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Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible

The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them.

Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young. 

Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people. 

Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager whose hoop dreams include playing in the NBA. When a private high school in Texas recruits him under the guise of an athletic scholarship, he believes he’s one step closer. Instead, he becomes entangled in a system that exploits young Black athletes through the F-1 student visa program. In Basketball Trafficking, Javier Wallace follows Tito’s journey from international tournaments and high school to his near deportation, exposing the underbelly of the basketball pipeline that stretches across borders. Wallace situates Tito’s experience within a broader framework of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and the unchecked power of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and US immigration system. Tito’s story is more than a sports story—it is an urgent account of the policing and manipulation of Black male athletic labor for institutional profit. Prompting readers to consider how the global athletic industrial complex extracts and discards Black labor, Wallace demands that readers see young Black athletes like Tito not just as bodies for entertainment but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.

Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically—in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youth

Dreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex sociopolitical landscape to advocate for immigrant rights and empower undocumented youth to proudly represent their lives and identities, all while under the ever-present threat of detention and deportation. Contributing to rhetorical studies of social movements, immigration, and minoritized rhetorics, Ribero argues that even though Dreamer rhetorics were reflective of the discursive limits of the neoliberal milieu, they also worked to disrupt neoliberal constraints through activism that troubled the primacy of the nation-state and citizenship, refused to adhere to respectability politics, forwarded embodied identity and transnational belonging, and looked for liberation in community—not solely in legislative action.

Each chapter presents a different rhetorical situation within the US “crisis” of immigration and the rhetoric that Dreamers used to respond to it. Organized chronologically, the chapters document Dreamer activism during the Obama presidency, from the 2010 hunger strikes advocating for the DREAM Act to undocuqueer “artivism” responding to Trump’s presidential campaign. The author draws not only on the methods and theories of rhetorical studies but also on women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, critical theory, and queer theory. In this way, the book looks across disciplines to illustrate the rhetorical savvy of one of the most important US social movements of our time.
 

A gothic horror novel about the American Dream

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.

After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

Each year, a number of youth who migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States are apprehended, placed in removal proceedings, and designated as unaccompanied minors. These young migrants represent only a fraction of all unaccompanied minors in the US, yet they are in many ways depicted as a preeminent professional and moral cause by immigration advocates.

In and beyond the legal realm, the figure of the "vulnerable Chinese child" powerfully legitimates legal claims and attorneys' efforts. At the same time, the transnational ambitions and obligations of Chinese youth implicitly unsettle this figure. The maneuvers of these youth not only belie attorneys' reliance on racialized discourses of childhood and the Chinese family, but they also reveal more broad uncertainties around legal frameworks, institutional practices, health and labor rights—and cause lawyering itself.

Based on three years of fieldwork across the United States, Lawyering an Uncertain Cause is a novel study of the complex and often contradictory rights, responsibilities, and expectations that motivate global youth and the American attorneys who work on their behalf.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala began arriving without parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. In many cases, the parents had left for the United States years earlier to earn money that they could send back home. In Reunited sociologists Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks explain the reasons for Central American youths’ migration, describe the journey, and document how the young migrants experience separation from and subsequent reunification with their families.
 
In interviews with Central American youth, their sponsors, and social services practitioners in and around Washington, D.C., Castañeda and Jenks find that Central American minors migrate on their own mainly for three reasons: gang violence, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and a longing for family reunification. The authors note that youth who feel comfortable leaving and have feelings of belonging upon arrival integrate quickly and easily while those who experience trauma in their home countries and on their way to the United States face more challenges.
 
Castañeda and Jenks recount these young migrants’ journey from Central America to the U.S. border, detailing the youths’ difficulties passing through Mexico, proving to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials that they have a legitimate fear of returning or are victims of trafficking, and staying in shelters while their sponsorship, placement, and departure are arranged. The authors also describe the tensions the youth face when they reunite with family members they may view as strangers. Despite their biological, emotional, and financial bonds to these relatives, the youth must learn how to relate to new authority figures and decide whether or how to follow their rules.
 
The experience of migrating can have a lasting effect on the mental health of young migrants, Castañeda and Jenks note. Although the authors find that Central American youths’ mental health improves after migrating to the United States, the young migrants remain at risk of further problems. They are likely to have lived through traumatizing experiences that inhibit their integration. Difficulty integrating, in turn, creates new stressors that exacerbate PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Consequently, schools and social service organizations are critical, the authors argue, for enhancing youth migrants’ sense of belonging and their integration into their new communities. Bilingual programs, Spanish-speaking PTA groups, message boards, mentoring of immigrant children, and after-school programs for members of reunited families are all integral in supporting immigrant youth as they learn English, finish high school, apply to college, and find jobs.
 
Offering a complex exploration of youth migration and family reunification, Reunited provides a moving account of how young Central American migrants make the journey north and ultimately reintegrate with their families in the United States.