Customer Reviews

Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Crossing Over is perhaps the most beautifully written and moving testaments to migrant experience i've ever read, and it fills a critical void in contemporary discourse on (Mexican) immigration. As a Mexicana living in the U.S., I have shared Martinez's book with family and friends on both sides of the border. As a college professor of Latino Studies, I have taught this book in several courses. I will continue to share this book with readers in the years to come.

Guided by the fatal experience of Benjamin, Jaime and Salvador Chavez, Ruben Martinez navigates the complex and tragedy-ridden path of the Mexican migrant. Among his characters' displays of love for Cheran and loyalty to its Purepecha traditions, Martinez weaves the pushes and pulls that send families into the war zone of the border. In addition to detailing economic hardships born from la crisis in Mexico, he opens the reader's eyes to the luxuries of impoverished life in the United States. For example, although in an unconscious way I knew the bleak conditions of Mexican pueblos, I had not thought about the transition from this lifestyle to an American version of poverty. Martinez made me see how Cheranes delight to have such basic amenities as hot and cold running water, flushing toilets and stoves. Each chapter offers a broader understanding of why, despite family separation, agonizing physical strain and possible death, many Mexicans try their luck at the daunting border.

Once these migrant families have made it across the border, they encounter a new milieu of challenges. Martinez illustrates how the children of these families find themselves in a particularly difficult state of feeling neither Mexican nor American, but somewhere in between. In the midst of figuring out their new identity, they are thrown into American public schools to hit face first the blows of racism, language barriers and isolation. It is here that teachers play a vital role in the education, self-esteem and future success of these children. If teachers are familiar with the individual experiences of their migrant students and of migrant families in general, they can accommodate the students' needs in the classroom. Schools can either make a Mexican child feel welcome and valued or unwanted and out of place.

Through his tone, Martinez tells the reader how close he got with migrant families such as the Chavezes and of the passion he has for their dilemma. Somehow he makes the tiniest, seemingly insignificant details of each individual family come together in a coherent idea that the reader cannot forget. The reader is left with a new vision of this man-made line dividing two countries and sees clearly all the death, renewed life and cultural battles that it represents.

Ruben Martinez carries readers between Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico, and the various sites in the United States, from Watsonville, California, to Warren, Arkansas, where migrants from Cheran work and live, and where a lively exchange of cultures is taking place today. "Crossing Over" is that wonderful rarity, a personal narrative that also manages to tell us a great deal about our own world. Like other first-rate journalists (and one thinks of George Orwell and Studs Terkel), Ruben Martinez personalizes the history, or packs his personal narrative with so much social and economic history that readers finish "Crossing Over" having learned more than they expected-and asking a lot of questions about current U. S. immigration policy.

As an activist and a watsonville, california native, i feel that Ruben Martinez has done a great service by shedding light on the life of migrant families. This book shows the diverse situations that can occur even out of one small town in Michoacan. There is definitely classism amongst migrant families that can be more intense then racism one may encounter when leaving their country of origin.
Martinez is descriptive of locations and living conditions. I know the neighborhoods well that che mentioned in watsonville, and i argue that he was a little geographically confused on street names etc. I can imagine Cheran, Michoacan and the people he describes-this may be because of my background- i don't know.
I think that it is important to continue writing books that display the diversity of Mexico, and the individual struggles of those who come north to the U.S.. People leave different conditions at different times by different means for different reasons. I am glad that this book only deals with people from one small town, rather than creating one more general explanation of why and how people cross the border to provide food for the United States and the world.

I'm glad I read this book. Although I traveled through Mexico in the summer of 2003, I learned far more about the Mexican way of life from this book. It does three things well: it creates the flavor of Mexican poverty without becoming sentimental; it shows the brutal transition from a tradition of self-sufficient hopelessness to cheap American values; and it does both of these by looking intimately at a few Mexican families. I was impressed by the author's ability to strip off a culture's surface in order to reveal both its oppression and its integrity. - Michael Squires

Crossing Over teaches us about the migrant trail by sharing -- with great sensitivity -- how the participants themselves experience its tragedies while searching for hope and better lives for their children. Though a true story, it reads like a novel. Both eloquent and accessible, the book would make a great teaching text for a wide range of courses, at both the high school and college levels.

Jonathan Fox
Professor and Department Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz

I read and read and read some more, so I don't use the word "classic" lightly, but I think this book may be destined to be a true classic in the literature of the American immigrant experience.
Martinez, troubled by the deaths of 3 brothers from the Mexican village of Cheran, travels to their hometown and immerses himself in its culture, as well as in the culture of other Mexicans who cross the border for work.
Martinez's in-depth, literate, literary reporting is excellent, and he has much to teach us about the world and ourselves, especially here in the Western Hemisphere.
Martinez pays the 3 dead brothers a fine tribute, memorializing three men who otherwise would have been forgotten except by their families and friends.