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763 books match the query 'Immigration & Emigration' and 26 start with p

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Pacific Pioneers

Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80

John E. Van Sant

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Shipwrecked sailors, samurai seeking a material and sometimes spiritual education, and laborers seeking to better their economic situation: these early Japanese travelers to the West occupy a little-known corner of Asian American studies. Pacific Pioneers profiles the first Japanese who resided in the United States or the Kingdom of Hawaii for a substantial period of time and the Westerners who influenced their experiences.

Although Japanese immigrants did not start arriving in substantial numbers in the West until after 1880, in the previous thirty years a handful of key encounters helped shape relations between Japan and the United States. John E. Van Sant explores the motivations and accomplishments of these resourceful, sometimes visionary individuals who made important inroads into a culture quite different from their own and paved the way for the Issei and Nisei.

Pacific Pioneers presents detailed biographical sketches of Japanese such as Joseph Heco, Niijima Jo, and the converts to the Brotherhood of the New Life and introduces the American benefactors, such as William Griffis, David Murray, and Thomas Lake Harris, who built relationships with their foreign visitors. Van Sant also examines the uneasy relations between Japanese laborers and sugar cane plantation magnates in Hawaii during this period and the shortlived Wakamatsu colony of Japanese tea and silk producers in California.

A valuable addition to the literature, Pacific Pioneers brings to life a cast of colorful, long-forgotten characters while forging a critical link between Asian and Asian American studies.

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Pan-African Resonance

Music, Migration, and Everyday Practice in London and Accra

Alison Okuda

Ohio University Press, 2026

As African and Caribbean nations gained independence from Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, many young musicians, students, and professionals crossed the Atlantic in search of new opportunities and built vibrant communities. Pan-African Resonance: Music, Migration, and Everyday Practice in London and Accra traces these journeys from Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Barbados, and Guyana, exploring how migrants practiced pan-Africanism through music across continents and generations. Drawing on musical recordings, newspapers, oral histories, and government documents from six countries, Alison Okuda demonstrates that pan-African solidarity thrived through the everyday creation and enjoyment of popular music. The book unfolds in two parts. Starting in the 1950s, it examines how Ghanaian highlife and Trinidadian calypso brought together musicians and young members of the independence generation, first in London and later in Accra. Even amid cultural tensions, Ghanaian and Caribbean communities expressed aspirations for freedom and unity in nightclubs, recording studios, private homes, and public streets. Before Ghana’s 1966 coup d’état, Ghanaians and diasporic Africans collaborated to shape an independent African-Atlantic world. Although the coup disrupted formal Pan-Africanist organizing, in the second part of the book Okuda shows that in the 1970s a new generation sustained dynamic networks of solidarity through highlife, reggae, and other popular styles—heard in recordings, radio broadcasts, live performances, and community events. Influenced by generational change and musical fluidity, African diasporic unity has remained central to popular music, migration, and politics in Ghana and the wider African-Atlantic world into the twenty-first century. Offering a rich interdisciplinary approach, Pan-African Resonance will appeal to readers interested in popular culture, transnational history, diaspora studies, and modern African history.

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Pan–African American Literature

Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century

Li, Stephanie

Rutgers University Press, 2018

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.

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Paper Families

Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion

Estelle T. Lau

Duke University Press, 2006

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the Chinese the first immigrant group officially excluded from the United States. In Paper Families, Estelle T. Lau demonstrates how exclusion affected Chinese American communities and initiated the development of restrictive U.S. immigration policies and practices. Through the enforcement of the Exclusion Act and subsequent legislation, the U.S. immigration service developed new forms of record keeping and identification practices. Meanwhile, Chinese Americans took advantage of the system’s loophole: children of U.S. citizens were granted automatic eligibility for immigration. The result was an elaborate system of “paper families,” in which U.S. citizens of Chinese descent claimed fictive, or “paper,” children who could then use their kinship status as a basis for entry into the United States. This subterfuge necessitated the creation of “crib sheets” outlining genealogies and providing village maps and other information that could be used during immigration processing.

