As migration pushes ever deeper into southern Mexico, growing numbers of persons and communities are becoming inextricably tied, through a process of accelerated migration, to numerous parts of the United States. In Transborder Lives, Lynn Stephen offers a detailed and imminently readable ethnographic account of Mixtec and Zapotec migrants in their home towns in Oaxaca, and in California and Oregon destination sites in the United States. Some residents of the communities she examines participated in the Bracero programme (1942–64), but migration massified from the mid-1980s onward and has become a regular feature of ‘transborder lives’ of thousands of Mixtecos and Zapotecos. Stephen prefers the term ‘transborder’ to ‘binational’ or even ‘transnational’ because she considers the borders that migrants negotiate to be class, ethnic, cultural and linguistic in nature, as well as politico-territorial.

Stephen organises the book around two Oaxacan communities: the well-known weaving town of Teotitlán del Valle, located in the central valley region; and the Mixtec town of San Agustín Atenango, situated between Huajuapan de León and Santiago Juxtlahuaca in the Mixteca Baja, several hours drive from the state capital. The primary destination sites discussed are southern California communities of Santa Ana and Oxnard in the case of Teotitlán, and Woodburn, Oregon for San Agustín. But this is too simple, because migrants originating from these towns or tied to them are or have been involved with a large number of Mexican and US destinations, and the breadth and nature of those involvements have changed over the course of the last century. The complexity of the movements and relationships is daunting, but Stephen does a good job of disentangling them through time and space, and relating them to social, economic and political developments from the Mexican Revolution to the Bracero programme to NAFTA and beyond. In her view both Teotitlán and San Agustín are ‘multisited communities’ for which scholars need produce ‘multisited histories’ (p. 66).

Work, gender, racial and ethnic categorisation, grassroots organising and even the use of advanced communications media come in for detailed analysis in separate chapters. It is notable that Teotitlán Zapotecs migrate primarily to urban areas, where some have developed successful small business careers; while San Agustín Mixtecs historically fulfilled the role of a weak, unorganised and highly exploitable indigenous agricultural proletariat both in Mexico and in the United States. Stephen dedicates a great deal more coverage to the Mixtecs than the Zapotecs, understandable given that she has written extensively about Teotitlán over the course of several decades. But Mixtec farm workers are also close at hand – Stephen resides in Oregon – and have developed and participated in a broad range of organisations variously dedicated to improving the lives of women, organising migrant farm workers, raising money for public works in the home community and promoting the human rights of indigenous persons both in Mexico and the United States. Stephen thinks that the concept of ‘meshworks’, which refers (roughly) to networks of networks, is useful for thinking about the ways that migrant individuals and groups become linked in multiple, complex, generally flexible, and sometimes transitory ways across time and space.

Wisely, she lets her informants carry a great deal of the narrative through often detailed, first-person accounts of their histories and experiences of life in the home community, the journey north, work experience, gender relations, ethnic discrimination, and even the appropriation of the New Media, such as the Internet, to sell weavings, teach outsiders about local history and mount campaigns against human rights violations. She provides precise discussion of migration law, discourse and practice in the United States and their meaning for migrants. For instance, Stephen notes how a significant percent of Mixtec settled in Woodburn reside in households composed of members with different official migration statuses: citizen, resident and undocumented, among others.

A chapter on ‘Surveillance and Invisibility in the Lives of Indigenous Farmworkers in Oregon’ elaborates on the transborder concept by showing through interviews how even those who completed a traumatic but successful undocumented crossing of the territorial divide between Mexico and the United States remain under surveillance by labour recruiters, plant managers and others, and how that sense of surveillance becomes internalised and then refracted in ‘minimalist’ behaviours through which migrants seek to remain invisible. They eschew confrontations and make few or no demands on employers and others, in the course of which they inadvertently give up many of their basic human rights and contribute to the preservation of a status quo super exploitation. Unfortunately, Stephen has no more to say on the open border/closed border or something-in-between dilemma that haunts the politics of US migration discourse beyond the vague suggestion that ‘The politics of visibility and invisibility, of surveillance and security, have to be made flexible and transparent so that the complex reality of the global economy in the United States can be approached at a human level’ (p. 177). In her defence, no one else has done much better.

Whether ‘transborder lives’ comes to be adopted as an appropriate replacement for, say, ‘transnational migrant circuits’ or ‘transnational communities’, remains to be seen. Expanding the idea of ‘border’ to embrace cultural, linguistic and psychological divides, among others, simultaneously expands the range of those who might fit under the concept's umbrella. Don't we all live transborder lives at some times and in some ways? Stephen might or might not agree. In either case she has produced a fine-grained ethnographic account of the complex world of indigenous Mexicans spread across two countries, and an analysis of the ways they absorb, exercise, transform, exchange and transmit ideas and practices within and across different borders. Transborder Lives is a bold attempt to reconfigure the study of Mexican migrants, and it is a good example of what Stephen refers to in an epilogue as ‘collaborative activist ethnography.’