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This first comprehensive study of Chicanas encountering the U.S. criminal justice system is set within the context of the international war on drugs as witnessed at street level in Chicana/o barrios. Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice uses oral history to chronicle the lives of twenty-four Chicana pintas (prisoners/former prisoners) repeatedly arrested and incarcerated for non-violent, low-level economic and drug-related crimes. It also provides the first documentation of the thirty-four-year history of Sybil Brand Institute, Los Angeles' former women's jail.

In a time and place where drug war policies target people of color and their communities, drug-addicted Chicanas are caught up in an endless cycle of police abuse, arrest, and incarceration. They feel the impact of mandatory sentencing laws, failing social services and endemic poverty, violence, racism, and gender discrimination. The women in this book frankly discuss not only their jail experiences, but also their family histories, involvement with gangs, addiction to drugs, encounters with the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems, and their successful and unsuccessful attempts to recover from addiction and reconstitute fractured families. The Chicanas' stories underscore the amazing resilience and determination that have allowed many of the women to break the cycle of abuse. Díaz-Cotto also makes policy recommendations for those who come in contact with Chicanas/Latinas caught in the criminal justice system.

By any measure of test scores and graduation rates, public schools are failing to educate a large percentage of Chicana/o youth. But despite years of analysis of this failure, no consensus has been reached as to how to realistically address it. Taking a new approach to these issues, Marcos Pizarro goes directly to Chicana/o students in both urban and rural school districts to ask what their school experiences are really like, how teachers and administrators support or thwart their educational aspirations, and how schools could better serve their Chicana/o students.

In this accessible, from-the-trenches account of the Chicana/o school experience, Marcos Pizarro makes the case that racial identity formation is the crucial variable in Chicana/o students' success or failure in school. He draws on the insights of students in East Los Angeles and rural Washington State, as well as years of research and activism in public education, to demonstrate that Chicana/o students face the daunting challenge of forming a positive sense of racial identity within an educational system that unintentionally yet consistently holds them to low standards because of their race. From his analysis of this systemic problem, he develops a model for understanding the process of racialization and for empowering Chicana/o students to succeed in school that can be used by teachers, school administrators, parents, community members, and students themselves.

Collateral Damage provides an overview of how political communication influences the process of incorporation with the broad society as well as its political parties. Sean Richey shows that how politicians talk about immigrants affects how their children perceive America and their feelings about the nation. These perceptions and feelings in turn greatly influence the children’s desire to incorporate into American political society. He also shows that regardless of a speaker’s intended outcome, what is said can still have a deleterious effect on incorporation desire, a communicative process that he terms “collateral damage.” Richey uses new experimental and survey evidence, as well as the rhetoric of Donald Trump as a test case, to examine how anti-immigration communication influences the incorporation of the children of immigrants.