Drawing on these documents as well as immigration case files, legislative materials, and transcripts of interviews and court proceedings, Lau reveals immigration as an interactive process. Chinese immigrants and their U.S. families were subject to regulation and surveillance, but they also manipulated and thwarted those regulations, forcing the U.S. government to adapt its practices and policies. Lau points out that the Exclusion Acts and the pseudo-familial structures that emerged in response have had lasting effects on Chinese American identity. She concludes with a look at exclusion’s legacy, including the Confession Program of the 1960s that coerced people into divulging the names of paper family members and efforts made by Chinese American communities to recover their lost family histories.

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Paper Sons and Daughters

Growing up Chinese in South Africa

Ufrieda Ho

Ohio University Press, 2011

Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.

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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

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Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan

Locating the Good Life

Elena Borisova

University College London, 2024

An intimate ethnographic account of migration and (im)mobility as a mundane part of people’s lives in the region of Tajikistan.

Tajikistan is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan foregrounds the experiences of those who “stay put” in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. In this first book-length ethnography of migration in Tajikistan, Elena Borisova examines the role of mobility through historical and cultural ideas about the good life. She demonstrates how mobility becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral, and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative, and moral aspects of (im)mobility, Borisova shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.

This book is a beautifully crafted ethnographic account that reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship, and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person, and the family. It is a major contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centered on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. Highly readable, it will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

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Parcels

Memories of Salvadoran Migration

Mike Anastario

Rutgers University Press, 2019

In light of new proposals to control undocumented migrants in the United States, Parcels prioritizes rural Salvadoran remembering in an effort to combat the collective amnesia that supports the logic of these historically myopic strategies. Mike Anastario investigates the social memories of individuals from a town he refers to as “El Norteño,” a rural municipality in El Salvador that was heavily impacted by the Salvadoran Civil War, which in turn fueled a mass exodus to the United States. By working with two viajeros (travelers) who exchanged encomiendas (parcels containing food, medicine, documents, photographs and letters) between those in the U.S. and El Salvador, Anastario tells the story behind parcels and illuminates their larger cultural and structural significance. This narrative approach elucidates key arguments concerning the ways in which social memory permits and is shaped by structural violence, particularly the U.S. actions and policies that have resulted in the emotional and physical distress of so many Salvadorans. The book uses analyses of testimonies, statistics, memories of migration, the war and, of course, the many parcels sent over the border to create an innovative and necessary account of post-Civil War El Salvador.

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Parents Without Papers

The Progress and Pitfalls of Mexican American Integration

Frank D. Bean is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on International Migration at the University of California, Irvine. Susan K. Brown is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. James D. Bachmeier is assistant professor of sociology at Temple University.

Russell Sage Foundation, 2015

For several decades, Mexican immigrants in the United States have outnumbered those from any other country. Though the economy increasingly needs their labor, many remain unauthorized. In Parents Without Papers, immigration scholars Frank D. Bean, Susan K. Brown, and James D. Bachmeier document the extent to which the outsider status of these newcomers inflicts multiple hardships on their children and grandchildren.

Parents Without Papers provides both a general conceptualization of immigrant integration and an in-depth examination of the Mexican American case. The authors draw upon unique retrospective data to shed light on three generations of integration. They show in particular that the “membership exclusion” experienced by unauthorized Mexican immigrants—that is, their fear of deportation, lack of civil rights, and poor access to good jobs—hinders the education of their children, even those who are U.S.-born. Moreover, they find that children are hampered not by the unauthorized entry of parents itself but rather by the long-term inability of parents, especially mothers, to acquire green cards.

When unauthorized parents attain legal status, the disadvantages of the second generation begin to disappear. These second-generation men and women achieve schooling on par with those whose parents come legally. By the third generation, socioeconomic levels for women equal or surpass those of native white women. But men reach parity only through greater labor-force participation and longer working hours, results consistent with the idea that their integration is delayed by working-class imperatives to support their families rather than attend college.

An innovative analysis of the transmission of advantage and disadvantage among Mexican Americans, Parents Without Papers presents a powerful case for immigration policy reforms that provide not only realistic levels of legal less-skilled migration but also attainable pathways to legalization. Such measures, combined with affordable access to college, are more important than ever for the integration of vulnerable Mexican immigrants and their descendants.

