MARIA CRISTINA GARCIA. Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, The United States, and Canada. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 273. $19.95

Abstract

María Cristina García's book eloquently explains the various factors that shaped the experience of over two million Central American refugees in Mexico, the United States, and Canada from 1970 to the 1990s. Blaming the Cold War for driving people out of their countries, García explains how government officials and pro-immigrant advocates in religious institutions and nonprofit organizations shaped responses to the Central American refugee crisis. According to García, government officials in North America conveniently politicized their initial responses to strengthen their own foreign or domestic agendas but left few venues for legalizing the status of Central American immigrants. As a response, activists mobilized national and transnational networks to establish refugee assistance programs, inject public debates with moral consciousness, and advocate humane immigration policies. García accurately concludes that Mexico's effort to present itself as a middle power in hemispheric affairs and a negotiator in the Central American peace process, and the country's pride in accommodating refugees, all shaped Mexican immigration policies. Its depiction as a regional leader, an autonomous broker, and a social democratic nation that welcomed exiles was central to postrevolutionary Mexico after the 1920s. In line with this process, García's conclusion that the establishment of the Mexican Committee for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) in the 1980s offered inadequate aid for Central American refugees makes sense. COMAR functioned as a government institution that showed Mexico's regional leadership and autonomy from the United States, two critical factors for strengthening the power of the state in Mexico since the 1920s. In practice, according to García, the Mexican Government failed to protect Central American refugees because it made them “pawns of foreign policy decisions” (p. 10). However, García makes a distinction between state policy and the response from Mexican citizens, praising those who mobilized, offered refugee assistance, and pressured government officials to keep Mexico a safe haven for refugees. Criticism from refugee advocates forced the Mexican government to re-examine its policy as the country's “credibility and moral authority in the Central American peace initiatives, as well as in migratory issues related to its northern boundary, became dependent on its response to the migration across its southern border” (pp. 46–47).