The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 83, July 1979 - April, 1980 Page: 422

So uthwestern Historical Quarterly

(p. 21). Green is to be commended for bringing together so much of
Cushing's work, and the University of Nebraska Press congratulated for
making it available in a well-edited and nicely produced book.
University of Texas, San Antonio THOMAS R. HESTER
Mexican Workers in the United States: Historical and Political Per-
spectives. Edited by George C. Kiser and Martha Woody Kiser.
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. Pp. ix+295.
Introduction, bibliography, index. Paperback, $7.50.)
It consideration is given to the number of both legal immigrants and
illegal immigrants entering the United States during the 197os, it is
apparent that the nation is in the midst of the largest in-migration in
its history. Few scholars, however, have recognized this fact. By all ac-
counts, citizens from Mexico constitute the plurality of this movement.
Yet Mexican immigration is not new. This movement of people from
Mexico into the labor force of the United States is the subject of the
present volume by George and Martha Kiser.
The Kisers have assembled a collection of thirty-four articles from a
variety of scholarly, governmental, and journalistic sources that describe
various aspects of Mexican worker involvement in the United States
economy. These articles are separated both into historical time periods
(for example, the World War I era and the depression years) and sub-
ject areas (the bracero, illegal workers, commuters, and the border in-
dustrialization program). The authors themselves have laced the collec-
tion together with essays by themselves that seek to provide perspective
for the reader.
On balance, the book does accomplish its mission. It is informative
to the reader and it is useful to the teacher in that it provides a con-
venient method of presenting a collection of articles for students to
interpret for themselves. Many of the nonscholarly articles could not
be assembled by a teacher who wished to show them to students.
The limitations of the book, however, should be noted. Namely, the
collection is clearly sympathetic with the presence of Mexican workers
in the United States. The editors made no attempt to include any ar-
ticles that might suggest any adverse impact of the in-migration of
Mexican workers upon the domestic citizen labor force. Relatedly, the
articles focus (as the subtitle of the book clearly states) upon the histori-
cal and the political aspects of the presence of Mexican workers in the
United States. No effort was made to tap the literature that explains the

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