Migration

While All They Will Call You would seem to be about Mexican migrants, Hernandez’s “telling” of the plane crash at Los Gatos actually reveals that migratory patterns have a much longer trajectory in history and a much more diverse span. Migration is also shown to serve political and economic needs of the nation-state. In general, framing migration in this broad historical context allows the reader to understand Mexican migration north without vilifying or exoticizing it.

In All They Will Call You, there are two notable examples of non-Mexican migration to the United States. The first is that of Elizabeth Liebersbach, a German-speaking Polish immigrant and eventually, Bobbie Atkinson’s mother. The story Liebersbach’s migration to the United States is covered in Chapter 19, “The Assimilation of Elizabeth Liebersbach.” In this chapter, Hernandez takes the reader back to 1912 and explains how, at that time, thousands of Polish people...