The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina, Revised and Expanded Second Edition


Book Description

Now thoroughly updated and revised—with a new chapter on the Dreamer movement and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA)—this book offers North Carolinians a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, illuminating rather than enflaming debates on immigration. In the midst of a tumultuous political environment, North Carolina continues to feature significant in-migration of Mexicans and Latin Americans from both outside and inside the United States. Drawing on the voices of migrants as well as North Carolinians from communities affected by migration, Hannah Gill explains how larger social forces are causing demographic shifts, how the state is facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes, and how migrants experience the economic and social realities of their lives. Gill makes connections between our hometowns and the globalization of people, money, technology, and culture by shedding light on the many diverse North Carolina residents who are such a vital part of the state's population but are often unrecognized in many ways. This book is essential for everyone, including students and teachers, who wants to understand what is at stake for all parties and wants to work toward solutions.




The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina


Book Description

Over recent decades, the Southeast has become a new frontier for Latin American migration to and within the United States, and North Carolina has had one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the nation. Here, Hannah Gill offers North Carolinians f




The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina


Book Description

Over recent decades, the Southeast has become a new frontier for Latin American migration to and within the United States, and North Carolina has had one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the nation. Here, Hannah Gill offers North Carolinians from all walks of life a better understanding of their Latino neighbors, bringing light instead of heat to local and national debates on immigration. Exploring the larger social forces behind demographic shifts, Gill shows both how North Carolina communities are facing the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes and how migrants experience the economic and social realities of their new lives. Latinos are no longer just visitors to the state but are part of the inevitably changing, long-term makeup of its population. Today, emerging migrant communities and the integration of Latino populations remain salient issues as the U.S. Congress stands on the verge of formulating comprehensive immigration reform for the first time in nearly three decades. Gill makes connections between hometowns and the increasing globalization of people, money, technology, and culture by shedding light on the many diverse North Carolina residents who are highly visible yet, as she shows, invisible at the same time.




Global Connections & Local Receptions


Book Description

In recent decades, Latino immigration has transformed communities and cultures throughout the southeastern United States--and become the focus of a sometimes furious national debate. Global Connections and Local Receptions is one of the first books to provide an in-depth consideration of this profound demographic and social development. Examining Latino migration at the local, state, national, and binational levels, this book includes studies of southeastern locales and a statewide overview of Tennessee. Leading migration scholar Alejandro Portes offers a national analysis while Raul Delgado Wise provides a Mexican perspective on the migration issue and its policy implications for both the United States and Mexico. This collection contains a broad base of contributions from legal scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists. Readers will find demographic data charting trends in immigration, descriptions of organizing and of individual experiences, a quantitative comparison of new and old destinations, a critical history of U.S. immigration policy in recent decades, a report on access to housing and efforts to enact anti-immigrant laws, an assessment of how mass outmigration currently affects the national economy and communities in Mexico, analysis of the way dominant ideology frames black-brown relationships in southern labor markets, and a concluding essay with detailed recommendations for making U.S. immigration policy just and humane.




Latinos in the New South


Book Description

Latinos have emerged as one of the fastest-growing ethnic populations in the American South. A 'New South' is taking shape in a region where culture and class relations have traditionally been constructed along black-white divides and experience absorbing culturally or linguistically foreign immigrants has been limited. This book presents a multidisciplinary examination of the impacts and responses across the Southeastern United States to contemporary Latino immigration. The rapid and large-scale movement of Latinos into the region has challenged old precepts and forced Southerners to confront the impacts of globalization and transnationalism in their daily lives. Drawing on theoretical perspectives as well as empirical research, the work provides insights into the Latino experience in both urban and rural locales. Each chapter is centred on the nexus between the immigrants' experiences in settling and adapting to new lives in the American South and the construction of transformed social, economic, political and cultural spaces.




