"This is the way ethnography should be written: with stories that entice, analysis that dazzles, and just the right mix of humor, music, and in-your-face dignidad. Border and migration studies will never be the same after Patricia Zavella's impassioned new book, I'm Neither Here nor There ." Matthew Gutmann, Brown University " I'm Neither Here nor There is a powerful, highly original ethnography about the complexities of the Mexican migrant and Mexican American population in the United States. By drawing primarily on work by scholars of color about people of color, Patricia Zavella decenters staid ways of understanding immigration, such as assimilation and the underclass model. Her use of the concepts of peripheral vision, double vision, and border thinking are particularly effective, as is her political-economic analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism in Santa Cruz County, California, and the poverty and challenges that they create for the area's working poor." Lynn Stephen, author of Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon "Among the most original and important contributions of I'm Neither Here nor There are its focus on one California region, which helps us to see that migrants do not come to an undifferentiated 'United States,' but rather to specific locations with distinct regional economic and social dynamics; its sensitivity to gender and sexuality as key sites where social change gets registered in the lives of individuals; and its brilliant discussions of the popular music of Los Tigres del Norte, Quetzal, and Lila Downs as repositories of collective memory, sites of moral instruction, and mechanisms for calling old and new communities into being through performance. Patricia Zavella also makes clear the causes and consequences of residential density and overcrowding in immigrant communities, surely one of the most important but least understood features of contemporary immigrant life. I'm Neither Here nor There is an outstanding work that will be welcomed by specialists as well as general readers.

It makes unique and valuable contributions to scholarship and civic life and presents an exemplary model of sophisticated and socially engaged research."--George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place.