Browse

Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.

This book provides scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers with a comprehensive review of the most up-to-date social scientific literature on lethal and nonlethal forms of male-to-female violence during and after separation and divorce. Special attention is devoted to reviewing theoretical perspectives on the topic and the ways in which various technologies are used by men to hurt the women who want to leave them, have begun to emotionally separate, are trying to leave them, in the process of leaving them, or who have left them. This book also provides solutions that cover a broad range of approaches: legal and criminal justice reforms; social services; economic policies; feminist men’s efforts; and new electronic technologies. Throughout the book are the voices of women who have experienced much pain and suffering, as well as the voices of abusive men. These narratives are derived from extensive research done over the past thirty years by the three authors.

AIDS has been a devastating plague in much of sub-Saharan Africa, but the long-term implications for gender and sexuality are just emerging. This book tackles this issue head-on and examines how AIDS has altered the ways in which masculinity is lived in Uganda—a country known as Africa’s great AIDS success story. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research in an urban slum community called Bwaise, this book reveals the persistence of masculine privilege in the age of AIDS and the implications such privilege has for combating AIDS across the African continent.

This book explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the United States—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it's failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers' experiences before and after welfare reform, the author probes women's struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers. By offering a new way to understand how structural factors impact the daily experiences of poor women, the book highlights the pervasiveness of distrust in their lives, uncovering its hidden sources and documenting its most corrosive and paralyzing effects. The author's critique and conclusions hold powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike.

How do we explain the surprising trajectory of the Chinese Communist revolution? Why has it taken such a different route from its Russian prototype? An answer, Elizabeth Perry suggests, lies in the Chinese Communists’ creative development and deployment of cultural resources – during their revolutionary rise to power and afterwards. Skillful “cultural positioning” and “cultural patronage,” on the part of Mao Zedong, his comrades and successors, helped to construct a polity in which a once alien Communist system came to be accepted as familiarly “Chinese.” Perry traces this process through a case study of the Anyuan coal mine, a place where Mao and other early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party mobilized an influential labor movement at the beginning of their revolution, and whose history later became a touchstone of “political correctness” in the People’s Republic of China. Once known as “China’s Little Moscow,” Anyuan came over time to symbolize a distinctively Chinese revolutionary tradition. Yet the meanings of that tradition remain highly contested, as contemporary Chinese debate their revolutionary past in search of a new political future.

Appealing to Justice is an unprecedented study of disputing in prison and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. The authors gained unique access to California prisoners and correctional officers, as well as to thousands of prisoners’ grievances. Quoting extensively from these data, they give voice to those who are rarely heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms in the literature—for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable populations to launch disputes—and they do it with sometimes striking poignancy. The book is at once an empirically rich portrayal of legal mobilization and legal consciousness behind bars and a theoretically driven analysis of the conflicting logics underlying the contemporary U.S. prison system and the (post) civil rights society into which it is inserted. In their sweeping but concise analysis, the authors argue that the confluence of rights consciousness and the culture of punitive control—two of the defining logics of our age—has set in motion a seismic tension that is found in its most primal form in the contemporary prison and its internal grievance system. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system that is fraught with institutional and cultural dilemmas and that delivers neither justice nor efficiency nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, the book quickly turns its sights to the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. It relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.

This book reframes one of the most important, controversial, and misunderstood issues of our time in this far-reaching reassessment of the growing debate on black reparation. It shifts the focus of the issue from the backward-looking question of compensation for victims to a more forward-looking racial reconciliation. Offering a comprehensive discussion of the history of the black redress movement, the book puts forward a powerful new plan for repairing the damaged relationship between the federal government and black Americans in the aftermath of 240 years of slavery and another 100 years of government-sanctioned racial segregation. Key to the author's vision is the government's clear signal that it understands the magnitude of the atrocity it committed against an innocent people, that it takes full responsibility, and that it publicly requests forgiveness—in other words, that it apologizes. The government must make that apology believable, the author explains, by a tangible act which turns the rhetoric of apology into a meaningful, material reality; that is, by reparation. Apology and reparation together constitute atonement. Atonement, in turn, imposes a reciprocal civic obligation on black Americans to forgive, which allows them to start relinquishing racial resentment and to begin trusting the government's commitment to racial equality. The author's bold proposal situates the argument for reparations within a larger, international framework—namely, a post-Holocaust vision of government responsibility for genocide, slavery, apartheid, and similar acts of injustice. The book makes the case that only with this spirit of heightened morality, identity, egalitarianism, and restorative justice can genuine racial reconciliation take place in America.

This book is a forceful examination of how and why a state-level revolt against welfare, begun in the late 1940s, was transformed into a national-level assault that destroyed a critical part of the nation’s safety net, with tragic consequences for American society. With a wealth of original research, the book puts recent debates about the contemporary welfare backlash into an historical perspective. It provides a closer look at these early anti-welfare campaigns, showing why they were more successful in some states than others and how opponents of welfare sometimes targeted Puerto Ricans and Chicanos as well as blacks for cutbacks. The book’s research reveals both the continuities and changes in American welfare opposition from the late 1940s to the present. The book brings new evidence to light that reveals how large farmers and racist politicians, concerned about the supply of cheap labor, appealed to white voters’ racial resentments and stereotypes about unwed mothers, blacks, and immigrants in the 1950s. It then examines congressional failure to replace the current welfare system with a more popular alternative in the 1960s and 1970s, which paved the way for national assaults on welfare. Taking a fresh look at recent debates on welfare reform, the book explores how and why politicians competing for the white vote and right-wing think tanks promoting business interests appeased the Christian right and manufactured consent for cutbacks through a powerful, racially coded discourse. Finally, through firsthand testimonies, the book vividly portrays the tragic consequences of current welfare policies and calls for a bold new agenda for working families.

How toxic are the products we consume on a daily basis? Whether it’s triclosan in toothpaste, formaldehyde in baby shampoo, endocrine disruptors in water bottles, or pesticides on strawberries, consumers are increasingly concerned about the chemicals in their food and personal care products. Norah MacKendrick chronicles these concerns, showing how individuals attempt to avoid exposure to toxics in the aisles of the grocery store using a practice she calls “precautionary consumption.” Through an innovative analysis of the history of environmental regulation in the United States, the advocacy work of environmental health groups, the expansion of the corporate health food chain Whole Foods Market, and the words of a diverse group of mothers, MacKendrick ponders why the problem of toxics in the retail landscape has been left to individual shoppers—and to mothers in particular. She reveals how precautionary consumption is a costly and time-intensive practice, one that is connected to cultural ideas of femininity and good motherhood, but is also most available to upper- and middle-class households. Better Safe than Sorry powerfully argues that precautionary consumption places a large and unfair burden of labor on women, and does little to advance environmental justice.

More Than Just Black delves into the experiences of second generation Nigerian adults in the United States and Britain, examining how race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect their identities and assimilation trajectories. I pay particular attention to how their relations with their proximal hosts, African Americans in the United States and Black Caribbeans in Britain, affect how they identify. I conclude that the Nigerian second generation have more in common with fellow immigrants than they do with their proximal hosts. OR Focusing on questions of identity, More Than Just Black examines the nature of second generation Nigerians incorporation in the United States and Britain. I investigate how, in combination, race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect the identity formation process and assimilation trajectories of the adult second generation of Nigerian ancestry in both countries. I find that despite living in countries where people are categorized by race and where race and racial categorization still hold great social and political power, the Nigerian second generation in both countries are not defined through the prism of race. They have formed a nuanced identity that balances race, a Nigerian ethnicity (which includes an achievement orientation akin to “model minority” groups), a pan-African identity, and, depending on structure of national identity and perceptions of thoroughness in redressing past ethnoracial traumas, identification with the country of destination.

What do people think of when they hear about an African American Republican? Are they heroes fighting against the expectation that all blacks must vote democratic? Are they Uncle Toms or sellouts, serving as traitors to their race? What is it really like to be a black person in the Republican Party? This book considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles can be seen. And at the end, the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed is illuminated.

The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet there has been no systematic account of its construction. Boats, Borders, and Bases traces the rise of detention through Cold War efforts to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants from arriving in the United States by boat. Caribbean migration and deterrence efforts are related to much-better-known policies that have shaped the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This account situates both the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico boundary within maritime and territorial grounds of U.S. empire. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account brings together histories of refugee resettlement, asylum, and criminalization to explore the racialization and interrelations in these policies. The turn to criminalize migration in the 1980s built upon both domestic crime politics and efforts to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers. The location of detention facilities in relatively remote places is not determined by formal policy or proximity to international boundaries, but rather by the contingent outcome of political negotiations. Boats, Borders, and Bases shows how the location of migration detention commonly builds on prison and military geographies. The expansion of jails, prisons, and restructuring of military bases contributed to the expansion of migration detention space.

This book examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, the book moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.

Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. This book tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions—of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry—affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. Earlier work has described elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of “the other Asians” whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In this book we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that “Buddha is hiding”.

What will California look like by the middle of the twenty-first century? Change is occurring in the state at a breathtaking pace. It will face many extraordinary challenges. Yet today most Californians believe that their elected officials are unable to develop effective public policies. The book examines the powerful undercurrents — economic, demographic, and political — shaping California at this critical juncture in its history. It focuses on three trends that are profoundly affecting the social and political landscape of the state: political distrust, racial and ethnic change, and regional diversity. The book discusses the complexities of this situation and offers a series of substantive recommendations for how California can come to terms with the unprecedented challenges it faces.

Since the 1980s, a particular definition of the United States and the global economy as being “capitalist” has become hegemonic. In this view, a capitalist economy is autonomous and coherent, and it needs to be regulated by its own internal laws. This view is an illusion. The reality is that economies organized around the pursuit of private profit are contradictory, incoherent, and heavily intertwined with politics and governmental action. But the illusion remains hugely consequential, because it has been embraced by political and economic elites who are convinced that they are powerless to change this system. The reality is that the continuing vitality of the United States and the world economy requires a new period of major reforms on the scale of the New Deal and the building of new global institutions after World War II.

Caught Up follows the lives of 50 Latina girls in “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” community school located 40 miles outside of Los Angeles, CA. Their path through these two institutions reveals the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. For example, the connection between both of these sites is a concerted effort between Legacy Community School and El Valle administrators to provide young people with wraparound services. These well-intentioned services are designed to provide youth with support at home, at school and in the actual detention center. However, I argue that wraparound services more closely resemble a phenomenon that I call wraparound incarceration, where students cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention despite leaving the actual detention center. For young people in Legacy school, returning to El Valle became an unavoidable consequence of wraparound services.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. It provides an overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, the book looks closely at changes within families, including women's increasing participation in the work force. The book includes some surprising findings—for example, that per-person income has risen sharply among almost all social groups, even as income has become more unequally distributed. Looking toward the future, the book suggests that while rising inequality will likely be with us for many decades to come, it is not an inevitable outcome. This book considers what can be done to address this trend, and also explores the question: why should we be concerned about this phenomenon?

Chocolate Cities is built on a simple premise: our current maps of black life are wrong. As Malcolm X made clear in Detroit over a half century ago, the geography of the black American experience is best understood as existing within and across varying versions of “the South”—regional areas with distinct yet overlapping and similar patterns of racism, white domination, and oppression alongside place-inspired black strivings, customs, and aspirations for a better and more equal society. Chocolate Cities offers a new geography of the United States based on the lives, experiences, and histories of black Americans called “the Black Map.” Using both cultural sources (film, music, fiction, and plays) and more traditional academic data—U.S. decennial census data (1900–2010); oral histories; multiyear ethnography; photographs; national, state, and local health and wealth data and reports; and archives—this book maps and analyzes black life since Emancipation in America’s “chocolate cities”—cities, towns, neighborhoods, streets, and communities wherein black life and culture are concentrated, maintained, created, and defended.