Christian Zlolniski’s compelling ethnographic portrait of Mexicans living in Santech, a working-class barrio in San Jose, California, is a penetrating examination of global structural forces that contribute to pronounced economic disparity and the “paradox of poverty amidst the affluence that has become a distinctive mark of the Silicon Valley” (p. 4). As the local economic base changed, immigrant laborers filled the niche for unskilled workers in agriculture, manufacturing, and more recently in the lowest-paid, most economically vulnerable flexible-labor sector of the high-tech industry that epitomizes the best of the “new U.S. economy” (p. 5). Zlolniski situates the economic, social, and political culture his informants are forging within the growing body of globalization and immigration studies.

Zlolniski’s ability to analyze complex theoretical issues through richly textured narrative is this book’s strength. His descriptions of the complexities of his informants’ lives reflect the rapport and trust that Zlolniski established with community members while conducting research in Santech for more than a decade. He illustrates the interplay of employment (formal, informal, and household), social relations, and political advocacy of residents to improve conditions (e.g., lowering the crime rate and improving schooling) to support his contention that men and women participate quite differently in economic restructuring and make varying adjustments to urban U.S. life.

Residents’ opportunities for employment in the service sector have changed significantly since Zlolniski began his research in 1991, as corporations have introduced cost-cutting measures: Janitorial labor at high-tech firms has given way to employment for local and multinational firms that subcontract this type of labor. Analysis of workers’ perceptions of ways that unionization—which promised to provide them with greater job security and higher wages—ultimately resulted in lower wages and less stable employment is a prime example of the types of frustrated attempts to get ahead financially that underscore the text. The demand for flexible labor has made informal economic activities—primarily vending, with some skilled employment—an integral supplement or alternative to “unstable, unpleasant, and poorly paid jobs in the formal economy” (p. 104) as part of household survival strategies.

In presenting detailed ethnographic accounts that indicate the necessity of income pooling for survival, Zlolniski also challenges models of autonomous, cohesive Mexican immigrant household units. Instead, he characterizes these households as sites of exploitation, inequality, and stratification across age and sex lines. Overcrowding (by relatives and paying boarders) that increases women’s domestic labor and uneven budgetary contributions among members compound these tensions. Even though paid and unremunerated labor is vital to economic solvency, household members often minimize the importance of women’s paid employment in an extension of their idealized household roles. Nevertheless, with a flexible structure that tends toward an extended family arrangement, these households frequently are “a bastion of resistance to poverty and exploitation often experienced by poor immigrant women” (p. 130).

Zlolniski integrates accounts of two types of agency among Santech residents for whom political mobilization became a “weapon of the weak” for seemingly “disadvantaged immigrants.” Demonstrating one type of agency, janitors—primarily men—worked with local Chicano leaders to unionize in “one of the most politically anti-union regions” in the United States (p. 8). Manifesting the other type, residents—particularly the working mothers who rely on social networks and are the most active community organizers—worked first with government programs and, then, more successfully with the People Acting in Community Together (PACT) interfaith civic organization to lobby the city government for better policing, better housing conditions, educational programs (including English as a second language courses) that met community needs, and a community center.

In an epilogue that includes valuable July 2003 updates on numerous informants’ lives, Zlolniski revisits the implications of his initial findings. Readers learn that the “new immigrants” already difficult quest for the “American Dream” has become more tenuous with corporate outsourcing, the crash of the dot-com industry, and heightened national security policies. This section chronicles the establishment of new households and the rupture of others, changes in Santech community membership as residents move to more affordable communities or return to Mexico, and the availability of fewer formal-sector jobs.

Zlolniski has delivered on his promise to show, “without painting a romantic picture,” that there is “room in Silicon Valley’s advanced economy for a group of poorly educated immigrants” (p. 21). With its timeliness enhanced by current debates about rights of undocumented migrants and proposed immigration reform, this accessible text is appropriate for courses across the social sciences. Given the political consciousness in the Santech community, readers will welcome, in future editions, a revised epilogue chronicling residents’ active participation in spring 2006 marches and demonstrations.