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Pathogenic Policing

Immigration Enforcement and Health in the U.S. South

Nolan Kline

Rutgers University Press, 2019

The relationship between undocumented immigrants and law enforcement officials continues to be a politically contentious topic in the United States. Nolan Kline focuses on the hidden, health-related impacts of immigrant policing to examine the role of policy in shaping health inequality in the U.S., and responds to fundamental questions regarding biopolitics, especially how policy can reinforce ‘race’ as a vehicle of social division. He argues that immigration enforcement policy results in a shadow medical system, shapes immigrants’ health and interpersonal relationships, and has health-related impacts that extend beyond immigrants to affect health providers, immigrant rights groups, hospitals, and the overall health system. Pathogenic Policing follows current immigrant policing regimes in Georgia and contextualizes contemporary legislation and law enforcement practices against a backdrop of historical forms of political exclusion from health and social services for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. For anyone concerned about the health of the most vulnerable among us, and those who interact with the overall health safety net, this will be an eye-opening read.

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Pathways of Desire

The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men

Héctor Carrillo

University of Chicago Press, 2017

With Pathways of Desire, Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greater sexual autonomy and sexual freedom in the United States. The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc of these men’s migration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, and their sexual and romantic relationships with American men. These men’s diverse and fascinating stories demonstrate the intertwining of sexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration.

Further, Carrillo shows that sexual globalization must be regarded as a bidirectional, albeit uneven, process of exchange between countries in the global north and the global south. With this approach, Carrillo challenges the view that gay men from countries like Mexico would logically want to migrate to a “more sexually enlightened” country like the United States—a partial and limited understanding, given the dynamic character of sexuality in countries such as Mexico, which are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity. Pathways of Desire also provides a helpful analytical framework for the simultaneous consideration of structural and cultural factors in social scientific studies of sexuality. Carrillo explains the patterns of cross-cultural interaction that sexual migration generates and—at the most practical level—shows how the intricacies of cross-cultural sexual and romantic relations may affect the sexual health and HIV risk of transnational immigrant populations.

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People on the Move

The Security, Social, and Economic Implications of Mass Migration, Volume 15

Nikolas A. Stavrou, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

On an annual basis, approximately 100 million people either attempt to or actually do leave their place of birth, often not knowing their final destination. The flow of immigrants who arrive in neighboring countries in search of refuge and work raises social, political, and security concerns. This special issue of Mediterranean Quarterly takes a closer look at a pattern of history that is at the core of current global instability—the mass migration of peoples.

This collection gathers a unique group of contributors, including representatives from Congress, the United Nations, and Israel’s Ministry of Justice, as well as senior diplomats from Canada, Bulgaria, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. Presenting their diverse perspectives, the contributors address regional and policy issues related to the mass migration of people, as well as questions concerning citizenship and national security, human trafficking in the form of prostitution, and cultural discrimination. The result is a multifaceted exploration of issues underlying many of the world’s economic, security, and social challenges. Other topics include the impact of state failure on migration, immigration in California, security measures and “preferred” immigrants in Canada after September 11, 2001, and Albanian migration into Greece.

Contributors. Alexandre Afonso, David Binder, Andrew C. Danopoulos, Constantine P. Danopoulos, Francis M. Deng, Mohamed A. El-Khawas, Omar G. Encarnación, Rochelle Gershuni, Larry L. Gerston, Ahmet Içduygu, Benjamin Kline, Bojan Korenic, Erin Kruger, Robert S. Leiken, Marlene Mulder, Elena Poptodorova, Tom Tancredo

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Peruvian Lives across Borders

Power, Exclusion, and Home

M. Cristina Alcalde

University of Illinois Press, 2018

In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home.

Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.

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Peruvians in Paterson

Building Businesses and Community

Gianncarlo Muschi

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Peruvians were among the first Latinos to arrive in Paterson and other cities in New Jersey during the post-WW II period. Over successive generations, they established a prosperous ethnic enclave that contributed to Paterson’s socioeconomic renewal. Yet their migration experience has remained relatively unexamined by scholars. This book examines the role of entrepreneurship and informality in the emergence and evolution of the Peruvian community of Paterson. It highlights the historical significance of the establishment of small businesses and social organizations as important cultural elements that validated their physical presence in the area. By uncovering the diverse strategies that Peruvians utilized for building a community, Muschi contends that their culture of informality and resourcefulness paved the way for their economic advancement and the consolidation of the Peruvian community. This book also shows that the informal economic practices introduced by Peruvians altered the social and economic landscape of Paterson and contributed to the revitalization of the local economy. Through the examination of oral histories, archival material from local newspapers, and memoirs declassified by the Peruvian consulate, the author challenges the oversimplified portrayal of Latinos as blue- collar workers with few opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. Peruvians in Paterson demonstrates that Latino migrants achieve wealth and ethnic empowerment in the process of adjustment and community building, suggesting new lines for future research.

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Platte River Road Narratives

A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel Over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812-1866

Merrill J. Mattes

University of Illinois Press, 1988

This massive annotated bibliography of all known significant eyewitness accounts of nineteenth-century central overland travel fills a conspicuous gap in historical literature, and will greatly accelerate research, writing, and collecting.

Platte River Road Narratives includes not only all identifiable overland accounts, but also a number of those identifiable in manuscript form only. Over 2,000 entries identify the author, the form of the passage, overland trip, and give Matte's authoritative commentary and evaluation, as well as identification of the repository of the source material.

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Policing Immigrants

Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines

Doris Marie Provine, Monica W. Varsanyi, Paul G. Lewis, and Scott H. Decker

University of Chicago Press, 2016

The United States deported nearly two million illegal immigrants during the first five years of the Obama presidency—more than during any previous administration. President Obama stands accused by activists of being “deporter in chief.” Yet despite efforts to rebuild what many see as a broken system, the president has not yet been able to convince Congress to pass new immigration legislation, and his record remains rooted in a political landscape that was created long before his election. Deportation numbers have actually been on the rise since 1996, when two federal statutes sought to delegate a portion of the responsibilities for immigration enforcement to local authorities.

Policing Immigrants traces the transition of immigration enforcement from a traditionally federal power exercised primarily near the US borders to a patchwork system of local policing that extends throughout the country’s interior. Since federal authorities set local law enforcement to the task of bringing suspected illegal immigrants to the federal government’s attention, local responses have varied. While some localities have resisted the work, others have aggressively sought out unauthorized immigrants, often seeking to further their own objectives by putting their own stamp on immigration policing. Tellingly, how a community responds can best be predicted not by conditions like crime rates or the state of the local economy but rather by the level of conservatism among local voters. What has resulted, the authors argue, is a system that is neither just nor effective—one that threatens the core crime-fighting mission of policing by promoting racial profiling, creating fear in immigrant communities, and undermining the critical community-based function of local policing.

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Polish Cities of Migration

The Migration Transition in Kalisz, Pila and Plock

Anne White

University College London, 2024

An interpersonal look into Poland’s shift from an emigration country to an immigration country.

Polish Cities of Migration analyzes Poland’s transition to become a “country of immigration.” Incorporating in-depth interviews with thirty-seven Polish returned migrants, seventy Ukrainians, and seventeen foreigners living in Kalisz, Plock, and Pila, the book explores two interconnected puzzles: how Poland’s migration transition is influenced by its current status as an emigration country, and why migrants are spreading out beyond the metropolises. It argues that migrants’ feelings of comfort in such locations are explained by network and lifestyle considerations, as well as the social acceptance of migration by former migrant Poles.

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Portraits of Basques in the New World

Richard W. Etulain

University of Nevada Press, 1999

A collection of new essays on notable historic and contemporary Basques of America's Far West that offers a perceptive and lively examination of the lives of one of the West's most resilient and successful ethnic minorities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the Basque people or those interested in the process of immigration and assimilation: these profiles illustrate how America's Basque immigrants have achieved success in mainstream society while retaining strong ties to their ancient Old World culture.

