There’s No Jose Here: Following the Hidden Lives of Mexican Immigrants | Gabriel Thompson (Nation Books)
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Thompson is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for the Brooklyn Rail, New York magazine, the Nation, and In These Times (where I’m an editor, though I haven’t worked with him). Throughout There’s No Jose Here he avoids taking a stand on the immigration debate. He’s more interested in understanding who America’s 34 million immigrants are—and the way he’s chosen to gain this understanding is to examine the struggles of a single man, a New York City livery driver named Enrique. “Abstractions are ultimately dehumanizing,” Thompson writes in the introduction, adding later, “Competing narratives crashing up against one another remain at arm’s length from the immigrants themselves.”
While Enrique is a documented immigrant—Thompson uses “documented” and “undocumented” rather than “legal” and “illegal”—Juana is not. The difference in their status has nothing to do with how she came to the States (via the same coyote as Enrique) or when (two years before him). When Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Enrique’s employer was willing to lie and say that he’d been in the country since 1982 so he could get amnesty.
Enrique’s trip to Mexico demonstrates the cost migration exacts on families. Juana can’t risk the trip because she’s undocumented, and she instructs Thompson and Enrique to check on her mother. But Enrique’s father, Angel, and his second wife, Leticia, do join him on his trip. Soon after Enrique was born Angel moved to New York to work, and though he returned home a few times, after his last trip to the U.S. he stopped sending money back to Angela and eventually stopped calling. Still, Angel misses Mexico and has a better car than Enrique, so Enrique lets him come along, despite many misgivings.
