Baker-Cristales, Beth

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Baker-Cristales, Beth

PERSONAL:

Education: Sarah Lawrence College, B.A., 1989; University of New Mexico, M.A., 1991, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Office—California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032-8530. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, educator, and anthropologist. California State University, Los Angeles, assistant professor, 2002—.

WRITINGS:

Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining El Hermano Lejano, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2004.

Contributor of articles and reviews to journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Beth Baker-Cristales is an anthropologist at California State University, Los Angeles. As she noted on the university Web site, her research interests include "globalization, transnationalism, nationalism and the state, economic development, work and labor rights, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and ethnic relations, political identity, and urban space." She also specializes in the cultural anthropology of Latin America and has done fieldwork in Latin America and California. These areas of specialization converge in her 2004 work, Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining El Hermano Lejano. Baker-Cristales writes in the introduction to the work, "This book is about the ephemeral yet powerful connections between Salvadorans in El Salvador and in the Los Angeles metropolitan area." The author further observes: "The book grew out of my attempts, over the course of a decade, to understand the lives of Salvadoran migrants. In particular, I was interested in what they think about their lives in the United States, about the war in El Salvador, about globalization, citizenship, nationality, and immigration…. This book is not just for people interested in Salvadoran migration; it has much to say about international migration in general, transnationalism, the role of the national state in contemporary social life, and the construction of social identities in the context of movement, change, and persistent challenges."

The civil war in El Salvador, which raged from 1980 to 1992, displaced millions of that country's citizens, many of whom immigrated to the United States. There are more than two million Salvadorans currently residing in the United States, most of them the result of the war, and half of them living in the Los Angeles area. Their regular remunerations to relatives in El Salvador constitute the largest single source of foreign revenue for that country. Combining field work done both in El Salvador and Southern California, Baker-Cristales attempts to show how immigrants, in this case those from El Salvador, adopt, adapt, and in many cases alter the social, political, and economic conditions of the nations they leave and those they move to. Her fieldwork included volunteering in community organizations, living in neighborhoods with a high density of immigrants, and conducting interviews with immigrants and their relatives in El Salvador.

Writing in the International Migration Review, Sarah J. Mahler commented that the author "focuses on ‘globalization from below,’ the agency of everyday actors whose efforts affect processes and institutions at higher levels, most notably government policies." Mahler further noted, "She relates how migrants involved in these activities negotiate their belongingness in the very social spaces that they are transforming." After an initial chapter supplying some background history to the influx of Salvadorans into the United States in the final decades of the twentieth century, the author settles into her primary task of giving individual examples of how such migrants demonstrate transnational tendencies, having a foot in both countries. Mahler felt that Salvadoran Migration to Southern California "makes a solid contribution to the field." Reviewing the same book in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Susan Biber Coutin thought it was "beautifully written," and an "ethnography of the reciprocal gaze between Salvadorans in Southern California and El Salvador." Coutin also pointed out that the author "advances debates over whether, in the face of globalization, the state is being reinforced or dismantled." Baker-Cristales concludes that the state is being transformed by the transnational experience and globalization. Coutin concluded that Salvadoran Migration to Southern California "should be of interest to immigration scholars, Latin American special- ists, theorists of the state and transnationalism, and anyone who is interested in El Salvador…. Clearly, this is an ethnography that gets it right."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Baker-Cristales, Beth, Salvadoran Migration to Southern California: Redefining El Hermano Lejano, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2004.