World of Our Mothers: Mexican Revolution-Era Immigrants and Their Stories. By Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel

Abstract

Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel’s World of Our Mothers: Mexican Revolution-Era Immigrants and Their Stories sets out to ethically document the voices and stories of forty-five women who migrated to the United States during the 1910 Mexican Revolution era, and the heterogenous ways they navigated and negotiated their lives and labor amidst U.S. segregation and anti-Mexican and immigrant violence. The text complicates traditional representations of Mexican women in the U.S. during the early twentieth century as passive and submissive by providing various, and at times contradictory, perspectives through the women’s own voices. Additionally, they place the women’s accounts in conversation with multiple discourses and histories, including Mexican, Indigenous, and Chicana feminisms, Indigenous and campesino displacement, and U.S. imperialist and extractive labor practices. The authors’ methodology stands out as one of care and respect for the women whose stories they make visible. All seven chapters begin with an introduction orienting the reader through the historical and socio-political circumstances the women’s narratives undertake, beginning with the Mexican Revolution and their displacement, often leading to the women’s migration to the United States. Each chapter furthers the particularities of the women’s lives, including but not limited to exploring their experiences as contract (reenganche) laborers, their struggles with mobility, and complex relationships to U.S. citizenship including both a desire and refusal of it, their roles as wives and mothers, and the role of education and religion in their lives. Rather than weave their interpretations alongside the women’s narratives, what Montiel and de la Torre Montiel offer is the women’s narratives thematically grouped beside each other.