In this extensive study, human geographer Catherine Nolin relates the memories of Guatemalans in Canada and their arduous struggle for regaining a sense of social power in their new place of residence. A focus on social and spatial ruptures is meant to challenge the less frictional yet more fashionable notion of mobility in transnational studies and responds to the author's long term experience as an activist and researcher engaged in networks of solidarity with the victims of Guatemala's violence afflicted past.

One of Nolin's interesting arguments is that the movement of people across state borders does not undermine the power of nation-states to forge or dismantle social identities, but the contrary. For people forced to move, state violence, bureaucracies and immigrant policies of Guatemala, the US and Canada, respectively, offer few options to physical expulsion and social exclusion. Since Mexico and the US remain the major and also most analysed recipients of Central American migrants, a focus on Canada is indeed a welcome contribution. In contrast to the dominant image of immigrant lives in the two former destinations as characterised by continuous mobility and expanded social networks, Nolin finds immobility and also a strong yearning for return among the Guatemalans in Canada. Furthermore, the gradual foreign policy shift of Canada from social justice and human rights to business and trade represents a wider trend of a decreasing ‘need’ for liberal states to justify their politics of immigration in unprofitable terms. A second less controversial argument is that gender structures migration processes through the three stages of exit, journey and resettlement and that it also influences future prospects of return. This works in two ways since gender itself becomes either reaffirmed or reconfigured in the process. Examples are presented both for and against the view on migrant women's ‘empowerment’ or ‘emancipation’ but the latter stands out in the discussed loss of women's social networks, especially for the elderly and mothers of young children.

There is much to appreciate in this book but some of the important aims are problematically contradicted by a narrative that would have gained considerably from more responsible editing by the publisher. In the following I will discuss what I see as two interrelated issues that the author leaves unresolved, namely the relation of violence to movement and of movement to the sense of social belonging or ‘community’. Regarding the first, Nolin writes, ‘One of my main concerns in this book is to situate political violence in Guatemala as the core feature of Guatemalan transnationalism …’ (p. 4). This informs the documented encounters between the researcher and her informants but becomes a burden to the study, not least given the fact that the Canadian regime, just as other liberal welfare states on the receiving end of world migrations, nourishes a similar concern. To be able to keep bureaucratically a post-political violence wave of migrants at bay they persistently maintain that political violence should be the ‘core feature’ of any defiance of border controls. Therefore, in order for many migrants to be recognised as new citizens they must prove their own victimisation in a language of political violence.

It seems to me that the centrality of past violence slips into the analytical framework of this study through the author's often admirably respectful approach to the expressed views of her informants. The possibility that people frame their long and multifaceted experiences in a moral discourse on a violent event, thereby and perhaps strategically responding to both Canada's and the researcher's ‘main concern’ is left out of the equation. So is the question as to what the dominant qualifying criteria for transnational movement of poor people means for our understanding of all those Central Americans who, after the end of the armed conflict, have continued to search for new opportunities beyond the borders of their home countries.

The book subscribes to a conceptual framework of social fields where changing alliances are considered to be more important than mythologised roots in the migrants' efforts to base their rebuilding of sociality on a shared past. This makes much sense, but the alleged opposition between culture and community on the one hand, and the fragmentary potential of violence on the other, leads the analysis astray. For example, when describing the violence of war-time Guatemala, Nolin correctly states that sacred places became massacre sites. But isn't there (also) an element in the reconstruction of community, especially of politicised exiled communities, of ‘massacre sites becoming sacred places’ which would imply that the experience of violence is not opposed to but instead constitutive of both identity and community? In fact, this comes out in the interviews presented in the book as a strong but nevertheless implicit current. An initially sound scepticism towards the myth of the indigenous population of Guatemala as naturally more rooted than others gets lost, and the myth reinforced.

In sum, I learned much from the warning of this book against the dangers of modelling the movement of people from an economic discourse on the movement of capital (and of rich people). However, a predetermined interest in victimisation and the peculiar decision to deductively centralise past violence, risks reproducing a sedentarist bias, assuming the importance of a certain kind of identification (both in space and in time) and a certain kind of violence (again, both in space and in time) instead of unconditionally investigating or measuring such importance. This is not to imply that the brutality of Guatemalan state atrocities and the experiences of flight are anything but profound and life changing, if not life ending, but there is another route for analysts to take here. It would lead to acknowledging moving people's past and ongoing hardships without ignoring or devaluing the social practices that go on simultaneously. I would even add, and this is perhaps the most difficult thing, that it is necessary to discuss the ways in which the story of ruptures through ‘uprooting’ and of healing through ‘return’ itself becomes part of that very practice.