"Sara Komarnisky provides a needed intervention in Latin American and Latinx studies through her ethnographic study of Mexicans in Alaska, an area severely understudied to date."-Jennifer Domino Rudolph, <i>Americas</i> "<i>Mexicans in Alaska</i> is a comprehensive and humane consideration of the desirable qualities and underestimated ingenuity and rigors informing the mobility and place-making of Mexican people in Alaska and Acuitzio del Canje, pointing to the undervalued diversity from within shaping Mexican immigrant and Mexican American family investments and life throughout the United States and its history."-Ana E. Rosas, <i>Alaska Journal of Anthropology</i> "I truly enjoyed reading this rich ethnography. It is thoroughly researched, and the writing is clear and engaging. It is also theoretically provocative and methodologically sophisticated."-Leah Schmalzbauer, <i>Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studie</i>s “A solid contribution to social science scholarship. Its inclusion of three generations of migrants provides a nice depth of time not often found in ethnographic scholarship, and its focus on Alaska as part of ‘greater Mexico’ is a novel and important contribution to the scholarship on migration in the United States.”-Ruth Gomberg-MuÑoz, associate professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago<br /> <br /> “<i>Mexicans in Alaska</i> enriches the study of migration through its lucid ethnography and theorizing. . . . By exploring the different dimensions of mobility across the continent in multigenerational networks, <i>Mexicans in Alaska</i> brings a new understanding to the social and material relations that extend between localities, not nations. An engaging ethnography.”-Lynn Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon
Mexicans in Alaska examines how Acuitzences are living, working, and imagining their futures across North America and suggests that anthropologists look across borders to see how broader structural conditions operate both within and across national boundaries. Understanding the experiences of transnational migrants remains a critical goal of contemporary scholarship, and Komarnisky’s analysis of the complicated lives of three generations of migrants provides depth to the field.
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Acuitzences in Alaska
Introduction: Yes, There Are Mexicans in Alaska
1. Tracing Mexican Alaska: A Transnational Social Space
2. The Annual Migration of the Traveling Swallows: Shared Experiences of Mobility across North America
3. “My Grandfather Worked Here”: Three Generations of the Bravo Family in Alaska and MichoacÁn
4. “You Have to Get Used to It”: Living the North American Dream
5. The Stuff of Transnational Life: Suitcases Full of Mole, T-Shirts, Roosters, and Other Things That Move
6. “It Freezes the People Together”: Producing a Mexican Alaska
Conclusion: Freedom to Move
Notes
Bibliography
Index