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Possible Paradises

Basque Emigration to Latin America

Azcona Pastor

University of Nevada Press, 2003

From Columbus's first voyage to "the Indies" in 1492, Basques participated in Spain's American enterprise. Supported by centuries of experience as mariners, shipbuilders, traders, miners, and ironworkers; encouraged toward emigration by restrictive inheritance laws and a land-poor territory; and conditioned by a culture that prized hard work and social solidarity, the Basques were poised to play a significant role in the exploration and development of the New World. The first Basques arrived with Columbus, and well into the twentieth century they continued to arrive seeking livelihood and refuge.

Possible Paradises, José Manuel Azcona Pastor's engaging and meticulously researched study of Basque emigration to the Americas, is a path breaking work of monumental importance. Ranging over the entire former Spanish American empire from Tierra del Fuego to the U.S. Southwest and covering over five centuries of history, Azcona examines the roles and fates of the Basques who came to the New World. He also studies the impact of the New World on the Basque Country, from the importance in the modern Basque diet of such American foodstuffs as corn and beans to the encouragement given to traditional Basque industries by the colonizers' demand for ships and iron tools. He considers the role of Basques in the Spanish imperial expeditions of exploration and conquest; their participation in transatlantic commerce and communication.

The Basque diaspora, although worldwide in dimension, has had its greatest presence and importance in the Americas. Azcona's pioneering study views the Basque presence in the New World through the broadest possible lens, linking Basque communities and activities from Argentina to the North American West.

Foreword by William A. Douglass. Translation by Roland Vazquez.

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Post-Communist Malaise

Cinematic Responses to European Integration

Zoran Samardzija

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was supposed to bring about the “end of history” with capitalism and liberal democracy achieving decisive victories. Europe would now integrate and reconcile with its past. However, the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2008—the rise in right-wing populism, austerity politics, and mass migration—have shown that the ideological divisions which haunted Europe in the twentieth century still remain. It is within this context that Post-Communist Malaise revives discourses of political modernism and revisits debates from Marxism and seventies film theory. Analyzing work of Theo Angelopoulos, Věra Chytilová, Srdjan Dragojević, Jean-Luc Godard, Miklós Jancsó, Emir Kusturica, Dušan Makavejev, Cristi Puiu, Jan Švankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr, the book focuses on how select cinemas from Eastern Europe and the Balkans critique the neoliberal integration of Europe whose failures fuel the rise of nationalism and right-wing politics. By politicizing art cinema from the regions, Post-Communist Malaise asks fundamental questions about film, aesthetics, and ideology. It argues for the utopian potential of the materiality of cinematic time to imagine a new political and cultural organization for Europe.

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Postcards from the Baja California Border

Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s

Daniel D. Arreola

University of Arizona Press, 2021

Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.

This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.

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Precarious Motherhood

Navigating Relationships and Support Post-Migration in the UK

Rachel Benchekroun

University College London, 2025

When the state withdraws support, migrant mothers build their own safety nets—a look at the strategies and struggles of those raising children under immigration insecurity.

Precarious Motherhood is a deeply human investigation of the lives of racially minoritized mothers as they navigate the intersecting challenges of financial hardship and the UK’s hostile immigration policies. Based on thorough ethnographic research, Rachel Benchekroun examines how these mothers forge relationships to access support, maintain their children’s well-being, and carve out spaces of belonging in an often unwelcoming system. The book captures the resilience and the relentless precarity of motherhood in migration, where every relationship shapes social barriers and everyday survival.

Through the voices of over twenty migrant mothers, this work sheds light on the personal and political dimensions of motherhood. It provides critical insights into state policies and social infrastructures that shape migrant lives, making it a valuable resource for scholars of migration and social justice.

