125 books match the query 'Migration' and 10 start with c

cover of Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks

Caribbean Journeys

An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks

Karen Fog Olwig

Duke University Press, 2007

Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being “Caribbean” is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses.

The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family’s educational, occupational, and socioeconomic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as “Caribbean diaspora” wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.

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cover of Changes in Care: Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa

Changes in Care

Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa

Cati Coe

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Africa is known both for having a primarily youthful population and for its elders being held in high esteem. However, this situation is changing: people in Africa are living longer, some for many years with chronic, disabling illnesses. In Ghana, many older people, rather than experiencing a sense of security that they will be respected and cared for by the younger generations, feel anxious that they will be abandoned and neglected by their kin. In response to their concerns about care, they and their kin are exploring new kinds of support for aging adults, from paid caregivers to social groups and senior day centers. These innovations in care are happening in fits and starts, in episodic and scattered ways, visible in certain circles more than others. By examining emergent discourses and practices of aging in Ghana, Changes in Care makes an innovative argument about the uneven and fragile processes by which some social change occurs.

There is a short film that accompanies the book, “Making Happiness: Older People Organize Themselves” (2020), an 11-minute film by Cati Coe. Available at: https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-thke-hp15
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cover of Chasing Warblers

Chasing Warblers

By Vera and Bob Thornton

University of Texas Press, 1999

Honorable Mention, Southern Books Competition, 1999

Known to many as "the butterflies of the bird world," wood warblers allure even the most experienced and discriminating birders. Their annual migrations to and from nesting areas in the United States and Canada draw thousands of birders to places such as High Island, Texas; Crane Creek, Ohio; and Point Pelee, Ontario, where warblers stop to rest and feed during the long journey. There birders have a chance to see and photograph these colorful, elusive songbirds whose quick, darting flight among high branches and thick cover makes them some of the most challenging birds to observe and identify.

In this entertaining, beautifully illustrated book, Bob Thornton recounts his and Vera Thornton's cross-continent adventures in finding and photographing all 52 species of wood warblers that nest in the United States. In addition to describing where and how they photographed each species, Thornton tells marvelous stories of the colorful characters they encountered along the way. He also touches on the current human threats to wood warblers that come from loss of habitat.

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cover of Chinese Americans in the Heartland: Migration, Work, and Community

Chinese Americans in the Heartland

Migration, Work, and Community

Huping Ling

Rutgers University Press, 2022

The term “Heartland” in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies. Focused on the Heartland cities of Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri, this book draws rich evidences from various government records, personal stories and interviews, and media reports, and sheds light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast and Hawaii. Some of the poignant stories such as “the Three Moy Brothers,” “Alla Lee,” and “Save Sam Wah Laundry” told in the book are powerful reflections of Asian American history.
 
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cover of Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America

Continental Shifts

Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America

By John D. "Rio" Riofrio

University of Texas Press, 2015

Applying a broad geographical approach to comparative Latino literary and cultural studies, Continental Shifts illuminates how the discursive treatment of Latinos changed dramatically following the enactment of NAFTA—a shift exacerbated by 9/11. While previous studies of immigrant representation have focused on single regions (the US/Mexico border in particular), specific genres (literature vs. political rhetoric), or individual groups, Continental Shifts unites these disparate discussions in a provocative, in-depth examination.

Bringing together a wide range of groups and genres, this intercultural study explores novels by Latin American and Latino writers, a border film by Tommy Lee Jones and Guillermo Arriaga, “viral” videos of political speeches, popular television programming (particularly shows that feature incarceration and public shaming), and user-generated YouTube videos. These cultural products reveal the complexity of Latino representations in contemporary discourse. While tropes of Latino migrants as threatening, diseased foreign bodies date back to the nineteenth century, Continental Shifts marks the more pernicious, recent images of Latino laborers (legal and not) in a variety of contemporary media. Using vivid examples, John Riofrio demonstrates the connections between rhetorical and ideological violence and the physical and psychological violence that has more intensely plagued Latino communities in recent decades. Culminating with a consideration of the “American” identity, this eye-opening work ultimately probes the nation’s ongoing struggle to uphold democratic ideals amid dehumanizing multiethnic tension.

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cover of Corridors of Migration: The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933

Corridors of Migration

The Odyssey of Mexican Laborers, 1600-1933

Rodolfo F. Acuña

University of Arizona Press, 2007

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In the San Joaquin Valley Cotton Strike of 1933, frenzied cotton farmers murdered three strikers, intentionally starved at least nine infants, wounded dozens of people, and arrested more. While the story of this incident has been recounted from the perspective of both the farmers and, more recently, the Mexican workers, this is the first book to trace the origins of the Mexican workers’ activism through their common experience of migrating to the United States.

Rodolfo F. Acuña documents the history of Mexican workers and their families from seventeenth-century Chihuahua to twentieth-century California, following their patterns of migration and describing the establishment of communities in mining and agricultural regions. He shows the combined influences of racism, transborder dynamics, and events such as the industrialization of the Southwest, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I in shaping the collective experience of these people as they helped to form the economic, political, and social landscapes of the American Southwest in their interactions with agribusiness and absentee copper barons.

