Jorge Duany’s Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States will be launched on Thursday, September 29, at 7:00pm at Librería La Tertulia. The book will be presented by Dr. Jorge Giovannetti (Department of Sociology, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras). The bookstore is located at 1002 Ponce de León Avenue in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Description: Blurred Borders, Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States is a comparative study of how migrants to the United States from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico maintain multiple ties to their countries of origin.

Chronicling these diasporas from the end of World War II to the present, Jorge Duany argues that each sending country’s relationship to the United States shapes the transnational experience for each migrant group, from legal status and migratory patterns to work activities and the connections migrants retain with their home countries. Blending extensive ethnographic, archival, and survey research, Duany proposes that contemporary migration challenges the traditional concept of the nation-state. Increasing numbers of immigrants and their descendants lead what Duany calls “bifocal” lives, bridging two or more states, markets, languages, and cultures throughout their lives. Even as nations attempt to draw their boundaries more clearly, the ceaseless movement of transnational migrants, Duany argues, requires the rethinking of conventional equations between birthplace and residence, identity and citizenship, borders and boundaries.

Jorge Duany holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies and Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley. He is professor of anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. His main research interests are Caribbean migration, Latinos in the U.S., and ethnic, national, and transnational identities. He is the author of Quisqueya on the Hudson: The Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights (1994) and The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (2002). He co-authored texts such as Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida (2006), Los cubanos en Puerto Rico: Economía étnica e identidad cultural (1995) and El Barrio Gandul: Economía subterránea y migración indocumentada en Puerto Rico (1995). His latest co-edited book is How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences (2009). Since February 2003 he writes a monthly column for El Nuevo Día.

For more information, see http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=2233