I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Patricia Zavella describes how poor and working-class Mexican Americans and migrants to California’s central coast struggle for agency amid the region’s deteriorating economic conditions and the rise of racial nativism in the United States. Zavella also examines tensions within the Mexican diaspora based on differences in legal status, generation, gender, sexuality, and language. She proposes “peripheral vision” to describe the sense of displacement and instability felt by Mexican Americans and Mexicans who migrate to the United States as well as by their family members in Mexico.

Drawing on close interactions with Mexicans on both sides of the border, Zavella examines migrant journeys to and within the United States, gendered racialization, and exploitation at workplaces, and the challenges that migrants face in forming and maintaining families. As she demonstrates, the desires of migrants to express their identities publicly and to establish a sense of cultural memory are realized partly through Latin American and Chicano protest music, and Mexican and indigenous folks songs played by musicians and cultural activists.

“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 models. 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