Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires by José C. Moya / May'98

Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 586 pgs., ISBN 0520-21526-5 (softcover, us$25) & ISBN 0-520-07229-4 (hardcover, us$55). You can order it at http://www.ucpress.edu, at http://amazon.com, at 0-1737-769469 in Northern Europe, at 0 1865 54814 in Southern Europe.

José C. Moya is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He can be reached via the following addresses:

Summary of the book

Between the midnineteenth-century and the Great Depression more than four million Spaniards came to the New World. Unlike most other Europeans, their major destination was not the United States but Argentina, especially its capital city, where they formed one of the largest immigrant urban communities in the world. In Cousins and Strangers, José Moya employs a macro-micro analytical framework, a comparative perspective, and a variety of sources (including linked databases with information on more than 60,000 individuals, and scores of interviews, popular songs, plays, and jokes) to provide not only a pioneering account of this group's experiences but also a model study of the immigration and adaptation process that aims to advance the field toward more general, inductive theories.

The first part of the book analyzes the interaction between the global and local dimensions of population movements, explaining why people left at a particular time, from certain places and toward specific destinations, how the sociodemographic composition of the exodus varied spatially and temporally, the relationship between poverty and emigration, and how those who left compared with those who stayed behind.

The second part examines the formation of immigrant neighborhoods and associations, the relationship between residential and occupational mobility, why arrivals from certain regions and villages fared better than others, how the social position of the immigrants' parents in the Old World affected theirs in the New, and the newcomers' ambiguous relationship with the host society as both the children of the mother country (cousins) and foreign immigrants (strangers).

This sociocultural history of immigrants also sheds much light on the dramatic evolution of their host city, and on related issues such as social ecology, ethnic segregation, class formation, the reproduction of social inequalities, women's work, domestic service, Argentine nationalism, and the relationship between social realities and cultural constructions.

Feedback the author has received with regard to this book

"Moya commands not only the statistical sources but the literary and folklorical ones as well, weaving them in a history that is both analytical and narrative...A superb book that will be a standard monument, not only for Spanish migration and Argentine history, but for migration history in general."
Walter Nugent, University of Notre Dame

"A major achievement, it represents a vast, comprehensive research effort on two continents, using a world-wide background literature and a stunning array of research techniques, all well integrated, on a topic of large scope and significance. The entire enterprise is watched over by an acute, curious, lively mind in notable equilibrium and equanimity, bringing the research to life, fereting out the implications of widely scattered and apparently disparate facts, and reaching many new, significant, and well founded conclusions."
James Lockhart, University of California, Los Angeles

"By far the most original on its subject, this book will become a landmark study in Latin American history."
David Rock, University of California, Santa Barbara

"The scope and depth of Moya's research are impressive...His imaginative use of sources and evidence and lively, frequently entertaining prose make this a stimulating, satisfying, and fascinating study...This is scholarship that is meticulous, well-reasoned, and highly original."
Ida Altman, University of New Orleans

"One of the truly first-rate studies in the vast migration literature--an authentic tour-de-force."
William Douglass, University of Nevada, Reno