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Co-editors Catherine S. Ramírez, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Juan Poblete, Steven C. McKay & Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship
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.
Fernando I. Leiva, The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile
In The Left Hand of Capital, Leiva provides a theoretically grounded analysis of the last thirty years of socioeconomic policies in Chile, beginning at the end of the Pinochet military regime in 1990. He skillfully probes how innovative center-left politico-economic initiatives transformed the state’s relationships with the country’s urban poor, indigenous peoples, workers, students, and business elites, thereby contributing to institutionalize, legitimize, and renew Chile’s neoliberal system of domination. Leiva documents how such politics, progressive in appearance, were pivotal in forging new arts of domestication, “participatory” social control mechanisms, and commodified subjectivities.
Catherine Ramírez, Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press)
Assimilation: An Alternative History explores the history of the concept of assimilation in the United States. A pillar of the US nation-making project, assimilation is widely regarded as an outcome of immigration: it is the process by which immigrants turn into Americans. Ramírez decouples immigration and assimilation and probes the gap between assimilation and citizenship to show how certain social groups that are not immigrants or that are not recognized as real or legitimate immigrants have been assimilated as racialized and subordinate subjects.
Lily Pearl Balloffet, Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford University Press)
Argentina in the Global Middle East connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through their shared links to global migration systems. By following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East, Balloffet sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity, migrant–homeland ties, and international relations. A companion website serves as an introduction to the geographies of human mobility that characterize this important piece of Argentine migration history.
Jeffrey Erbig, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (University of North Carolina Press)
Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (University of North Carolina Press) examines Indigenous responses to the largest imperial mapmaking expedition ever sent to the Americas, a Luso-Hispanic effort to create a border between Brazil and Spanish South America in the eighteenth century. Drawing upon archival research in more than two dozen archives in seven countries, Erbig demonstrates that interimperial border drawing was a response to Native sovereignty in such spaces, that Indigenous agents shaped where the border was drawn, and that afterward they appropriated it to their own purposes.
Jessica Taft, The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru's Movement of Working Children (NYU Press)
Since 1976, the Peruvian movement of working children has fought to redefine age-based roles in society, including defending children’s right to work. In The Kids Are in Charge, Taft gives us an inside look at this groundbreaking, intergenerational social movement, showing that kids can—and should be—respected as equal partners in economic, social, and political life.
Patricia Pinho, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press)
In Mapping Diaspora, Pinho traces the origins of roots tourism to the late 1970s, when groups of black intellectuals, artists, and activists found themselves drawn especially to Bahia, the state that in previous centuries had absorbed the largest number of enslaved Africans. African Americans have become frequent travelers across what Pinho calls the "map of Africanness" that connects diasporic communities and stimulates transnational solidarities while simultaneously exposing the unevenness of the black diaspora. Roots tourism, Pinho finds, is a fertile site to examine the tensions between racial and national identities as well as the gendered dimensions of travel, particularly when women are the major roots-seekers.
Sylvanna Falcón, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations (UW Press)
In Power Interrupted, WINNER of the 2016 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award, Sylvanna M. Falcón redirects the conversation about UN-based feminist activism toward UN forums on racism. Her analysis of UN antiracism spaces, in particular the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, considers how a race and gender intersectionality approach broadened opportunities for feminist organizing at the global level.
Cecilia Rivas, Salvadoran Imaginaries: Mediated Identities and Cultures of Consumption (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press)
Ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s, El Salvador has now emerged as a study in contradictions. It is a country where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now at peace but still grappling with a legacy of violence. It is a place marked by deep social divides, yet offering a surprising abundance of inclusive spaces. Above all, it is a nation without borders, as widespread emigration during the war has led Salvadorans to develop a truly transnational sense of identity.
Sylvanna Falcón, Dana Collins, Sharmila Lodhia, Molly Talcott, New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights
On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminists are at a critical juncture to re-envision and re-engage in a politics of human rights. Interdisciplinary feminist conversations among scholar-activists can both challenge and enrich new directions in feminism and human rights.
Patricia Pinho, Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press)
Often called the “most African” part of Brazil, the northeastern state of Bahia has the country’s largest Afro-descendant population and a black culture renowned for its vibrancy. In Mama Africa, Patricia de Santana Pinho examines the meanings of Africa in Bahian constructions of blackness. Combining insights from anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, Pinho considers how Afro-Bahian cultural groups, known as blocos afro, conceive of Africanness, blackness, and themselves in relation to both.
Jessica Taft, Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU Press)
From anti-war walkouts to anarchist youth newspapers, rallies against educational privatization, and workshops on fair trade, teenage girls are active participants and leaders in a variety of social movements. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas illuminates the experiences and perspectives of these uniquely positioned agents of social change.
Patricia Zavella, I'm Neither Here nor There: Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty (Duke University Press)
I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Patricia Zavella describes how poor and working-class Mexican Americans and migrants to California’s central coast struggle for agency amid the region’s deteriorating economic conditions and the rise of racial nativism in the United States.
Catherine Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press)
With their striking attire, pachucos and pachucas represented a new generation of Mexican American youth, which arrived on the public scene in the 1940s. Yet while pachucos have often been the subject of literature, visual art, and scholarship, The Woman in the Zoot Suit is the first book focused on pachucas.
Patricia Zavella and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Mexicans in California: Transformations and Challenges (UI Press)
Numbering over a third of California's population and thirteen percent of the U.S. population, people of Mexican ancestry represent a hugely complex group with a long history in the country. Contributors address a broad range of issues regarding California's ethnic Mexican population, including their concentration among the working poor and as day laborers; their participation in various sectors of the educational system; social problems such as domestic violence; their contributions to the arts, especially music; media stereotyping; and political alliances and alignments.
Gabriela Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916-1939 (UI Press)
Mexican Chicago builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of "American" and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Gabriela F. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago between 1916 and 1939 were not just another ethnic group working to be assimilated into a city that has a long history of incorporating newcomers.
Patricia Zavella and Denise A. Segura, Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader (Duke University Press)
This pathbreaking reader analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the “structural violence” that they confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived—all within the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices of the two countries.
Gabriela Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms (Duke Press)
Chicana Feminisms presents new essays on Chicana feminist thought by scholars, creative writers, and artists. This volume moves the field of Chicana feminist theory forward by examining feminist creative expression, the politics of representation, and the realities of Chicana life.
Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Anthropology of Contemporary Issues) (Cornell University Press)
Cornell University Press was recently awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make fifty-seven outstanding out-of-print humanities titles in anthropology, classics, political science, and literary criticism freely accessible to a global audience as ebooks. Women’s Work and Chicano Families (1987), has been selected for inclusion in the program.