The Other Immigrant Story

Despite a family lineage of several generations in the United States, plus higher education and all the marks of class privilege, Mexican-American historian Natalia Molina avoids wearing black and white to faculty events so she isn’t confused for catering staff. She still finds herself viewed as “foreign” whilst her husband’s family, with more recent European roots, is considered fully assimilated.

Why? Immigrants do not just assimilate, Molina argues: they assimilate into a racial hierarchy. Drawing on over 150 years of immigration history and two decades of research, Molina shows how legal structures and cultural narratives have racialised Latinos as perpetual outsiders. Interwoven is Molina’s own multigenerational family saga, tracing the stories of four generations of Mexican-Americans whose communities are treated as if they’re forever “just arriving”.

An eye-opening re-examination of the history of immigration, The Other Immigrant Story interrogates the myths surrounding assimilation.