Book Review: On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building

Abstract

Chapter five traces the experiences of Paco's friend Rogelio Martínez Sernaand that of his male peersacross the US-Mexico borderlands. Chávez-García argues that these men crossed into the United States not only to deter impoverishment and hardship but, more importantly, to achieve an economically, personally, and emotionally stable family life. This final chapter opposes Chávez-García's initial assessment that these letters simply provided a window into broader social, political, and economic circumstances beyond their control in shaping their choices. Instead, Chávez-García illustrates how Rogelio and his male acquaintances were neither victims nor passive agents in the process of gaining employment and other opportunities. Their use of humor, creativity, and resilience afforded them opportunities to cope with larger structural systems that they otherwise could not dictate. Moreover, Chávez-García notes that their oppression toward women, women's bodies, gender, and female sexuality illustrates another dimension of agency that these men possessed when negotiating their lives in the United States.This study is important because, as Chávez-García notes, few histories on twentieth-century Mexico have examined migrants' firsthand personal experiences in the United States. More than that, however, it creates new dominions of archival sources. The book demonstrates how new generations of historians, with access to personal family archives, can shed light on matters that dominant and traditional archival sources simply lack. Finally, Chávez-García's work provides a rudimentary outline for curating family archives within a larger historical framework.