front cover of Life and Labor on the Border
Life and Labor on the Border
Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886–1986
Josiah McC. Heyman
University of Arizona Press, 1991
For thousands of Mexican laborers, life along the U.S. border represents an opportunity both to earn wages and to gain access to consumer goods. For anthropologist Josiah Heyman, this labor force presents an opportunity to gain a better understanding of working people, “to uncover the order underlying the history of waged lives.”

Life and Labor on the Border traces the development of the urban working class in northern Sonora over the period of a century. Drawing on an extensive collection of life histories, Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people have left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment.
 
Heyman searches for the origins of “working classness” in these family histories, revealing aspects of life that strengthen people’s involvement with a consumer economy, including the role of everyday objects like sewing machines, cars, and stoves. He considers the consequences of changing political and economic tides, as well as the effects on family life of the new role of women in the labor force. Within the broad sweep of family chronicles, key junctures in individual lives—both personal and historical crises—offer additional insights into social class dynamics. These life stories convey the positive sense of people’s goals in life and reveal the origins of a distinctive way of life in the borderlands.
 
[more]

front cover of Paper Trails
Paper Trails
Migrants, Documents, and Legal Insecurity
Sarah B. Horton and Josiah Heyman, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Across the globe, states have long aimed to control the movement of people, identify their citizens, and restrict noncitizens' rights through official identification documents. Although states are now less likely to grant permanent legal status, they are increasingly issuing new temporary and provisional legal statuses to migrants. Meanwhile, the need for migrants to apply for frequent renewals subjects them to more intensive state surveillance. The contributors to Paper Trails examine how these new developments change migrants' relationship to state, local, and foreign bureaucracies. The contributors analyze, among other toics, immigration policies in the United Kingdom, the issuing of driver's licenses in Arizona and New Mexico, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and community know-your-rights campaigns. By demonstrating how migrants are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems through the issuance of identification documents, the contributors open up new ways to understand how states exert their power and how migrants must navigate new systems of governance.

Contributors. Bridget Anderson, Deborah A. Boehm, Susan Bibler Coutin, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Sarah B. Horton, Josiah Heyman, Cecilia Menjívar, Juan Thomas Ordóñez, Doris Marie Provine, Nandita Sharma, Monica Varsanyi
[more]

front cover of Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups
Paulson, Susan
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Environmental issues have become increasingly prominent in local struggles, national debates, and international policies. In response, scholars are paying more attention to conventional politics and to more broadly defined relations of power and difference in the interactions between human groups and their biophysical environments. Such issues are at the heart of the relatively new interdisciplinary field of political ecology, forged at the intersection of political economy and cultural ecology.

This volume provides a toolkit of vital concepts and a set of research models and analytic frameworks for researchers at all levels. The two opening chapters trace rich traditions of thought and practice that inform current approaches to political ecology. They point to the entangled relationship between humans, politics, economies, and environments at the dawn of the twenty-first century and address challenges that scholars face in navigating the blurring boundaries among relevant fields of enquiry.  The twelve case studies that follow demonstrate ways that culture and politics serve to mediate human-environmental relationships in specific ecological and geographical contexts. Taken together, they describe uses of and conflicts over resources including land, water, soil, trees, biodiversity, money, knowledge, and information; they exemplify wide-ranging ecological settings including deserts, coasts, rainforests, high mountains, and modern cities; and they explore sites located around the world, from Canada to Tonga and cyberspace.

[more]

front cover of The Shadow of the Wall
The Shadow of the Wall
Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford; Foreword by Josiah Heyman; Photographs by Murphy Woodhouse
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels, detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power of family separation and reunification and the cost of criminalization, and they call into question assumptions about human rights and federal policies.

The authors analyze data from the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS), a mixed-methods, binational research project that offers socially relevant, rigorous social science about migration, immigration enforcement, and violence on the border. Using information gathered from more than 1,600 post-deportation surveys, this volume examines the different faces of violence and migration along the Arizona-Sonora border and shows that deportees are highly connected to the United States and will stop at nothing to return to their families. The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Contributors
 
Howard Campbell
Josiah Heyman
Alison Elizabeth Lee
Daniel E. Martínez
Ricardo Martínez-Schuldt
Emily Peiffer
Jeremy Slack
Prescott L. Vandervoet
Matthew Ward
Scott Whiteford
Murphy Woodhouse
[more]

front cover of The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region
The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region
Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions
Edited by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez and Josiah Heyman
University of Arizona Press, 2017

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region presents advanced anthropological theorizing of culture in an important regional setting. Not a static entity, the transborder region is peopled by ever-changing groups who face the challenges of social inequality: political enforcement of privilege, economic subordination of indigenous communities, and organized resistance to domination.

The book, influenced by the work of Eric Wolf and senior editor Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, centers on the greater Mexican North/U.S. Southwest, although the geographic range extends farther. This tradition, like other transborder approaches, attends to complex and fluid cultural and linguistic processes, going beyond the classical modern anthropological vision of one people, one culture, one language. With respect to recent approaches, however, it is more deeply social, focusing on vertical relations of power and horizontal bonds of mutuality.

Vélez-Ibáñez and Heyman envision this region as involving diverse and unequal social groups in dynamic motion over thousands of years. Thus the historical interaction of the U.S.-Mexico border, however massively unequal and powerful, is only the most recent manifestation of this longer history and common ecology. Contributors emphasize the dynamic “transborder” quality—conflicts, resistance, slanting, displacements, and persistence—in order to combine a critical perspective on unequal power relations with a questioning perspective on claims to bounded simplicity and perfection.

The book is notable for its high degree of connection across the various chapters, strengthened by internal syntheses from notable border scholars, including Robert R. Alvarez and Alejandro Lugo. In the final section, Judith Freidenberg draws general lessons from particular case studies, summarizing that “access to valued scarce resources prompts the erection of human differences that get solidified into borders,” dividing and limiting, engendering vulnerabilities and marginalizing some people.

At a time when understanding the U.S.-Mexico border is more important than ever, this volume offers a critical anthropological and historical approach to working in transborder regions.

Contributors:

Amado Alarcón
Robert R. Álvarez
Miguel Díaz-Barriga
Margaret E. Dorsey
Judith Freidenberg
Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
James Greenberg
Josiah Heyman
Jane H. Hill
Sarah Horton
Alejandro Lugo
Luminiţa-Anda Mandache
Corina Marrufo
Guillermina Gina Núñez-Mchiri
Anna Ochoa O’Leary
Luis F. B. Plascencia
Lucero Radonic
Diana Riviera
Thomas E. Sheridan
Kathleen Staudt
Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter