Narrative has now won its spurs within the social sciences, as evidenced by the number of publications, by the diversity of disciplinary approaches (e.g., linguistic, sociological, and psychological), and by the wide range of theoretical frameworks applied to its study. Similar remarks apply to studies of identity issues focused on the individual or a group, as shown by the range of foci such as social, ethnic, gender, national, racial, and institutional identity. Anna De Fina's Identity in narrative appears to be a useful resource for students of these topics and, more specifically, for anyone interested in the study of immigration.

Based on the study of narratives of 14 Mexican immigrants living in Maryland (USA), De Fina explores group identity constructions, representations, and negotiations through elicited narratives. The study is based on two sets of data: stories of personal experience and chronicles on border crossing between Mexico and the United States. The style of the book is extremely clear and the line of arguments well structured. Unfortunately, what is generally considered as a strong quality for a book may sometimes turn out to be its weakness. Indeed, Identity in narrative tends to reflect a “dissertation style,” with unnecessary repetitions and precautions that not only slow down its reading but at times make the author's writing somewhat “uninformative.” These drawbacks unfortunately weaken the quality of her study.

The book consists of seven equally long chapters, including the conclusions (chap. 7). The first chapter (pp. 11–30) gives a concise survey of different theoretical models of narrative studies and discusses how identity issues have been approached in the social sciences since the poststructuralist and social constructivist positions in the 1960s and 1970s. It also discusses the relation between the local and global contexts, which, as I explain below, is less clear than the author assumes.

Chap. 2 (31–50) starts with an overview of Mexican undocumented migration to the United States since the nineteenth century in order to provide a historical and sociocultural background useful to understanding the construction of migration discourse in narratives. Two sides of the discourse are presented in complementary terms: the story of the “newcomers,” the Mexican migrants, and that of the “host country” through public discourse. This two-sided presentation aims at giving enough material for further analysis of the connections between the local expression of identities in narrative discourse and the social processes that surround Mexican migration in the United States.

A second part of this chapter is devoted to the presentation of the author's investigation: De Fina gives brief accounts of her fieldwork methodology and of her data construction through elicited interviews. She uses the “snowball” technique to construct a homogeneous group of “friends of friends.” This important aspect is surprisingly not theorized in her study of group identity. Indeed, several questions remain unasked. For instance, does this interconnectedness between interviewees contribute to shape a group identity among these migrants? Does this network of acquaintances and friends create a “group identity,” or does a “group identity” emerge from this network? These are important questions that must be addressed in the kind of ethnographic approach assumed by De Fina. Ethnography shouldn't be considered – as it often still is – as only a method for “gathering data,” but should be regarded as a mode of investigation and comprehension of linguistic and cultural phenomena. It requires close attention to all the different levels likely to explain the dynamics the researcher seeks to explain.

The last part of the chapter deals with data selection and transcription. De Fina explains her choice of Labov & Waletzky's (1967) theoretical model to define narratives, to analyze the narrator's beliefs and attitudes, and to divide the stories into clauses.

The next four chapters are devoted to different perspectives on Mexican group identity. Each of them has a specific linguistic focus. Chap. 3 (51–92) is on the narrator's representation and negotiation of social role through pronoun switches, yo ‘I’ versus nosotros ‘we’, and through self-repairs. Chap. 4 (93–138) deals with the presentation of self and others in the story world through the use of reported speech in border-crossing chronicles. Chap. 5 (139–80) focuses on immigrants' self- versus other-ethnic categorization. Chap. 6 (181–216), an extension of the previous chapter, is focused on the category “Hispanic” as a narrator's self-categorization as well as its application to others in different story worlds.

As informative as the discussion generally is, there are a few points that do not appear to be very convincing or are simply problematic. They have to do with identity in the interactional context of the interviews from which the studied narratives were extracted. De Fina's position not to take into account the intra-interactional dynamics of the interview is clearly explained (30). Much to her credit, she acknowledges the theoretical importance of this dimension in the construction of her interviewees' identity repertoire. She argues that she is more interested in the connection between the narrative and the wider social context in which the narrative is embedded and to which it responds. Although I favor, a priori, an interactional approach to any discourse elicited in interviews, De Fina's monologic and partially decontextualized perspective fosters an analytical problem. Aside from framing discourse (see, e.g., Schegloff's 1997 critique of Labov & Waletzky's seminal article on narratives), it also categorizes narrators as interviewees or respondents (an interactional category par excellence), and in the case of De Fina's study, as Mexican immigrants: It is in fact because they are Mexican migrants that interviewees were chosen, and probably why they (partly) decided to engage in such a specific communicative event. The interview format has thus to be factored in the shift from yo to nosotros in reported speech in which the interviewees take on the role of spokespersons, talking on behalf of other Mexican migrants. Another important aspect that can be taken into account to explain this linguistic shift is the transformation of the status of the narrative in the process of the interview. It becomes an “on-the-record” narrative, that is, a speech that can be reiterated and entextualized and thus undergoes decontextualization and then recontextualization to create a new discourse. The migrant's narrative becomes a public event that could be reproduced and shared with others who constitute a third party. Indeed, both the interview format and the narrative itself construct the figure (Goffman 1974) of the Mexican migrant in the hic et nunc of the speech event. Taking into account these two dimensions would certainly downplay the collective agency which, according to De Fina, takes the place of her speakers' individual experience in the narrated story. It would also explain why this generalization of experience is not peculiar to De Fina's group but is a pattern observable in other migrants' narratives in different migration settings. I have observed similar shifts in narratives of a wide range of francophone African migrants in South Africa, especially when they recount their migration trajectory from their country of departure (Vigouroux 2003). Greater attention to the context of the interview could have shown how narrators “display” their Mexican migrant identity within a universe of representations (Hall 1996), both outside the interaction – which De Fina emphasizes – and inside its here-and-now, using a wide range of categories, including gender. This perspective would probably have shown De Fina's group of migrants to be less homogeneous than her study claims.

This leads to a second problem on which I will comment only briefly: the relation – or should I say the interaction – between the local context of the narrative and the global context of the society in which these discourses are (re)produced. The dichotomy between these two dimensions has been discussed in a growing body of literature on globalization, in which the migration process can be approached as a “product” or an outcome of a changing world order (e.g. Kearney 1995). An important question is whether this distinction between local and global is as relevant as scholars have tended to assume. Where does one draw the boundary between the two notions? Does the local stop where the global starts, and if so, where is that? Or is the global a collection of multiple localities? If we assume, like De Fina, that the local informs the global and vice versa, or that it is part of the construction of the other, doesn't it become more difficult, if not irrelevant, to maintain a conceptual contrast between the two notions (Massey 1992)? How does this distinction apply to identity construction and display? Can one posit, as the author does (without clearly explaining what she means), the existence of global identities? If so, what does this notion stand for?

One of the most valuable qualities of De Fina's book is her openmindedness in the way she examines her linguistic and ethnographic data and the nonrestrictive analytical models she uses. She seems to have examined the data from different perspectives before settling on a particular interpretation. Identity in narrative shows to those who still wait to be convinced the extent to which data must inform theory. This well-documented book is worth reading in order to understand the interplay between social and linguistic dynamics in narratives. It makes a valuable contribution to our postmodern reflection on multilayered identity, despite the shortcomings I highlight here.