Latino Orlando


Book Description

Inside the experiences of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean Latino Orlando portrays the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants who have come to the Orlando metropolitan area from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. While much research on immigration focuses on urban destinations, Simone Delerme delves into a middle- and upper-class suburban context, highlighting the profound demographic and cultural transformation of an overlooked immigrant hub. Drawing on interviews, observations, fieldwork, census data, and traditional and new media, Delerme reveals the important role of real estate developers in attracting Puerto Ricans—some of the first Spanish-speaking immigrants in the region—to Central Florida in the 1970s. She traces how language became a way of racializing and segregating Latino communities, leading to the growth of suburban ethnic enclaves. She documents not only the tensions between Latinos and non-Latinos, but also the class-based distinctions that cause dissent within the Latino population. Arguing that Latino migrants are complicating racial categorizations and challenging the deep-rooted Black-white binary that has long prevailed in the American South, Latino Orlando breaks down stereotypes of neighborhood decline and urban poverty and illustrates the diversity of Latinos in the region. A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller




Latino City


Book Description

Latino City explores the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts, into New England's first Latino-majority city. Like many industrial cities, Lawrence entered a downward economic spiral in the decades after World War II due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. The arrival of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in the late twentieth century brought new life to the struggling city, but settling in Lawrence was fraught with challenges. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in the city. In this book, Llana Barber interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Latinos then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. For many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there was no "American Dream" awaiting them in Lawrence; instead, Latinos struggled to build lives for themselves in the ruins of industrial America.




Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South


Book Description

The Latino population in the South has more than doubled over the past decade. The mass migration of Latin Americans to the U.S. South has led to profound changes in the social, economic, and cultural life of the region and inaugurated a new era in southern history. This multidisciplinary collection of essays, written by U.S. and Mexican scholars, explores these transformations in rural, urban, and suburban areas of the South. Using a range of different methodologies and approaches, the contributors present in-depth analyses of how immigration from Mexico and Central and South America is changing the South and how immigrants are adapting to the southern context. Among the book’s central themes are the social and economic impact of immigration, the resulting shifts in regional culture, new racial dynamics, immigrant incorporation and place-making, and diverse southern responses to Latino newcomers. Various chapters explore ethnic and racial tensions among poultry workers in rural Mississippi and forestry workers in Alabama; the “Mexicanization” of the urban landscape in Dalton, Georgia; the costs and benefits of Latino labor in North Carolina; the challenges of living in transnational families; immigrant religious practice and community building in metropolitan Atlanta; and the creation of Latino spaces in rural and urban South Carolina and Georgia.




Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream


Book Description

In this immersive ethnography, Tony Tian-Ren Lin explores the reasons that Latin American immigrants across the United States are increasingly drawn to Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism, a strand of Protestantism gaining popularity around the world. Lin contends that Latinos embrace Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that believers may achieve both divine salvation and worldly success, because it helps them account for the contradictions of their lives as immigrants. Weaving together his informants' firsthand accounts of their religious experiences and everyday lives, Lin offers poignant insight into how they see their faith transforming them both as individuals and as communities. The theology fuses salvation with material goods so that as these immigrants pursue spiritual rewards they are also, perhaps paradoxically, striving for the American dream. But after all, Lin observes, prosperity is the gospel of the American dream. In this way, while becoming better Prosperity Gospel Pentecostals they are also adopting traditional white American norms. Yet this is not a story of smooth assimilation as most of these immigrants must deal with the immensity of the broader cultural and political resistance to their actually becoming Americans. Rather, Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism gives Latinos the logic and understanding of themselves as those who belong in this country yet remain perpetual outsiders.




Scratching Out a Living


Book Description

"What does globalization look like in the rural South? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi's chicken processing communities and workplaces, where large numbers of Latin American migrants began arriving in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest paid jobs in the country. Based on six years of collaboration with a local workers' center, activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse explores how Black, white, and new Latino residents have experienced and understood these transformations. Illuminating connections between the area's long history of racial inequality, the poultry industry's growth, immigrants' contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers' prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future"--Provided by publisher.