Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail

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.

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.

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.

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.