Jorge Duany has again demonstrated his mastery in this ambitious Hispanic Caribbean crossing of borders and boundaries, drawing on a wealth of conceptual and empirical sources. He begins by referencing the 1990s interest in borders as opposed to territorially bound concepts of nation, identity, and language, linked with migration. His definition of borders is that of hybrid geographical and cultural zones between nations, in contradistinction to boundaries as legal spatial delimitations of states; and he adopts a transnational framework of analysis, which implies a blurring or reordering of binary distinctions, an ambiguous bifocality. He sees bifocality as a dual frame of reference of here and there, host and home, inhabiting cultural borders though never crossing legal boundaries. This he melds with a notion of diaspora that evokes a wide range of connotations (movement, displacement, hybridity) and a proliferation of meanings, whereby diaspora is applied to almost any migrant group as opposed to any attempt to classify diaspora. He argues that it is futile to essentialize diaspora; rather, one of the basic criteria for diaspora is that of enduring links to real or putative homeland through collective memories, myths and rituals.

This, then, is the conceptual grounding for Duany's analysis of the three Spanish-speaking Caribbean island territories: the Dominican Republic, which is the one that has been most studied by transnational migration scholars, and the other two, Cuba and Puerto Rico, often seen as twentieth-century anomalies – Cuba as socialist and Puerto Rico as a colony. Duany, however, sees all three through a transnational lens. His main thesis is that, while migrants' attachments to home depend largely on the nature of their states' relationships with the host states, new approaches are needed to document the enduring connections – the form, frequency, and intensity of transnationalism – hinging on the nature of the tight ties between the United States and all three.

In his analysis, he borrows Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller's 2004 threefold classification of migrant-sending states: the “strategically selective state,” encouraging engagement but not granting citizenship rights or full political participation in national affairs (for example Haiti and Barbados); the “transnational nation-state,” defining migrants as long-distance members, granting dual citizenship and incorporating them into public policy (the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Mexico); and the “disinterested and denouncing state,” treating émigrés as if they no longer belonged and often considering them suspicious, and even traitors (Cuba, the former Czechoslovakia and Vietnam 1975–94). He adds a fourth, the “transnational colonial state,” including dependent territories with large migrant populations in metropolitan countries (Puerto Ricans in the US and Antilleans in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom).

Each Hispanic Caribbean territory developed distinctive relations with the US, whereby post-1959 Cubans came to be privileged as political refugees and Dominicans denied entry as economic migrants, while Puerto Ricans were US citizens with free access and political rights, and Puerto Rico was a secondary destination for Dominicans and Cubans. For Duany, comparing the three required abandoning “methodological nationalism” and studying transnational practices as historical processes, which he saw as enriched by his own insider/outsider, autobiographical diasporic condition as “Cuban-Rican.”

The end product is a meticulously documented book, whose initial chapters range from a conceptual rethinking of transnationalism to an empirical historical and contemporary overview of the Hispanic Caribbean migration to the US. There follow two chapters each on the three territories: on Puerto Rico's farm labour programme and the Orlando Ricans, on revisiting the Cuban exception and outlining recent trends and projections, and on the Dominican diaspora to the US and to Puerto Rico. A further chapter homes in on the circulation of people and money in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and a concluding chapter poses the question how do borders blur?

In answering the question, Duany highlights border zones within and between communities as the point of departure for understanding cultural hybridization. Even as states attempt to draw boundaries, in the incessant crossing of borders transnational migrants (and their descendants) redraw the lines. While borders and boundaries matter, they become porous – in short, blurred.