Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994

"María Cristina García’s Havana USA shows how, as a result of Cuban migration, South Florida came to constitute a borderland area. García focuses on the first three great waves of Cuban migration to the United States following the Cuban Revolution. In doing so, she exposes the vast diversity in the Cuban community residing in the United States—a community that is often portrayed as monolithic. While Walls and Mirrors reveals how the Mexican and Mexican American communities were often divided, Havana USA demonstrates how the Cuban community faced internal divisions among exiles themselves. Havana USA demonstrates how Cubans were able to assimilate structurally into the United States while simultaneously forging a distinctive cultural identity. García demonstrates that unlike other immigrant groups, Cuban exiles received vast support from the federal government and nongovernmental organizations. This support allowed them to succeed economically and politically while creating a vibrant Cuban enclave in south Florida. In other words, the Cuban experience could provide a model of how federal and other support could help other migrants to incorporate into the nation and ensure their success. Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration examines how unauthorized migration from Mexico to the United States became entrenched in the period between 1965 and 1986. At the outset, I argue, Mexican officials discouraged emigration, but by the 1970s, those same officials were encouraging the departures of working-class men as a solution to high unemployment and population growth. Simultaneously, the US government attempted to address these same problems by further fortifying the border and conducting more raids in Latina/o communities. Men from migrant communities also saw their permanent residence denied at the local level. When they resided in their hometowns in Mexico, their families and friends pressured them to head north to make money. Conversely, when they lived in their new cities and towns in the United States, their communities insisted that they return home. “Migrants sought to affirm their own cartographies of belonging” Migrants described their diminished capacity to belong in local and national spaces by describing themselves as being “neither from here nor from there” – “Ni de aquí ni de allá.” In this context, migrants sought to affirm their own cartographies of belonging. They unwittingly resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents in their hometowns through the money they sent from abroad; they countered their illegality north of the border by establishing that undocumented migrants deserved constitutional rights; and they diminished the pressures enacted by their communities by reconfiguring the very meanings of community life. These actions provided them with partial inclusion in the multiple locales they lived, but only as migrants who lived, at least some of their time, in the United States. For their part, elderly Mexican men, along with women and queer men, commonly responded to dominant gender and sexual ideologies by remaining in Mexico and depending on foreign remittances to survive. In 1986, the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, making it more difficult to cross borders. By then, however, undocumented migration had already become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. In light of the new hardships of migration, many Mexican families decided to settle together in the United States and dared not return to Mexico for fear that they would not be able to get back into the United States. Rather than feeling “pushed” from all the spaces in which they resided, they now felt entrapped in the United States, which they referred to as the “Jaula de Oro,” or the Golden Cage."