HIS 368 - Latinx Communities in the United States: Books

The Borders of Punishment: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Exclusion critically assesses the relationship between immigration control, citizenship, and criminal justice. It reflects on the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by mass mobility and its control and for the first time, sets out a particular sub-field within criminology, the criminology of mobility. Drawing together leading international scholars with newer researchers, the booksystematically outlines why criminology and criminal justice should pay more attention to issues of immigration and border control.Contributors consider how 'traditional' criminal justice institutions such as the criminal law, police, and prisons are being shaped and altered by immigration, as well as examining novel forms of penality (such as deportation and detention facilities), which have until now seldom featured in criminological studies and textbooks. In so doing, the book demonstrates that mobility and its control are matters that ought to be central to any understanding of the criminal justice system. Phenomenasuch as the controversial use of immigration law for the purposes of the war on terror, closed detention centres, deportation, and border policing, raise in new ways some of the fundamental and enduring questions of criminal justice and criminology: What is punishment? What is crime? What should bethe normative and legal foundation for criminalization, for police suspicion, for the exclusion from the community, and for the deprivation of freedom? And who is the subject of rights within a society and what is the relevance of citizenship to criminal justice?

Available for the first time in English, Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra's magisterial history of the foods and eating habits of Puerto Rico unfolds into an examination of Puerto Rican society from the Spanish conquest to the present. Each chapter is centered on an iconic Puerto Rican foodstuff, from rice and cornmeal to beans, roots, herbs, fish, and meat. Ortiz shows how their production and consumption connects with race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and cultural appropriation in Puerto Rico. Using a multidisciplinary approach and a sweeping array of sources, Ortiz asks whether Puerto Ricans really still are what they ate. Whether judging by a host of social and economic factors--or by the foods once eaten that have now disappeared--Ortiz concludes that the nature of daily life in Puerto Rico has experienced a sea change.

In The Broken Village, Daniel R. Reichman tells the story of a remote village in Honduras that transformed almost overnight from a sleepy coffee-growing community to a hotbed of undocumented migration to and from the United States.

This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa.

Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labor, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy. Dionicio Nodín Valdés examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farmworkers, and organized labor. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and César Chávez, and that the labor movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.

Latin America Confronts the United States offers a new perspective on US-Latin America relations. Drawing on research in six countries, the book examines how Latin American leaders are able to overcome power asymmetries to influence US foreign policy. The book provides in-depth explorations of key moments in post-World War II inter-American relations - foreign economic policy before the Alliance for Progress, the negotiation of the Panama Canal Treaties, the expansion of trade through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the growth of counternarcotics in Plan Colombia. The new evidence challenges earlier, US-centric explanations of these momentous events. Though differences in power were fundamental to each of these cases, relative weakness did not prevent Latin American leaders from aggressively pursuing their interests vis-à-vis the United States. Drawing on studies of foreign policy and international relations, the book examines how Latin American leaders achieved this influence - and why they sometimes failed.

"An adoption professional once told me, 'At its best, there is no adoption system as good as Guatemala's. At its worst, there is none worse.'"--from the foreword by Kevin Kreutner   In Between Light and Shadow veteran journalist Jacob Wheeler puts a human face on the Guatemalan adoption industry, which has exploited, embraced, and sincerely sought to improve the lives of the Central American nation's poorest children. Fourteen-year-old Ellie, abandoned at age seven and adopted by a middle-class family from Michigan, is at the center of this story. Wheeler re-creates the painful circumstances of Ellie's abandonment, her adoption and Americanization, her search for her birth mother, and her joyous and haunting return to Guatemala, where she finds her teenage brothers--unleashing a bond that transcends language and national borders.   Following Ellie's journey, Wheeler peels back the layers of an adoption economy that some view as an unscrupulous baby-selling industry that manipulates impoverished indigenous Guatemalan women, and others herald as the only chance for poor children to have a better life. Through Ellie, Wheeler allows us to see what all this means in personal and practical terms--and to understand how well-intentioned and sometimes humanitarian first-world wealth can collide with the extreme poverty, despair, misogyny, racism, and violent history of Guatemala.  

