Fragmented Ties


Book Description

In one of the most comprehensive treatments of Salvadoran immigration to date, Cecilia Menjívar gives a vivid and detailed account of the inner workings of the networks by which immigrants leave their homes in Central America to start new lives in the Mission District of San Francisco. Menjívar traces crucial aspects of the immigrant experience, from reasons for leaving El Salvador, to the long and perilous journey through Mexico, to the difficulty of finding work, housing, and daily necessities in San Francisco. Fragmented Ties argues that hostile immigration policies, shrinking economic opportunities, and a resource-poor community make assistance conditional and uneven, deflating expectations both on the part of the new immigrants and the relatives who preceded them. In contrast to most studies of immigrant life that identify networks as viable sources of assistance, this one focuses on a case in which poverty makes it difficult for immigrants to accumulate enough resources to help each other. Menjívar also examines how class, gender, and age affect immigrants' access to social networks and scarce community resources. The immigrants' voices are stirring and distinctive: they describe the dangers they face both during the journey and once they arrive, and bring to life the disappointments and joys that they experience in their daily struggle to survive in their adopted community.




Between Two Islands


Book Description

"This is the best available single-volume treatment of the causes and consequences of Dominican migration to and from the 'two islands' ... Without a doubt, this book represents by far the best study to date of Dominican immigration to New York, and it will become not only the definitive statement on the topic for some time to come but also a work of great comparative value for contemporary theory and research on the immigration and incorporation of newcomers to the United States." Ruben G. Rumbaut, San Diego State University.




We Thought It Would Be Heaven


Book Description

Resettled refugees in America face a land of daunting obstacles where small things--one person, one encounter--can make all the difference in getting ahead or falling behind. Fleeing war and violence, many refugees dream that moving to the United States will be like going to Heaven. Instead, they enter a deeply unequal American society, often at the bottom. Through the lived experiences of families resettled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau reveal how a daunting obstacle course of agencies and services can drastically alter refugees' experiences building a new life in America. In these stories of struggle and hope, as one volunteer said, "you see the American story." For some families, minor mistakes create catastrophes--food stamps cut off, educational opportunities missed, benefits lost. Other families, with the help of volunteers and social supports, escape these traps and take steps toward reaching their dreams. Engaging and eye-opening, We Thought It Would Be Heaven brings readers into the daily lives of Congolese refugees and offers guidance for how activists, workers, and policymakers can help refugee families thrive.




New Social Ties


Book Description

Deborah Chambers draws on the metaphor of friendship as a strategy for exploring contemporary changes in informal social ties. She traces the shift from fixed and permanent ties of family, neighbourhood and community to fluid and transient ties typified by computer mediated communication.




Literature as History


Book Description

Literature as History represents a unique way to rethink history. Mario T. García, a leader in the field of Chicano history and one of the foremost historians of his generation, explores how Chicano historians can use Chicano and Latino literature as important historical sources.




Border Culture


Book Description

The border between the United States and Mexico, despite attempts at containment, remains a vast and uniquely malleable yet indefinable region. With Border Culture, Ilan Stavans has collected essays representative of the tangled experiences and issues central to life between cultures. Divided into two sections, Border Culture covers topics essential to better understanding this often misunderstood region and state-of-mind. The first section, "Considerations," culls essays covering socio-economic and political topics illustrating the hyper reality of life and living on La Frontera. Section two, "Testimonios," takes careful consideration of lives affected by the border, either as a finite place, alternate universe, or the framework of the border as a state-of-mind, through various historic and literary accounts of La Frontera. This enlightening and comprehensive collection will no doubt help readers better understand border culture.




The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis


Book Description

This new edition of The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis builds on the success of its predecessor, offering a comprehensive overview of social network analysis produced by leading international scholars in the field. Brand new chapters provide both significant updates to topics covered in the first edition, as well as discussing cutting edge topics that have developed since, including new chapters on: · General issues such as social categories and computational social science; · Applications in contexts such as environmental policy, gender, ethnicity, cognition and social media and digital networks; · Concepts and methods such as centrality, blockmodeling, multilevel network analysis, spatial analysis, data collection, and beyond. By providing authoritative accounts of the history, theories and methodology of various disciplines and topics, the second edition of The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis is designed to provide a state-of-the-art presentation of classic and contemporary views, and to lay the foundations for the further development of the area. PART 1: GENERAL ISSUES PART 2: APPLICATIONS PART 3: CONCEPTS AND METHODS




The Invisibility Bargain


Book Description

Migrants fleeing economic hardship or violence are entitled to a range of protections and rights under domestic and international law, yet they are often denied such protections in practice. In an era of mass migration and restrictive responses, migrant acceptance is often contingent on the expectation that they contribute economically to the host country while remaining politically and socially invisible. These unwritten expectations, which Jeffrey D. Pugh calls the "invisibility bargain", produce a precarious status in which migrants' visible differences or overt political demands on the state may be met with hostile backlash from the host society. In this context, governance networks of state and non-state actors form an institutional web that can provide indirect access to rights, resources, and protection, but simultaneously help migrants avoid negative backlash against visible political activism. The Invisibility Bargain seeks to understand how migrants negotiate their place in receiving societies and adapt innovative strategies to integrate, participate, and access protection. Specifically, the book examines Ecuador, the largest recipient of refugees in Latin America, and assesses how it achieved migrant human security gains despite weak state presence in peripheral areas. Pugh deploys evidence from 15 months of fieldwork spanning ten years in Ecuador, including 170 interviews, an original survey of Colombian migrants in six provinces, network analysis, and discourse analysis of hundreds of presidential speeches and news media articles. He argues that localities with more dense networks composed of more diverse actors tend to produce greater human security for migrants and their neighbors. The book challenges the conventional understanding of migration and security, providing a new approach to the negotiation of authority between state and society. By examining the informal pathways to human security, Pugh dismantles the false dichotomy between international and national politics, and exposes the micro politics of institutional innovation.




The Promise of Youth Anti-Citizenship


Book Description

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us? The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order. The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism. Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.




How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands


Book Description

How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands examines the range of economic, social, and cultural impacts immigrants have had, both knowingly and unknowingly, in their home countries. The book opens with overviews of the ways migrants become agents of homeland development. The essays that follow focus on the varied impacts immigrants have had in China, India, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Mozambique, and Turkey. One contributor examines the role Indians who worked in Silicon Valley played in shaping the structure, successes, and continued evolution of India's IT industry. Another traces how Salvadoran immigrants extend U.S. gangs and their brutal violence to El Salvador and neighboring countries. The tragic situation in Mozambique of economically desperate émigrés who travel to South Africa to work, contract HIV while there, and infect their wives upon their return is the subject of another essay. Taken together, the essays show the multiple ways countries are affected by immigration. Understanding these effects will provide a foundation for future policy reforms in ways that will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative effects of the current mobile world. Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye