This study argues for a radically new interpretation of the origins and evolution of the ethnic Mexican community across the US. This book offers a definitive account of the interdependent histories of the US and Mexico as well as the making of the Chicano population in America. The authors link history to contemporary issues, emphasizing the overlooked significance of late 19th and 20th century US economic expansionism to Europe in the formation of the Mexican community.

The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

Scholars and journalists have looked mostly to Mexico's own economy and society for the chief causes of Mexican migration to the United States. This book presents a strikingly contrasting explanation and offers a persuasive historical re-examination of the history of relations between the two countries.

Gilbert Gonzalez dispels the myth that Mexican migration conforms to the pattern of earlier European migrations. Mexican migration, he shows, is the social consequence of U.S. economic domination over Mexico. Since the late nineteenth century, powerful U.S. capitalist...

Scholars and journalists have looked to Mexico's economy and society for the chief causes of Mexican migration to the United States. This book presents a contrasting explanation, examining the history of relations between the two countries. Gilbert Gonzalez dispels the myth that Mexican migration conforms to the pattern of earlier European migrations. Mexican migration, he shows, is the social consequence of US economic domination of Mexico. Since the late nineteenth century, US capitalist enterprises have controlled important sectors of the Mexican economy, a dominance that uprooted small...