Introduction

This is a study of a group of people who migrate between a particular town in Northern Yucatán, Mexico, and a neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. Like so many other migrants in the United States today, the migrants from Yucatán do not arrive in Dallas and cut social ties to their hometown. Rather, they maintain strong community and kinship affiliation to their fellow townsmen, both migrant and non-migrant. The maintenance of social fields across political borders is called transnational migration, and this book contributes to a burgeoning literature in anthropology that shows how the local and global are interconnected and fundamentally inseparable (Appadurai 1991, 1996a, 1996b; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Guarnizo and Smith 1999; Hannerz 1996; Kearney 1995; Smith 1999; among others). Transnational social connections are forged and maintained by migrants, many of whom have limited economic means and little access to institutional power in either of the two nation-states that they traverse.