Rating: 
Summary: [Weak] and one sided
Review: Eloquently describes the grinding proverty that drives poor Mexicans to attempt the dangerous crossing to America. However, portrays the issue from only one side. Doesn't explore the causes of the poverty or the complete and utter failure of Mexico to address the issue. Doesn't explore the impacts on American society or economy. Rather, this is a 330 pages of why Mexican's should be allowed to violate US law and why the US is wrong to exercise its right to defend its border.Having lived in CA my entire life, I was aware of the poverty that drove such proud people to such deperation. This book offered nothing new, except more excuses. Disappointing and lacking any solutions. I was expecting something more from someone with both the experience and education of Martinez.
Rating: 
Summary: Eloquent and accessible
Review: Crossing Over teaches us about the migrant trail by sharing -- with great sensitivity -- how the participants themselves experience its tragedies while searching for hope and better lives for their children. Though a true story, it reads like a novel. Both eloquent and accessible, the book would make a great teaching text for a wide range of courses, at both the high school and college levels. Jonathan Fox
Professor and Department Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
Rating:
Summary: los dos lados
Review: Among this book's many strengths is Ruben Martinez's attention to both sides of the immigration story. He devotes nearly half the book to describing lives in Cheran, Michoacan, showing how immigration to the U.S. is transforming rural Mexico in a variety of surprising ways. Martinez argues that this transformation is the biggest change to hit the highlands since the Conquest. Martinez then travels "el otro lado", the other side--or the multiple other sides. He takes us into the cheranes' homes in small-town Wisconsin and Arkansas and in the working-class edge of Saint Louis, all before visiting the strawberry fields of California. Given the dispersal of recent Mexican migration throughout the U.S., beyond the expected centers of California and the Southwest, Martinez's book is timely indeed. I also commend Martinez for the way he explores culture change without judging or mourning the loss of old ways. As a reader, I effortlessly tagged along with Martinez, across the many roads traversed by mexicanos today. I enjoyed this book for its breezy, evocative, yet thoughtful writing. Martinez transports readers to places few of us will visit, but places with which we are all increasingly connected.
I highly recommend CROSSING OVER for use in college classes and for anyone who works with recent Mexican immigrants.
Rating:
Summary: An immediate classic - best reporting of the last decade
Review: There's no better way to begin to understand the tangled and interwoven relationship between Mexico and the United States than by picking up Ruben Martinez' "Crossing Over." I chose it because of a very good review written by Geri Smith in the December 31, 2001 edition of Business Week (see p. 26 of US edition; the review is entitled "The Grapes of Wrath, Mexican-Style"). I thought the book had an interesting premise - three Mexican brothers attempting an illegal crossing die in a truck crash in Southern California in 1996 while being chased by the 'migra' (border patrol). It's an interesting start, but the book is much more than that. It's the personal reporting that sets the book apart. It becomes Martinez' travelogue - he befriends families in Cheran, Mexico, then meets up with them again in the United States in such far-flung places as Warren Arkansas, Norwalk Wisconsin, and Watsonville California. The initimacy of the reporting sticks with you long after you've completed the book. One standout passage of note: a tour of a meat-processing plant in Wisconsin. Paging Sinclair Lewis. Don't wait for the paperback. For this book, only the hardcover will do because you'll want it on your bookshelves for many years to come.
Rating:
Summary: personal narrative and social history
Review: Ruben Martinez carries readers between Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico, and the various sites in the United States, from Watsonville, California, to Warren, Arkansas, where migrants from Cheran work and live, and where a lively exchange of cultures is taking place today. "Crossing Over" is that wonderful rarity, a personal narrative that also manages to tell us a great deal about our own world. Like other first-rate journalists (and one thinks of George Orwell and Studs Terkel), Ruben Martinez personalizes the history, or packs his personal narrative with so much social and economic history that readers finish "Crossing Over" having learned more than they expected-and asking a lot of questions about current U. S. immigration policy.
Rating:
Summary: This is an extraordinary book!
Review: If you desire enlightenment about the Mexican migrant experience, read this book. If you are a teacher, a social worker, a police officer, a public official who interacts with Mexican immigrants, especially if you are a legislator or INS official who has responsibility for dealing with these people, please read this book. If you have concerns about the integrity and humanity of our national immigration policies and practices vis-a-vis Mexico, read this book. It is exceptionally well written. It will give you more tender eyes.
Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: I read and read and read some more, so I don't use the word "classic" lightly, but I think this book may be destined to be a true classic in the literature of the American immigrant experience.
Martinez, troubled by the deaths of 3 brothers from the Mexican village of Cheran, travels to their hometown and immerses himself in its culture, as well as in the culture of other Mexicans who cross the border for work.
Martinez's in-depth, literate, literary reporting is excellent, and he has much to teach us about the world and ourselves, especially here in the Western Hemisphere.
Martinez pays the 3 dead brothers a fine tribute, memorializing three men who otherwise would have been forgotten except by their families and friends.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Read
Review: I had the good fortune to hear Ruben Martinez speak about his book and his experience while writing it. The tragic story of the Chavez brothers, who died in a fiery truck crash while trying to cross-over to "el otro lado", the other side, to pick strawberries, is a heartrending, richly evoked story. It is reminiscent of the realistic journalism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in "News of a Kidnapping", Marquez's story of a Columbian kidnapping. Martinez cried during his reading. He has strong feelings about his experience and the family whose lives he shared while documenting their story in a larger cultural and historical context. I cried all through my reading of the book. Mr. Martinez has given us strong writing about powerful themes that are even more timely given recent events affecting our feelings about immigration and foreign participation in US society.
Rating:
Summary: A Profound Examination of Immigrant Life
Review: Ruben Martinez has written an important and ferociously passionate book that chronicles not only the epic tale of one immigrant family, but the birth pangs of a new America. He describes a country where cultural boundaries between North and Sout, the First World and Third World are collapsing, a nation where what it means to be "typically American" changes with each passing day and each arriving immigrant. Equally important this book also honors the heroism and inner-life of immigrants. Too often in America immigrants are a population of the voiceless and invisible.They pick our crops in farm fields, sew our clothes in sweatshops, and care for our homes and children as domestic workers, but when it comes to hearing their stories, we remain deaf. "Crossing Over" helps to give immigrant America a voice and forces us to listen.
Rating: 
Summary: Crossing Over
Review: Ruben Martinez might focus on one family who has lost three brothers trying to cross the border, but by doing that he tells the lives of other immigrants, of brothers, sisters, mothers, nephews trying to cross the border too. What I like about the book is how he inserts different facts in between of tragic moments or happy ones. With the facts he puts in, one is able to appreciate and respect what "illegal aliens" have to do in order to earn what should already be theirs.
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