Acuña follows the steps of one of the murdered strikers, Pedro Subia, reconstructing the times and places in which his wave of migrants lived. By balancing the social and geographic trends in the Mexican population with the story of individual protest participants, Acuña shows how the strikes were in fact driven by choices beyond the Mexican workers’ control. Their struggle to form communities graphically retells how these workers were continuously uprooted and their organizations destroyed by capital. Corridors of Migration thus documents twentieth-century Mexican American labor activism from its earliest roots through the mines of Arizona and the Great San Joaquin Valley cotton strike.

From a founding scholar of Chicano studies and the author of fifteen books comes the culmination of three decades of dedicated research into the causes and effects of migration and labor activism. The narrative documents how Mexican workers formed communities against all odds.
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cover of Counterstreams in Migration: Ethiopians' Choices to Stay, Leave, or Return

Counterstreams in Migration

Ethiopians' Choices to Stay, Leave, or Return

Hewan Girma

Temple University Press, 2026

Migration journeys are not unidirectional. In Counterstreams in Migration, Hewan Girma reveals a more complex circuit of migration, concentrating on the motivations behind non-migration, return migration, and repeat migration to show how these flows mutually affect and influence the migrant as well as the family members who remain at home.

Weaving together nearly 100 stories of non-migrants, returnees, and repeat migrants from Ethiopia, Girma advances a theory of migra-emotions, emotions specific to migration, to understand decisions and experiences, such as the imaginary of home and the lived reality of alienation, disaffection abroad, and feelings of duty to one’s homeland.

Looking beyond the meanings of migration or processes of integration, Girma explores the emotional subtext of migration aspirations. In doing so, Counterstreams of Migration complicates conventional understandings of migration and provides a more complete picture of migrant stories.
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cover of Crisis for Whom?: Critical Global Perspectives on Childhood, Care, and Migration

Crisis for Whom?

Critical Global Perspectives on Childhood, Care, and Migration

Edited by Rachel Rosen, Elaine Chase, Sarah Crafter, Valentina Glockner, and Sayani Mitra

University College London, 2023

A complex and nuanced interdisciplinary exploration of children in migration crises.

Children are central figures in narratives of “migration crises.” They are often depicted as either essentially vulnerable and in need of special protections, or suspiciously adult-like and a threat to national borders. This bilingual book, written in English and Spanish, challenges these simplistic narratives. Drawing on collaborations between young migrants, researchers, artists, and activists, this collection asks new questions about how crises are produced, mobility is controlled, and childhood is conceptualized. Answers to these questions have profound implications for resources, infrastructures, and relationships of care. The chapters offer insights from diverse global contexts, painting a rich and insightful tapestry about child migration. They stress that children are more than recipients of care and that the crises they face are multiple and stratifying, with long historical roots. Readers are invited to understand migration as an act of concern and love and to attend to how the solidarities between citizens and “others,” adults and children, and between children, are understood and forged.
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cover of Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal

Crossing the Border to India

Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal

Jeevan R. Sharma

Temple University Press, 2018

Given the limited economic opportunities in rural Nepal, the desire of young men of all income and education levels, castes and ethnicities to migrate has never been higher. Crossing the Border to India provides an ethnography of male labor migration from the western hills of Nepal to Indian cities. Jeevan Sharma shows how a migrant’s livelihood and gender, as well as structural violence impacts his perceptions, experiences, and aspirations. 

Based on long-term fieldwork, Sharma captures the actual experiences of crossing the border. He shows that Nepali migration to India does not just allow young men from poorer backgrounds to “save there and eat here,” but also offers a strategy to escape the more regimented social order of the village. Additionally, migrants may benefit from the opportunities offered by the “open-border” between India and Nepal to attain independence and experience a distant world. However, Nepali migrants are subjected to high levels of ill treatment. Thus, while the idea of freedom remains extremely important in Nepali men’s migration decisions, their actual experience is often met with unfreedom and suffering.

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cover of Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility

Cultures of Migration

The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility

By Jeffrey H. Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci

University of Texas Press, 2011

Around the globe, people leave their homes to better themselves, to satisfy needs, and to care for their families. They also migrate to escape undesirable conditions, ranging from a lack of economic opportunities to violent conflicts at home or in the community. Most studies of migration have analyzed the topic at either the macro level of national and global economic and political forces, or the micro level of the psychology of individual migrants. Few studies have examined the "culture of migration"—that is, the cultural beliefs and social patterns that influence people to move.

Cultures of Migration combines anthropological and geographical sensibilities, as well as sociological and economic models, to explore the household-level decision-making process that prompts migration. The authors draw their examples not only from their previous studies of Mexican Oaxacans and Turkish Kurds but also from migrants from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and many parts of Asia. They examine social, economic, and political factors that can induce a household to decide to send members abroad, along with the cultural beliefs and traditions that can limit migration. The authors look at both transnational and internal migrations, and at shorter- and longer-term stays in the receiving location. They also consider the effect that migration has on those who remain behind. The authors' "culture of migration" model adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the cultural beliefs and social patterns associated with migration and will help specialists better respond to increasing human mobility.

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