A new book by Stanton E.F. Wortham, the Lynch School of Education and Human Development Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean, traces diverse, dynamic interactions within a changing community as it explores a Mexican migrant community鈥檚 two decades of growth in an American town and the complex relationships among the new arrivals and existing residents.
The result of 11 years of field research, Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches and Civic Institutions presents the voices and views of three groups of residents鈥擨rish and Italian American, African American, and Mexican immigrant鈥攖hrough a broad range of personal stories about how migrants are perceived, the actions and reactions among diverse residents, and the weight of stereotypes and past experiences, said Wortham, the book鈥檚 lead author.
Stanton E.F. Wortham, Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Migration Narratives shows how Mexicans鈥� experiences were shaped by stories about the town鈥檚 earlier cycles of migration. Many residents of Irish, Italian, and African descent narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and worked hard to succeed, finding jobs, establishing families, and moving 鈥渦p and out鈥� of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods.
鈥淲e trace how these stories were often inaccurate, but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant life,鈥� said Wortham. 鈥淲e all have ways of discussing the complexities in our lives, and we usually oversimplify. What we do is document the complexities that migrants and hosts actually experience in towns like this. We think that is the best place to start if we hope to respond intelligently to the politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.鈥�
Migration Narratives offers a compelling study of a community adapting to changing demographics and culture during an election year, when immigration and immigrant communities are among the contested topics discussed by politicians at all levels of government, Wortham said.
A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with a particular expertise in social identification and human interaction, Wortham led a team of researchers who spent years speaking to residents in the northeast American town, which became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, such that the Mexican population grew by more than 1,000 percent and ended up comprising almost a third of the town.
鈥淲e spent many years in this community, and we wrote this book 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,鈥� Wortham said.
“People often break immigration down into simple explanations: It鈥檚 people working hard and hoping their kids succeed and building America, as in the classic immigrant story. Or it鈥檚 about immigrants moving in and taking all the jobs. Or it鈥檚 about racial injustice and how immigrants are discriminated against. What the book tries to do is show that actually all of those things are true, but not one of them describ