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We will see in the following chapters that there were important domestic and international political reasons why the US government involved itself in the politics of Latin American countries and encouraged or discouraged migration from them. For different reasons, the US government has made immigrant settlement much easier for some national-origin groups than for others. This, in turn, has affected how quickly and under what terms Latino immigrants have been allowed to join the polity. These decisions also have affected the immigrants’ choice of places to settle, the kinds of transnational and co-ethnic social networks available to them in those places, and what political and economic opportunity structures were present in those communities. It follows that that experience has had an important impact on these immigrants’ trust in government, feelings of personal efficacy, and willingness to become engaged politically. These opportunity structures also affect their socioeconomic mobility; immigrants of higher socioeconomic status are more likely to engage politically. This means that having more economic opportunities also affects political incorporation. This is a good example of how agency and structure interact. A particular immigrant brings a set of skills (education, funding, personal drive) which affect her ability to succeed in her new country. But that success is also affected by the institutions she must interact with on the ground. How open those institutions are, and how much they will enable her to take advantage of their resources, is outside of her control.

What this interaction looks like for immigrants from each national-origin group also varies over time. Each national-origin group discussed in this volume has faced particular challenges, has organized so as to improve its position, and all have achieved important successes. That mobilization, in turn, has changed the structural context for new immigrants. Therefore, nothing in these stories is “static”; there is constant movement across historical time. It is only by looking at the historical trajectory of each national-origin group that we may understand fully the Latino political incorporation process today. This is what we will be doing in the following chapters.