Specters of Belonging

Reviews / Votes

In addition to its scholarly value, this book will be useful for policy makers interested in how immigration policies can make participation in civic lives on both sides of the border easier and more robust. Felix's work is both timely and necessary. * Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics * The book adds a new layer to critiques of citizenship...Written with passion and references to a wide range of materials, including songs, Mexican proverbs, and personal experiences, Felix's study weaves in the politics and the poetics of belonging, giving his analysis a depth and complexity that are much needed in transnational studies. * Perspectives on Politics * The life cycle is an evocative metaphor to capture the changing nature of migrant politics...By definition, life cycles conclude with death, and Felix pays attention to the choices migrants make around end-of-life rituals...Those choices are spiritual and personal, but they are also deeply political...by calling attention to migrant tenacity, he draws readers' attention to the many barriers to acting or feeling transnationally that migrants struggle against and shows how they do so at an intimate scale. * Boom California * ...Felix provides a riveting ethnographic account that grounds new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for studying not only political membership of Mexican migrants but also transnationality...The book thus serves as both poetic narrative and political analysis...Concepts such as diasporic dialectics spring organically from these ethnographic encounters and from the words and practices of his research participants...The strength of this book comes from the author's intimate understanding of shifting, multifaceted borders...the important part of the research is in fact the 'accompaniment,' the use of ethnography to break down the very borders the author is interrogating, including those across the academic/activist divide. * Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies *