Cristina Salinas joins a growing chorus of scholars—including but not limited to Mireya Loza, Ana Raquel Minian, and Miroslava Chávez-García—who, in the past few years, have produced fine studies of Mexican migration to the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Salinas offers a fresh look at the relatively well-known subject of Mexican immigration to South Texas, arguing that “immigration law was mainly enacted not in the embassies or the halls of Congress, but on the ground, in daily decisions by the Border Patrol” (3). As the book unfolds, though, her argument clearly points toward the important roles that the migrants themselves played in crafting new futures north of the border. Salinas’s nuanced and careful study thus employs a bottom-up approach, bridging the gap between the aforementioned studies and bottom-up histories of federal bureaucracies at the border—such as with S. Deborah Kang’s fine study The INS on the Line and Kelly...

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