Common notions of undocumented immigrants in the United States often paint a picture of fear and despair—they stay silent, avoid trouble, and minimize their presence so as to not become a target in the eyes of enforcement. As Asad L. Asad highlights in Engage and Evade, this liminal understanding of undocumented immigrant life falls short. His argument is clear: undocumented Latinos in the United States do not simply evade surveillance; they engage it based on competing roles society bestows upon them. Over the course of four chapters, Asad provides a compelling account that recenters migrant agency in the face of state surveillance, providing a window into the multi-faceted world that Latino immigrant families encompass. This choice departs from studies that place emphasis on a system instead of on who is most affected by it. Engage and Evade interrogates the US immigration regime but does so by honoring the lives of undocumented Latino immigrants. Emphasizing and following how Latinos “engage and evade” surveillance leads to an illustrating study of migrant ingenuity and bravery as they reckon with social responsibilities bestowed upon them.Asad's lens is local—rooted in Dallas County—and works strongly to follow immigrant experiences in quotidian life. He is concerned with life lived in community to get at the everyday, which he especially grasps through ethnographic work and interviews conducted over five summers. The observations and conclusions of these methodologies are clear in Engage and Evade, as we meet multiple migrants, learn about their journeys to Texas, and discover their choice-making process as they settle and adapt. Each chapter emphasizes a different social role and institution that undocumented immigrants engage or evade to meet the responsibilities their respective social roles demand of them. Collectively, they work to show how surveillance meets Latino immigrants in their search to migrate, their journey of migration, and their subsequent settlement and adaptation in the United States.In chapter 1, Asad is concerned with prospective immigrants. This chapter strongly points out that migration, and its surveillance, is not something that begins post-border. It starts prior to migrating, as individuals consider the surveillance they will possibly face at a port of entry and beyond. Chapter 2 shifts focus to consider immigrants as individuals. Asad's analysis in this chapter follows undocumented immigrants as they strive to avoid negative interactions with regulatory institutions and amplify positive ones instead. Both are an attempt to counter the chance of deportation. Chapter 3 emphasizes the social role of immigrant parents. Asad's focus here unpacks how parenthood places further responsibilities on immigrants who have citizen children. To meet these responsibilities, they engage with surveillance through social services in order to take care of their children. This approach is tactful, and Asad shows that it is a way in which undocumented Latino immigrants attempt to minimize hardship for their children. Lastly, chapter 4 centers on the experiences of petitioning immigrants, and Asad brings attention to an archival point. While some immigration scholars, such as Miroslava Chávez-García in Migrant Longing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), highlight “an archive of intimacy” often found in closets and basements of homes that clue us in to the personal anecdotes of migrant life, Asad is concerned with formal record-keeping that undocumented Latino immigrants partake in with aspirations to meet societal membership, and how these records are read by immigration officials. Importantly, Engage and Evade also includes two appendices that expand on methodology. Key for both students and educators, these components provide insight into a thoughtful research praxis and are a rich resource for those interested in national data concerning undocumented Latino immigrants.Engage and Evade is an important addition to scholarship on Latino immigration, as Asad provides a breakdown of a complex regime by rooting it in the local and in the particular. Immigration historians at large will benefit from Asad's temporal analysis that does not abide by dates and eras, but does frame migration, and its surveillance, as a process that begins well before any departure and does not nearly end once a border has successfully been crossed, whether authorized or unauthorized. Moreover, considering the lack of scholarship that tunes into the intricacies of migrant Texas during the latter twentieth century, Engage and Evade is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that works to diversify readings of the state. While his sample study population is majority ethnic-Mexican, Asad's inclusion of Central Americans speaks to the state's increasing diversity and rightfully mirrors a similar growth across urban centers in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.In a time of increasing suppression of Latino immigrants, Asad has brought forth a study that reminds us that migrant life is never merely about evasion. It is also about the hope to engage, stay, and flourish.
Allison Saenz (Thu,) studied this question.