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Precarious Privilege

Race and the Middle-Class Immigrant Experience

Irene Browne

Russell Sage Foundation, 2024

In recent years crackdowns on immigrant labor and a shrinking job market in California, Arizona, and Texas have pushed Latine immigrants to new destinations, particularly places in the American South. Although many of these immigrants work in manufacturing or food-processing plants, a growing number belong to the professional middle class. These professionals find that despite their privileged social class and regardless of their national origin, many non-Latines assume that they are undocumented working-class Mexicans, the stereotype of the “typical Latine.” In Precarious Privilege, sociologist Irene Browne focuses on how first-generation middle-class Mexican and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta respond to this stigmatizing assumption.

Browne finds that when asked to identify themselves by race, these immigrants either reject racial identities entirely or draw on belief systems from Mexico and the Dominican Republic that emphasize European-indigenous mixed race identities. When branded as typical Latines in the U.S., Mexican middle-class immigrants emphasize their social class or explain that a typical Latine can be middle-class, while Dominicans simply indicate that they are not Mexican. Rather than blame systemic racism, both Mexican and Dominican middle-class immigrants often attribute misperceptions of their identity to non-Latines’ ignorance or to individual Latines’ lack of effort in trying to assimilate.

But these middle-class Latine immigrants do not simply seek to position themselves on par with the U.S.-born white middle class. Instead, they leverage their cosmopolitanism—for example, their multilingualism or their children’s experiences traveling abroad—to engage in what Browne calls “one-up assimilation,” a strategy that aims to position them above the white middle class, who are often monolingual and unaware of the world outside the United States. Middle-class Latines’ cosmopolitanism and valuing of diversity also lead them to have cordial relations with African Americans, but these immigrants do not see themselves as sharing African Americans’ status as oppressed minorities.

Although the stereotype of the typical Latine has made middle-class Latine immigrants susceptible to stigma, they insist that this stigma does not play a significant role in their lives. In many cases, they view the stereotype as a minor issue, feel that opportunities for upward mobility outweigh any negative experiences, or downplay racism by emphasizing their class privilege. Browne observes that while downplaying racism may help middle-class Latine immigrants maintain their dignity, it also perpetuates inequality by reinforcing the lower status of working-class undocumented immigrants. It is thus imperative, Browne argues, to repeal harsh anti-immigration policies, a move that will not only ease the lives of the undocumented but also send a message about who belongs in the country.
Offering a nuanced exploration of how race, social class, and immigration status intersect, Precarious Privilege provides a complex portrait of middle-class Latine immigrants in the United States today.

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Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Catherine S. Ramírez

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.

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Public Loves, Private Troubles

Migration, Technology, and Intimacy in Rural Indigenous Guatemala

Meghan Farley Webb

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Examines the role of digital technologies in the lives of Kaqchikel Maya women whose husbands work abroad.

Anthropologist Meghan Farley Webb’s ethnography, Public Loves, Private Troubles, uses the lens of cellphones and other digital technologies to unpack marriage, love, sexuality, and family issues of Kaqchikel Maya women who remain in Guatemala while their husbands are part of the transnational migration workforce. Indigenous intimacy has been underexplored in ethnographic literature, and this is among the first books to focus on information technology's impact on intimacy and family in the Maya area. Overall, Webb shows how Maya women are empowered with their more autonomous lives when the husbands are absent but also are constrained by social media monitoring of their activities.

To begin, Webb surveys the Tecpán highland setting and civil war and migration history. She discusses how neoliberal policies are manifested in the financial and emotional stress of having to leave for the United States for economic opportunities. Chapter 1 characterizes the lives of Maya women in Guatemala who “endure” while their husbands are working abroad. Webb describes how marriage, family, and even the Catholic Church shape how the women see themselves and their situations. Chapter 2 delves into the history and use of technologies, such as cellphones and WhatsApp, and how they affect communication in these transnational households. Insight is given to the family and personhood. Chapter 3 focuses on the prominent use of the Facebook platform. Men use the app to conduct extramarital affairs, but the app is also used by couples as a way to express a public performance of devotion and a happy family. Chapter 4 focuses on the surveillance, including malicious gossip, that Kaqchikel women are subjected to especially from their mothers-in-law, who live nearby or in the same household. The narrative culminates in a discussion of how many wives are happier and more empowered without the men at home, yet they still can experience uncertainty, loneliness, and depression.

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