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Kids at Work is the first book to look at the participation of child street vendors in the United States. The children portrayed in this book are the children of undocumented Latinx immigrants who are relegated to street vending because they lack opportunities to work in the formal sector of the economy. On the streets of Los Angeles, California, the children help their parents prepare and sell ethnic food from México and Central America, such as pozole, pupusas, tamales, champurrado, tacos, and tejuino. Shedding light on the experiences of children in this occupation highlights the complexities and nuances of family relations when children become economic co-contributors. This book captures a preindustrial form of family work life in a postindustrial urban setting where a new form of childhood emerges. Child street vendors experience a childhood period and family work relations that lies in the intersection of two polar views of childhood, which embodies a mutually protective and supportive aspect of the economic relationship between parent and child. This book is primarily based on the point of view of street vending children, and it is complemented with parent interviews and rich ethnographic fieldwork that humanizes their experience.

Born Out of Place focuses on the largely invisible and easily overlooked topic of babies born to migrant worker mothers. Such a focus brings to light the flaws and unintended consequences of migration laws and labor policies, the often poignant and painful experiences of migrant mothers, and the ambivalent roles of fathers. Within the context of contemporary global capitalism, this research yields a deeper and fuller understanding of the practical problems and the cruel disappointments faced by those who take part in “guest worker” programs. New insights about the problem—or the crisis—of temporary migration, which is too often not temporary, are revealed through ethnographic research that attends to the everyday lives and stories of migrant mothers and their Hong Kong–born babies. The book’s arguments are threefold. First, temporary migrant workers are never only workers. They are people too. But the women who dare to become mothers are often deemed not only bad workers, but also ungrateful or immoral women. Second, the laws and policies designed to enforce a rotating door for workers and to prevent overstaying and illegal work, often create the opposite results. Some women overstay and become pregnant, and many overstay because they are pregnant. Third, women who return home as “single mothers” face severe stigma and economic pressures that propel them to continue in a migratory cycle of atonement: an ongoing, self-perpetuating, precarious pattern of migration. Mothers and babies thus reveal the inequalities of citizenship and belonging and the precariousness of migrant labor.

How do the Japanese men and Chinese women who participate in cross-border matchmaking—individuals whose only interaction is often just one brief meeting—come to see one another as potential marriage partners? This book traces the practices of Sino-Japanese matchmaking from transnational marriage agencies in Tokyo to branch offices and language schools in China, from initial meetings to marriage, the visa application processes, and beyond to marital life in Japan. Engaging issues of colonial history, local norms, and the very ability to conceive of another or oneself as marriageable, the book rethinks cross-border marriage not only as a form of gendered migration, but also as a set of practices that constructs marriageable partners and imaginable marriages. The book shows that instead of desiring different others, these transnational marital relations are based on the tactical deployment of socially and historically created conceptions of proximity between Japan and northeast China. Far from seeking to escape local practices, participants in these marriages actively seek to avoid transgressing local norms. By doing so on a transnational scale, they paradoxically reaffirm and attempt to remain within the boundaries of local marital ideologies.