"Transnational Peasants provides a historical and sociological exploration of a contemporary migration mystery: Why do two groups from the same country pursue radically different economic strategies of transnational mobility?".

"Kyle argues that patterns of transnationalism, developed over several centuries and varying by region and ethnicity, continue to play a crucial role in who will leave Ecuador and who will stay. Yet migrants' use of professional "migration merchants," including smugglers, leads to a phenomenon that transcends the original sending conditions of the 1980s; even cash-poor rural small holders in communities lacking telephone service can buy a clandestine passage to Manhattan."--BOOK JACKET.