Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Women's migration within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States is increasing; nearly as many women as men are migrating. This development gives rise to new social negotiations which have not been well examined in migration studies until now. This path-breaking anthology analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the "structural violence" that Mexican women confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived: in the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices between the two countries. Women in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands includes twenty-three essays - two of which are translated from the Spanish - that illuminate women's engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women's fertility rates as "out of control." Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women's migration from rural areas to urban centres within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas' commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Juarez. This rich, wide-ranging anthology highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.