Presenting an unprecedented, integrated view of migration in North America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminates the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States over the past two centuries. Several essays discuss recent migrations from Central America as well. In the introduction, Dirk Hoerder provides a sweeping historical overview of North American societies in the Atlantic world. He also develops and advocates what he and Nora Faires call “transcultural societal studies,” an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that combines migration research across disciplines and at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. The contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across North America in relation to changing cultural, political, and economic patterns. They describe the ways that people have fashioned cross-border lives, as well as the effects of shifting labor markets in facilitating or hindering cross-border movement, the place of formal and informal politics in migration processes and migrants’ lives, and the creation and transformation of borderlands economies, societies, and cultures. This collection offers rich new perspectives on migration in North America and on the broader study of migration history.
Dirk Hoerder taught North American social history, the history of global migrations, borderland studies, and the sociology of migrant acculturation at Arizona State University. He is the author of many books, including Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, also published by Duke University Press. Hoerder lives in Salzburg, Austria.
The late Nora Faires was Professor of History and of Gender and Women’s Studies at Western Michigan University and co-author of A History of Women in America.