Mexican migration has been the subject of many analyses concerned with exploring its political and economic dimensions. These studies have yielded key data on the process of mass migration and its implications at a societal level, yet they have seldom explored its implications at a personal level. To understand the emotional reality of migration, it is necessary to direct our attention to the viewpoints of the migrants themselves. In this section we have included a few stories of migration as told by Mexican migrants, and a collection of Retablos, votive paintings offered to a Saint or the Virgin as tokens of thanks.

Retablos and Oral histories alike reveal the degree to which U.S. migration has become a core part of the collective experience of the Mexican people. Working in the United States is now an institutionalized feature of the nation's culture and society. The words and images presented in this section are integral to our understanding of migration because they depict a side usually not told in statistical reports, they evidence the hopes and fears, the thoughts, lives and experiences of those who venture north of the border, the migrants themselves.