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A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

This memoir is an act of map making, of plotting out overlapping territories—topographical, temporal, and psychological. Centered on family life in a Massachusetts town from the 1920s to the 1960s, the author's investigation extends outward to include the Boston area from colonial times to the recent past, encounters with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and with Harvard College, the American Civil War, and Ireland and Germany in the nineteenth century.

Charles Fanning re-creates the landscape of childhood and adolescence in a place and time both ordinary and rich with possibility. An expert on Irish immigration, he was born and raised in Norwood, Massachusetts, twelve miles outside of Boston, where Yankee and Irish cultures bumped against each other. The narrative traces his personal growth, shaped by family, school, baseball, radio drama, and art. He was the first in his family to attend college, and the book ends with his undergraduate experience at Harvard, class of 1964.

Along with this coming-of-age story, Mapping Norwood features forays back in time, including chapters on each of Fanning's parents and historical excavations and meditations on three ancestors. Guided by his own experience as a scholar, the pressure of these chapters is epistemological—the thrill of the hunt toward knowing. Fanning's great-grandfather, John Fanning, disappeared from the family in the late 1880s, and a chapter chronicles the discovery of “Walking John's” fifty years of hidden later life in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he died alone in 1946. Fanning's great-great-grandfather, Winslow Radcliffe, was a veteran of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry in the Civil War, and the author traces this regiment through the horrors of Antietam and Fredericksburg, by means of diaries and letters by four men from Winslow's company. The evidence gleaned helps explain Winslow's suicide after the war. An Irish immigrant ancestor, Phillip Fanning, came to Boston from County Monaghan just after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Relying on historical research, Fanning imagines vividly the lives led by Phillip's family and thousands like them in the wake of Ireland's nineteenth-century catastrophe.

A searing critique of the “freedom” that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation
 

Meaningless Citizenship traces the costs of America’s long-term military involvement around the world by following the forced displacement of Iraqi families, unveiling how Iraqis are doubly displaced: first by the machinery of American imperialism in their native countries and then through a more pernicious war occurring on U.S. soil—the dismantling of the welfare state.

Revealing the everyday struggles and barriers that texture the lives of Iraqi families recently resettled to the United States, Sally Wesley Bonet draws from four years of deep involvement in the refugee community of Philadelphia. An education scholar, Bonet’s analysis moves beyond the prevalent tendency to collapse schooling into education. Focusing beyond the public school to other critical institutions, such as public assistance, resettlement programs, and healthcare, she shows how encounters with institutions of the state are an inherently educative process for both refugee youths and adults, teaching about the types of citizenship they are expected to enact and embody while simultaneously shaping them into laboring subjects in service of capitalism. 

An intimate, in-depth ethnography, Meaningless Citizenship exposes how the veneer of American values—freedom, democracy, human rights—exported to countries like Iraq, disintegrates to uncover what is really beneath: a nation-state that prioritizes the needs of capitalism above the survival and wellbeing of its citizens.

Borderlands migration has been the subject of considerable study, but the authorship has usually reflected a north-of-the-border perspective only. Gathering a transnational group of prominent researchers, including leading Mexican scholars whose work is not readily available in the United States and academics from US universities, Mexican Migration to the United States brings together an array of often-overlooked viewpoints, reflecting the interconnectedness of immigration policy.

This collection’s research, principally empirical, reveals significant aspects of labor markets, family life, and educational processes. Presenting recent data and accessible explanations of complex histories, the essays capture the evolving legal frameworks and economic implications of Mexico-US migrations at the national and municipal levels, as well as the experiences of receiving communities in the United States. The volume includes illuminating reports on populations ranging from undocumented young adults to elite Mexican women immigrants, health-care rights, Mexico’s incorporation of return migration, the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on higher education, and the experiences of young children returning to Mexican schools after living in the United States. Reflecting a multidisciplinary approach, the list of contributors includes anthropologists, demographers, economists, educators, policy analysts, and sociologists.

Underscoring the fact that Mexican migration to the United States is unique and complex, this timely work exemplifies the cross-border collaboration crucial to the development of immigration policies that serve people in both countries.

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

This interdisciplinary study investigates the unique challenges faced by migrant workers in the market socialist countries of China and Vietnam. 

The labor of hundreds of millions of internal migrant workers plays a crucial role for China and Vietnam’s national development and the expansion of global production chains in these market socialist countries. As the Communist party states have been promoting both marketization and welfare expansion since their respective reforms began, contradictions between the commodification and social protection of labor lead to significant obstacles to migrant workers’ welfare and well-being in the post-reform era.

