Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers in Latin America

Abstract

This edited volume presents a useful contribution to the migration history of Latin America, situated squarely in the transdisciplinary field of migration studies and following the equally interesting 2017 volume by two of the coeditors. As noted in the introduction, the volume seeks to move away from studies of specific ethnic groups—the editors criticize the homogenizing effects of approaches that project a false cohesion onto groups such as “the Italians” or “the Spanish”—and prefers a comparative perspective on national case studies. In this sense the volume's contributors seek to focus on the particularities of national host sites as well as the “diasporic perspective” of, say, Italians in Argentina and Brazil (pp. 3–4). Though the volume successfully fulfills this goal, this is not an entirely new approach; it goes back at least to works such as Fernando Devoto's Historia de la inmigración en la Argentina (2003) or Samuel Baily and Eduardo Míguez's Mass Migration to Modern Latin America (2003). One could also argue the reverse: that methodological nationalism keeps one from seeing the transnational aspects of migration, though this is not a trap that this volume's authors fall into.More originally, and in line with the contributors' previous work, the case studies themselves focus heavily on less studied migratory groups, particularly Jews, Palestinians, and Syrian Lebanese—no doubt a reflection of many of the authors' connections with Tel Aviv University—as well as Chinese and Japanese in Argentina. Though the editors insist rightly on the need to move beyond authors from a given ethnic group writing about their own history, this volume does not entirely escape this and includes a large number of Jewish authors writing about Jewish and Middle Eastern migrants (p. 4). Among the most fascinating chapters are the three that focus on inter-American migratory flows by addressing US immigrants in Costa Rica, Colombian women in Ecuador (many of whom received asylum), and the Franco-Brazilian borderlands. Indeed, these three cases highlight the need for further historical research in order to broaden the focus from the era of mass European migration to the Americas before the world wars and mass Latin American emigration to the north in the latter decades of the twentieth century.Though space does not allow for a summary of all the book's chapters, several themes stand out, including the ways in which gender shaped the migration experience (of Jews to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century and Colombians to Ecuador in the beginning of the twenty-first), the imagining of distant homelands after emigration, and the tensions between forces of discrimination and homogenization that pull migrants in different directions. As in many edited volumes, the comparisons between the different case studies are mostly implicit or tackled in the introduction and conclusion. The compelling chapters on Palestinian migration, for example, could have gained from comparisons with the experiences of immigrants from Italy and Spain, for example, who became Italian or Spanish by identifying with an “imagined homeland” (pp. 105–6). An exception is a particularly interesting chapter by Claudia Stern that analyzes Arab and Jewish integration in Chile through the lens of two well-known politicians who represented middle-class intellectuals' rise at the expense of traditional landed elites. The illuminating concluding essay, by Jürgen Buchenau and Jerry Dávila, exemplifies how migration studies can explore the limits of ideologies of mestizaje in Mexico and Brazil by illuminating such ideologies' nationalist, homogenizing, and exclusionist tendencies.I thoroughly enjoyed the volume, and all the chapters are informative, though it should be noted that the volume's title is a misnomer. The book does not analyze in depth refugees and asylum in Latin America. Though several of the chapters deal with the topics in passing, they are not the object of analysis and are not treated as objects of study. This perhaps points to a conceptual blind spot, in that the ethnic studies approach can in some cases overshadow the politics of exile. Though both are related, and the study of refugees and asylum clearly needs to be based on migration studies, a greater attention to the questions of asylum and legal status would have brought to light a different set of issues. This is particularly true given the prominence of recent asylum cases, such as those of Evo Morales and Julian Assange, which also—and perhaps not coincidentally—deal with inter-American politics. This in no way, however, takes away from an informative volume that makes a significant contribution to ethnic and migration studies in Latin America.