This book presents an overview of the major varieties of Spanish in the United States--the second most used language in the country, spoken by more than thirty-three million people. John Lipski traces the importance of the Spanish language in the United States, the scholarship that documents the variation and richness of the language as spoken here, and probes the phenomenon popularly called "Spanglish." He provides useful descriptions of the major varieties, from Cuban and Puerto Rican through Mexican and various Central American strains to the traditional varieties found in New Mexico and Louisiana that date back to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. Each profile contains a concise historical sketch of the background of each Spanish-speaking group, current demographic information, its sociolinguistic configurations, and information about the phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and interactions with English and other varieties of Spanish. This reference for teachers, scholars, students, and interested bystanders is a testimony to the vitality and legitimacy of the Spanish language in the United States. It will be of value in courses on Spanish in the United States, Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics, and teaching Spanish to heritage speakers.

The democratic hemisphere / Christa J. Olson -- A strange democracy : rhetoric, posthegemony, and Latinamericanism / José Cortez -- Draining the democracy : Donald J. Trump and anti-immigrant rhetoric / Alberto González, Amy N. Heuman, and Linsay M. Cramer -- Revisiting the seeming impossibility of migrants as political actors / René Agustín de los Santos -- American exceptionalism, baseball diplomacy, and the normalization of US-Cuban relations / Michael L. Butterworth -- Communicating about corruption: Guatemalan rhetorics of corruption / Adriana Angel -- Re/tracing the local grassroots women activists' crafting of rhetorical agency in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico / Clara Eugenia Rojas Blanco -- The peace agreement and the rhetoric of religion on the Colombian plebiscite : religious activism and democracy / Pamela Flores and Nancy R. Gómez -- People, media, and democracy in Brazil : discourses about Lula's oratory in the Brazilian press / Carlos Piovezani -- The farewell speech of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner / Alejandra Vitale -- Spectacular crisis : rhetorics of representation in Venezuela / Abraham Romney.

During the wars for independence in Spanish South America (1808-1826), thousands of slaves enlisted under the promise of personal freedom and, in some cases, freedom for other family members. Blacks were recruited by opposing sides in these conflicts and their loyalties rested with whomever they believed would emerge victorious. The prospect of freedom was worth risking one's life for, and wars against Spain presented unprecedented opportunities to attain it.Much hedging over the slavery issue continued, however, even after the patriots came to power. The prospect of abolition threatened existing political, economic, and social structures, and the new leaders would not encroach upon what were still considered the property rights of powerful slave owners. The patriots attacked the institution of slavery in their rhetoric, yet maintained the status quo in the new nations. It was not until a generation later that slavery would be declared illegal in all of Spain's former mainland colonies.Through extensive archival research, Blanchard assembles an accessible, comprehensive, and broadly based study to investigate this issue from the perspectives of Royalists, patriots, and slaves. He examines the wartime political, ideological, and social dynamics that led to slave recruitment, and the subsequent repercussions in the immediate postindependence era. Under the Flags of Freedom sheds new light on the vital contribution of slaves to the wars for Latin American independence, which, up until now, has been largely ignored in the histories and collective memories of these nations.

Red Hot Salsa is an extraordinary collection of bilingual poems from the bestselling editor of Cool Salsa i think in spanish i write in english i want to go back to puerto rico, but i wonder if my kink could live in ponce, mayagüez and carolina tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en spanglish abraham in español --from "My Graduation Speech," by Tato Laviera Ten years after the publication of the acclaimed Cool Salsa, editor Lori Marie Carlson has brought together a stunning variety of Latino poets for a long-awaited follow-up. Established and familiar names are joined by many new young voices, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos has written the Introduction. The poets collected here illuminate the difficulty of straddling cultures, languages, and identities. They celebrate food, family, love, and triumph. In English, Spanish, and poetic jumbles of both, they tell us who they are, where they are, and what their hopes are for the future.

This book features the American South, beyond black and white. 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 multi-disciplinary 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.