Bringing into focus the connection between the reconfiguration of labor and changes in the two countries’ welfare systems, Migrant Labour in Global Factories analyzes how these contradictions shape the care of their huge migrant labor forces. It explores how they unfold in the historical and political contexts of both countries, bringing a range of relevant theories about welfare and social policymaking to bear on the features of the market socialist economy. The book argues that the evolving welfare systems in China and Vietnam fail to meaningfully address the social consequences of labor commodification in contexts where neoliberal development is instrumentalized to serve the political control and legitimacy of the party states. This is often at the cost of long-term and sustainable social policies for migrant labor in global factories.

Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs—a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires—Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular—by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food—had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Migrant Marketplaces offers a new perspective on the linkages between migration and trade that helped define globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

An imaginative exploration of queer and trans Latinx migrant survival, examining literature, film, and performance to challenge normative constructions of citizenship and belonging.

Queer and trans migrants in the US face persistent fictions depicting them as powerless. Through the lens of “impossible possibilities,” what Ruben Zecena defines as a space between the possible and impossible, the book presents a complex account of undocumented migrants that goes beyond good and bad dichotomies expressed by the state.

Migrating like a Queen highlights the joy, fabulosity, glamour, and complex desires of queer and trans Latinx migrants in the context of dehumanizing legal and representational structures. Analyzing a rich archive of twenty-first century media and literature, Ruben Zecena reveals how individuals imagine a reality that pushes against the constraints of narrative tropes created by the nation-state. The book foregrounds work by and about queer and trans Latinx migrants, including Alexandra DeRuiz, tatiana de la tierra, Sonia Guiñansaca, and Julián Delgado Lopera, illustrating the defining of a movement. Engaging multiple genres and forms, from testimonio to the bildungsroman, this book is a testament to the ever-shifting cultural strategies of survival that seize power from systems of subjection.

Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully.

As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to this vibrant anthology, Migration and Mortality, examine restrictive immigration policies and the broader capitalist systems of exploitation and inequality while highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience. 

The case studies in this timely collection explore border deaths, detention economies, asylum seeking, as well as the public health and mental health of migrants. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding broader movements for life and justice in the Americas.

Constant migration is a worldwide phenomenon that creates sharp divisions between those who accept the need for migrants and welcome the contributions they make and those who oppose them on xenophobic grounds. Guy Arnold provides a comprehensive survey of the consequences of migration.

Arnold studies both the massive internal migrations in China and India that drive economic development and the influx of cheap labour into the advanced economies of the USA and EU. He shows that migrants are essential to advanced countries, filling skills gaps and bolstering ageing and static populations. He argues that the constant flow of people in all directions should be welcomed as a positive assault upon outdated, narrow nationalism.

Packed with statistics that support the argument that migration is a force for positive change, Arnold's analysis will be an excellent resource for journalists, policy makers and students of sociology, human geography and anthropology.

A remarkable young woman flees India to chase the dream of self-reinvention in America

The orphaned girls of St. Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants, but seventeen-year-old Savi dreams of escape. She is chosen to work as a governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate in Tamil Nadu, where she falls for a lively and carefree apprentice sculptor. After the violent and horrific events of a single night, they are forced to flee, leaving their homeland forever in the rearview.

Decades later, Savi has become known to all as “Missy” and runs a successful driving school in Chicago. She is a pillar of the South Asian community and the mother of two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa. But when Varun, a charming doctor with mysterious connections to her past, enters their lives, a chain of events is set off that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy. Can Missy outrun her secrets? And, if she is forced to face them, what will become of those she loves?
 

During the 1630s, more than 14,000 people sailed from Britain bound for New England, constituting what has come to be known as the Great Migration. This book offers the most extensive study of these emigrants ever undertaken. Focusing on 2,000 individuals who moved from the five counties of eastern England, it provides historians with important new findings on mobility, family life, kinship networks, and community cohesion. 

Roger Thompson reveals the personal experiences and ancestral histories of the emigrants. He follows them across the Atlantic and investigates their lives and achievements in the New World. Distinguising between such groups as gentry, entrepreneurs, artisans, farmers, and servants, he explores whether the migration tended to be a solitary uprooting from a stable and predictable world of familiar neighborhoods or simply a longer move among many relocations.

Thompson also sheds light on the issue of motivation: Were these settlers pulled by the hope of eventual enrichment or of founding a purified society, or were they pushed by intolerance and persecution at home? Did they see New England as a haven of escape or an opportunity to exploit? Did New Englanders seek to replicate “English ways,” preserving traditional culture and society, or did they embrace change and innovation? Mobility and Migration provides a wealth of new evidence for historians of both early modern England and colonial America.