers, but when it comes to hearing their stories, we remain deaf. "Crossing Over" helps to give immigrant America a voice and forces us to listen.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An immediate classic - best reporting of the last decade, March 26, 2002

By 

Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Hardcover)

There's no better way to begin to understand the tangled and interwoven relationship between Mexico and the United States than by picking up Ruben Martinez' "Crossing Over." I chose it because of a very good review written by Geri Smith in the December 31, 2001 edition of Business Week (see p. 26 of US edition; the review is entitled "The Grapes of Wrath, Mexican-Style").

I thought the book had an interesting premise - three Mexican brothers attempting an illegal crossing die in a truck crash in Southern California in 1996 while being chased by the 'migra' (border patrol). It's an interesting start, but the book is much more than that. It's the personal reporting that sets the book apart. It becomes Martinez' travelogue - he befriends families in Cheran, Mexico, then meets up with them again in the United States in such far-flung places as Warren Arkansas, Norwalk Wisconsin, and Watsonville California. The initimacy of the reporting sticks with you long after you've completed the book. One standout passage of note: a tour of a meat-processing plant in Wisconsin. Paging Sinclair Lewis.

Don't wait for the paperback. For this book, only the hardcover will do because you'll want it on your bookshelves for many years to come.