Porous border: How Mexican migrants change themselves--and the U.S.

• Author: Rimensnyder, Sara
• Position: Culture & Reviews - Crossroads: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail

The annual week-long fiesta in the Mexican Indian village of Cheran dates back to pre-Conquest days. But for the past 330 years, its crowning event has been a traditional Spanish bullfight. Each year, on the morning after the popular event, the Purepecha Indians celebrate Mass, where they fervently pray the rosary. Then they make offerings to the harvest god, muttering prayers in Purepecha as a statue of St. Francis and a Catholic priest look on.

"Thus," writes Ruben Martinez in his new book, Crossroads: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (Metropolitan), "the pre-Columbian symbol of the harvest god who decides whether to make the earth fertile takes its place on the altar alongside the man from Assisi."

In his warm and compelling account, Martinez sp ns a fascinating story of cultural evolution as he follows several migrant families from Cheran, a rural village in the southern state of Michoacan. His migrant heroes share a common trait: Like their ancestors, who forged the syncretic pagan Catholicism that survives today, the migrants negotiate the cultural and economic influence of the United States with a distinct sense of autonomy. As they move back and forth over the border, mostly illegally, they're defying much more than U.S. immigration officials. They're also flouting traditional notions of citizenship ship and national culture, reinventing themselves and their communities, new and old, in the pursuit of a better life.

Take the case of Dante Cerano, an Indian disc jockey on state-sponsored radio who organizes rock concerts in Cheran. Though Cerano's not Though Cerano's not a migrant, Martinez calls him, the "embodiment of the clashing and melding thatdefine Purepecha identity in the twenty-first century." Cerano speaks perfect Purepecha and Mexican with hints of urban slang picked up in Mexico City. He wants to play rock 'n' roll on the radio, but the cultural authorities have decided the airwaves should be used to preserve traditional folk music, not to blast U.S.-influenced rock.

To Cerano, both music and migration are rebellion from such authority. By working in the United States, he tells Martinez, Purepecha Indians "improve the material conditions of their lives and also transform their culture. Through culture, people create their identity, their sense of place in the world; they tell their own stories with the aesthetic thetic of their choosing."

That sensibility is keenly in evidence throughout Cross-roads roads and on...