The essays in this volume challenge traditional approaches to migration history and actual migration policies. The editors and authors bring into conversation three approaches: transnationalism, comparative history, and borderland studies. Thus, more than an interdisciplinary agenda emerges; what emerges is a project that entangles migration history. This involves a conversation between U.S.-based and Canada-based scholars who look at the borders from their two sides and provide a transborder spatial grammar. They discuss the extension of routes from the south across the two continental dividi ... More

The essays in this volume challenge traditional approaches to migration history and actual migration policies. The editors and authors bring into conversation three approaches: transnationalism, comparative history, and borderland studies. Thus, more than an interdisciplinary agenda emerges; what emerges is a project that entangles migration history. This involves a conversation between U.S.-based and Canada-based scholars who look at the borders from their two sides and provide a transborder spatial grammar. They discuss the extension of routes from the south across the two continental dividing lines, Mexico-United States-Canada. By transcending the focus on states and their national immigration-exclusion legislation, the authors discuss the policing lines based on sexualities and races and how those lines were constructed. They trace how religious communities, also usually viewed as bordered or even exclusive, can create entangled communities across North America. And they place not merely the United States and Canada but all of the people living in North America in their webs of relations across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which have been connecting spaces for centuries.