Rubén Martínez is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. A journalist, poet and performer, he is, in addition to Crossing Over, the author of The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (Vintage), Eastside Stories: Gang Life in East L.A. (with Joseph Rodriguez) and The New Americans (The New Press).

     Born and raised in Los Angeles of Salvadoran and Mexican heritage, Martínez has long written on immigration issues. He was news editor of the L.A. Weekly, and has published reportage, essays and poetry in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and The Nation, among others. In broadcast media, he has contributed to PBS and NPR, and has appeared as a political commentator on Nightline, Frontline and CNN. 

     He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Desgin, and received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in non-fiction. He also received a Freedom of Information Award from the American Civil Liberties Union, and won an Emmy for his work in public television.
A longtime musician, Martínez has been featured on albums by The Roches and Concrete Blonde, and is currently recording a story-song cycle about modern migrants.

Author's Statement

The reason that I wrote Crossing Over is a very personal one: I am the son and grandson of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. In my childhood, stories of how my family arrived in America were often told at the dinner table and family gatherings. Those journeys seemed epic to me then, and when I hear the stories of today's migrants—be they from Mexico or Vietnam, South Asia or Eastern Europe—I hear echoes of my family's own narrative.

     Immigration is a perennial “hot-button” issue in America. We celebrate ourselves as a “nation of immigrants”—we're all immigrants except the Native Americans—and yet we often receive the newcomers not with a welcoming embrace, but with sweatshop wages and ethnic slurs, with simpleton or savage representations on our movie and TV screens.

     At election time, you'll always find a politician railing against immigrants. No wonder. Immigrants are among the most vulnerable group in our society. Most of them can't vote, they have no real political representation. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is the politics of fear—a cheap way to score points.

     What is it we fear about immigrants? Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington recently wrote a diatribe against Mexican immigrants in particular, saying they don't want to “assimilate” into “our” way of life. Others say that immigrants take up jobs that belong to “Americans.”

     The families I write about in Crossing Over pick strawberries in the hills of northern California, tomatoes in Arkansas, apples in Washington, watermelon in Kentucky, tend lawn-grass farms in Alabama. They work in canneries in Alaska, clean hotel rooms in Dallas, bus tables in New York City.

     I don't know of many “Americans” who are clamoring for these jobs.

     The truth is, we fail ourselves when we blame immigrants for problems that are not of their causing, because in doing so, we lash out at our own history of crossing rivers and oceans, of hard work in hope of achieving the American dream. To deny that dream to the immigrants is to negate the very ideals the dream is founded upon.
    
    Immigration is not a simple story. It's messy, it's crude. It most often begins with tragedy in the home country. It is a journey of necessity, not a jolly jaunt. It can be a dangerous passage—thousands have perished on the U.S.-Mexico border and in Caribbean waters over the last decade.

     The journey does not end once the immigrant arrives in America. It continues in the bottom rungs of the labor economy, in English as a Second Language classrooms, in churches and temples and mosques where the immigrants huddle together in ethnic solidarity to pray for the “better life.”

     A generation ago, millions of immigrants and their children achieved the American dream because of their work ethic, and because we offered them opportunities to gain a foothold in the middle class: with union jobs and wages, the GI bill, excellence in public education.

     By and large, those pathways to the middle class do not exist today.

     What I fear the most is that many of the migrants among us today will remain in the shadows economically and socially not because they've failed us but because we've failed them. 

    The subtitle of this book is A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail . But I see it as a very American book. It is a variation of the story Steinbeck told us in the 1930s. It has commonalities with the Great Migration of African Americans from the south to the cities of the north. There's a dash of Horatio Alger. While writing, I often thought of Polish, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants in the tenements of New York a century ago—their epic journeys and the optimism they clung to against all odds.

     I wrote this book so that Americans might consider today's immigrants in the same light.
Rubén Martínez .

 

All materials © 2004 by Rubén Martínez. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York. All rights reserved.