Available From UC Press

Making Los Angeles Home examines the different integration strategies implemented by Mexican immigrants in the Los Angeles region. Relying on statistical data and ethnographic information, the authors analyze four different dimensions of the immigrant integration process (economic, social, cultural, and political) and show that there is no single path for its achievement, but instead an array of strategies that yield different results. However, their analysis also shows that immigrants' successful integration essentially depends upon their legal status and long residence in the region. The book shows that, despite this finding, immigrants nevertheless decide to settle in Los Angeles, the place where they have made their homes.

Rafael Alarcón has a PhD in city and regional planning from UC Berkeley and is a professor and researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Luis Escala has a PhD in sociology from UCLA and is a professor and researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Olga Odgers has a PhD in sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales-Paris and is a professor and researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. Dick Cluster is a writer and translator in Oakland, California, and the former Associate Director of the Honors Program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

 

"A highly original book that remedies the homogenizing tendency of many scholars in the United States to paint Mexican immigrants with the same brush." —Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens
"This is an ambitious book written in the grand tradition of the migration studies classics. The authors question how America’s largest immigrant group is integrating into its main immigrant gateway city. Their answers are theoretically fresh and nuanced. Making Los Angeles Home will be read for decades to come."—David FitzGerald, coauthor of Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas

"Making Los Angeles Home is the best book we have for understanding the complexities of the integration trajectories of Mexican immigrants. This book demolishes the simplistic generalizations that are all too commonly invoked to characterize the most important immigrant group in the United States."—Richard Alba, author of Strangers No More: The Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe