Results by title
542 books match the query 'Emigration and immigration' and 14 start with w
Waiting On Washington
Central American Workers in the Nation's CapitalTerry A. Repak
Temple University Press, 1995
In an analysis of recent immigration patterns in Washington, D.C., Terry A. Repak documents the unusual predominance of women among Central American immigrants. Two thirds of the arriving immigrants in earlier decades have been women, many of them recruited by international diplomats and U.S. government employees to work as housekeepers and nannies. Repak considers the labor force participation patterns for women compared to men, the effect of immigration laws—particularly the IRCA's uneven impact on women versus men—and the profound adjustments in gender roles and identities that accompany migration.
Showing an extraordinary amount of autonomy, most of these immigrant women decided to migrate without consulting either fathers or partners, and they gained even greater independence once settled. Repak plots the career trajectories of numerous Central American immigrant women and men to illustrate the array of the women's responses, gender differences in the migration and assimilation experience, the availability of work, and the possibility for upward mobility and higher wages. Providing social, economic and political context, she looks at the conditions that set the stage for this migration, including the rapid expansion of service jobs in the 1960s and 1970s in Washington, D. C. and the political strife in such Central American countries as war-torn El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
Walking Together
Central Americans and Transit Migration Through MexicoAlejandra Díaz de León
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Migrants in transit form several types of social networks, develop trust, and engage in acts of solidarity. The need to be recognized and grieved, compounded by the practical use of pooling information and resources, leads migrants to form small, strong groups called road families. Through the generalized sharing of information and small items such as food and blankets, migrants also form a transient community that includes everyone on the road at the same time. Sociologist Alejandra Díaz de León shows the trajectories of families that left together, showing, surprisingly, that families might not be the best social arrangement in transit.
Drawing on multisited research, this work contributes to debates on the role of social networks in clandestine migration processes and to discussions on how people create social networks and trust under violent and stressful situations. The detailed ethnographic narratives and accessible writing weave together theory with empirical observations to highlight and humanize the migrant experience.
Sitting at the intersection of border studies, immigration studies, and Latinx studies, this concise volume shows how Central American migrants in transit through Mexico survive the precarious and unpredictable road by forming different types of social ties.
Walled
Barriers, Migration, and Resistance in the U.S.-Mexico BorderlandsEdited by Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet
University of Arizona Press, 2025
From the bustling San Diego–Tijuana region to the borderlands of Brownsville-Matamoros, the U.S.-Mexico border is marked by extensive stretches of walls. Over the past thirty years, these walls have evolved from purely physical barriers into multifaceted systems encompassing administrative, legal, legislative, and biometric components. This volume invites readers to reflect on the transformations of the border since the construction of the initial fourteen miles of wall, and the subsequent addition of 1,940 miles. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the border’s evolution, and its profound and lasting impacts.
Bringing together recognized scholars in border studies, Walled delves into the varied manifestations and lived experiences associated with U.S.-Mexico border walls. The introduction by Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet offers a thorough review of the border walls’ thirty-year history, placing it within a global context. Contributions offer diverse perspectives of the border experience, from state policies and migrant experiences to the daily lives of border residents. Topics such as militarization, migration, artistic resistance, and humanitarian aid are carefully examined. This volume is an essential resource for policymakers, activists, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand the intricate realities of border communities and the far-reaching consequences of border policies.
Contributors
Susana Báez-Ayala
Andréanne Bissonnette
Mathilde Bourgeon
Silvia M. Chávez-Baray
Irasema Coronado
Thalia D’Aragon-Giguère
Erin Hoekstra
Anthony Jimenez
T. Mark Montoya
Eva M. Moya
Scott Nicol
Héctor Antonio Padilla Delgado
Lisa Sun-Hee Park
Tony Payan
Patricia Ravelo-Blancas
David A. Shirk
Allyson Teague
Élisabeth Vallet
We Are Not Dreamers
Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United StatesLeisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Contributors. Leisy J. Abrego, Gabrielle Cabrera, Gabriela Garcia Cruz, Lucía León, Katy Joseline Maldonado Dominguez, Grecia Mondragón, Gabriela Monico, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, Maria Liliana Ramirez, Joel Sati, Audrey Silvestre, Carolina Valdivia
Welcoming New Americans?
Local Governments and Immigrant IncorporationAbigail Fisher Williamson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Abigail Fisher Williamson explores why and how local governments across the country are taking steps to accommodate immigrants, sometimes despite serious political opposition. Drawing on case studies of four new immigrant destinations—Lewiston, Maine; Wausau, Wisconsin; Elgin, Illinois; and Yakima, Washington—as well as a national survey of local government officials, she finds that local capacity and immigrant visibility influence whether local governments take action to respond to immigrants. State and federal policies and national political rhetoric shape officials’ framing of immigrants, thereby influencing how municipalities respond. Despite the devolution of federal immigration enforcement and the increasingly polarized national debate, local officials face on balance distinct legal and economic incentives to welcome immigrants that the public does not necessarily share. Officials’ efforts to promote incorporation can therefore result in backlash unless they carefully attend to both aiding immigrants and increasing public acceptance. Bringing her findings into the present, Williamson takes up the question of whether the current trend toward accommodation will continue given Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and changes in federal immigration policy.
Western Journeys
Teow Lim Goh
University of Utah Press, 2022
In Western Journeys, Teow Lim Goh charts her journeys immigrating from Singapore and spending the last fifteen years living in and exploring the American West. Goh chronicles her lived experiences while building on the longer history of immigrants from Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing new insights to places, the historical record, and memory. These vital essays consider how we access truth in the face of erasure. In exploring history, nature, politics, and art, Goh asks, “What does it mean for an immigrant to be at home?”
Looking beyond the captivating landscapes of the American West, Goh uncovers stories of the Chinese people who came to America during the era of Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as the stories of the Indigenous peoples who have been written out of popular narratives, and various others. She examines the links between the transcontinental railroad, the cowboy myth, and the anti-Chinese prejudice that persists today. These essays explore the early efforts to climb Colorado’s highest peaks, the massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and the increasingly destructive fire seasons in the West. Goh’s essays create a complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory story of people and landscapes, a tapestry of answers and questions.
Wheeling's Polonia
Reconstructing Polish Community in a West Virginia Steel TownWilliam Hal Gorby
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Wheeling was a center of West Virginia’s labor movement, and Polish immigrants became a crucial element within the city’s active working-class culture. Arriving at what was also the center of the state’s Roman Catholic Diocese, Poles built religious and fraternal institutions to support new arrivals and to seek solace in times of economic strain and family hardship. The city’s history of crime and organized vice also affected new immigrants, who often lived in neighborhoods targeted for selective enforcement of Prohibition.
At once a deeply textured evocation of the city’s ethnic institutions and an engagement with larger questions about belonging, change, and justice, Wheeling’s Polonia is an inspiring account of a diverse working-class culture and the immigrants who built it.
When Friends Come From Afar
The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago's Chinese American Service LeagueSusan Blumberg-Kason
University of Illinois Press, 2024
At once intimate and broad in scope, When Friends Come from Afar uses one woman’s life to illuminate a bedrock Chicago institution.
Whose America?
U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980Edited by Maria Cristina Garcia and Maddalena Marinari
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Up-to-date yet rooted in history, Whose America? provides a sophisticated account of recent immigration policy while mapping the ideological struggle to answer an essential question: which people have the right to make America their home or refuge?
Contributors: Leisy Abrego, Carl Bon Tempo, Julio Capó, Jr., Carly Goodman, Julia Rose Kraut, Monique Laney, Carl Lindskoog, Yael Schacher, and Elliott Young
Why We Left
Untold Stories and Songs of America's First ImmigrantsJoanna Brooks
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
A grounded, tender, and mournful reckoning with the catastrophes that launched poor, white Anglos into their role as itinerant foot soldiers for modern imperialism—now in paperback with a new preface
Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. For generations, they lived hardscrabble lives, eking out subsistence in one place after another as they continually moved west in search of a better life. Why, Brooks wondered, did her people and countless other poor English subjects abandon their homeland for such unremitting hardship? The question leads her on a journey through an obscure dimension of American history.
Why We Left reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, presenting a powerful restorying of how we arrived at our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience, Brooks offers a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island.
She shares folk ballads such as “Edward,” which reveals the influence of deforestation on the dislocation of early Anglo-American peasant immigrants, and “The House Carpenter’s Wife,” which emphasizes the impact of economic instability and the colonial enterprise on women. From these ballads, tragic and heartrending, Brooks uncovers an archaeology of the worldviews of America’s earliest immigrants. This tenth-anniversary edition includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.
Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
A ReaderDenise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, eds.
Duke University Press, 2007
This reader includes twenty-three essays—two of which are translated from the Spanish—that illuminate women’s engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women’s fertility rates as “out of control.” Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women’s migration from rural areas to urban centers within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas’ commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Juárez. This rich collection highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.
Contributors. Ernestine Avila, Xóchitl Castañeda, Sylvia Chant, Leo R. Chavez, Cynthia Cranford, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Gloria González-López, Maria de la Luz Ibarra, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Eithne Luibheid, Victoria Malkin, Faranak Miraftab, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Norma Ojeda de la Peña, Deborah Paredez, Leslie Salzinger, Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel, Denise A. Segura, Laura Velasco Ortiz, Melissa W. Wright, Patricia Zavella
Words of Passage
National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican MigrantsBy Hilary Parsons Dick
University of Texas Press, 2018
Migration fundamentally shapes the processes of national belonging and socioeconomic mobility in Mexico—even for people who never migrate or who return home permanently. Discourse about migrants, both at the governmental level and among ordinary Mexicans as they envision their own or others’ lives in “El Norte,” generates generic images of migrants that range from hardworking family people to dangerous lawbreakers. These imagined lives have real consequences, however, because they help to determine who can claim the resources that facilitate economic mobility, which range from state-sponsored development programs to income earned in the North.
Words of Passage is the first full-length ethnography that examines the impact of migration from the perspective of people whose lives are affected by migration, but who do not themselves migrate. Hilary Parsons Dick situates her study in the small industrial city of Uriangato, in the state of Guanajuato. She analyzes the discourse that circulates in the community, from state-level pronouncements about what makes a “proper” Mexican to working-class people’s talk about migration. Dick shows how this migration discourse reflects upon and orders social worlds long before—and even without—actual movements beyond Mexico. As she listens to men and women trying to position themselves within the migration discourse and claim their rights as “proper” Mexicans, she demonstrates that migration is not the result of the failure of the Mexican state but rather an essential part of nation-state building.
Working the Boundaries
Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican ChicagoNicholas De Genova
Duke University Press, 2005
De Genova worked for two and a half years as a teacher of English in ten industrial workplaces (primarily metal-fabricating factories) throughout Chicago and its suburbs. In Working the Boundaries he draws on fieldwork conducted in these factories, in community centers, and in the homes and neighborhoods of Mexican migrants. He describes how the meaning of “Mexican” is refigured and racialized in relation to a U.S. social order dominated by a black-white binary. Delving into immigration law, he contends that immigration policies have worked over time to produce Mexicans as the U.S. nation-state’s iconic “illegal aliens.” He explains how the constant threat of deportation is used to keep Mexican workers in line. Working the Boundaries is a major contribution to theories of race and transnationalism and a scathing indictment of U.S. labor and citizenship policies.
World of Our Mothers
Mexican Revolution–Era Immigrants and Their StoriesMiguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel
University of Arizona Press, 2022
While the women share a historic immigration journey, each story provides unique details and circumstances that testify to the diversity of the immigrant experience. The oral histories, a project more than forty years in the making, let these women speak for themselves, while historical information is added to support and illuminate the women’s voices.
The book, which includes a foreword by Irasema Coronado, director of the School of Transborder Studies, and Chris Marin, professor emeritus, both at Arizona State University, is divided into four parts. Part 1 highlights the salient events of the Revolution; part 2 presents an overview of what immigrants inherited upon their arrival to the United States; part 3 identifies challenges faced by immigrant families; and part 4 focuses on stories by location—Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and Midwestern colonias—all communities that immigrant women helped create. The book concludes with ideas on how readers can examine their own family histories. Readers are invited to engage with one another to uncover alternative interpretations of the immigrant experience and through the process connect one generation with another.