The Broken Village

In his book, The Broken Village, Daniel Reichman analyzes the rise of migration from Honduras to the United States during the early 2000s.  Transnational migration over the past several decades has grown as a result of larger social, political, and economic shifts associated with globalization.  In his work, Reichman uses several cases studies based on the lives of individual migrants to uncover the cultural and structural factors that contribute to migration.  In this assignment, you are to build a case study of your own in order to further investigate issues surrounding migration.

1. Find someone who has immigrated to the United States within the last 20 years, who you feel comfortable interviewing. Make sure you get consent from the person and let them know that the information collected will only be shared with the professor.  Use a pseudonym to protect the person’s identity and do not tell me your relationship to that person.  The person could be from any country outside of the United States and could have immigrated for any reason.

2. Conduct a short semi-formal interview with the person. Your goal is to find out cultural and structural reasons for migrating to the US.  Of course, you cannot simply ask, what are the structural reasons for migrating?  Instead, you must create 5-10 more easily understandable questions that will help you to uncover these reasons.  Begin with simple questions that give you the facts their migration.  Then ask the deeper questions about why they migrated and what they expected life to be like in the US.  Keep the questions open ended and use prompts like “what do you mean by…” or “tell me more about…” to clarify or deepen the answers.  You may also ask question about the migration process itself, the reaction of friends and family back home, or about life in the US as an immigrant.

3. Write a case study based on the results of your interview using The Broken Village as a guide. First, provide enough description and information about the person and his or her story to elucidate the migrant experience from the emic perspective.  Second, provide some analysis of some aspect of migration this case study demonstrates using etic perspectives gained from anthropology.  Below are some possible lines of analysis.

1. What are the possible cultural and structural reasons for migration?How do these compare to the cultural and structural explanations presented in The Broken Village?

1. How has migration been shaped by larger contexts? How were this person’s choices influenced by larger local, national, or global forces?  You may need to do a little research on the major events happening at the time of migration.

1. What role does gender play in this case study and in migration more generally? How might gender ideologies shape a person’s decision to migrate?  How is the experience of migration affected by gender relations and expectations?

1. What might be some of the other social divisions and relationships that are important to an understanding of migration? These other types of divisions could include race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc.  Take account of how a person’s social or legal identity might affect the migration process.

The final product of the exercise is a short ethnographic case study of 500-600 words.  Acceptable completion of the assignment could add up to 4 points to the final course grade but cannot be used to raise the grade more than half a step.  In other words, a student could raise the final course grade from B+ to A- but not from B to A.