You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Recruiting the growing numbers of immigrants into union ranks is imperative for the besieged U.S. labor movement. Nowhere is this task more pressing than in California, where immigrants make up a quarter of the population and hold many of the manual jobs that were once key strongholds of organized labor. The first book to offer in-depth coverage of this timely topic, Organizing Immigrants analyzes the recent history of and prospects for union organizing among foreign-born workers in the nation's most populous state. Are foreign-born workers more or less receptive to unionization than their native-born counterparts? Are undocumented immigrants as likely as legal residents and naturalized citi...
Starting in the 1990s, San Francisco launched a series of bold but relatively unknown public policy experiments to improve wages and benefits for thousands of local workers. Since then, scholars have documented the effects of those policies on compensation, productivity, job creation, and health coverage. Opponents predicted a range of negative impacts, but the evidence tells a decidedly different tale. This book brings together that evidence for the first time, reviews it as a whole, and considers its lessons for local, state, and federal policymakers.
A century-long history of immigrant incarceration in the United States Today, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains an average of 37,000 migrants each night. To do so, they rely on, and pay for, the use of hundreds of local jails. But this is nothing new: the federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than 100 years. In The Migrant's Jail, Brianna Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it...
In North America industrial agriculture has now virtually displaced diversified family farming. The prevailing system depends heavily on labor supplied by migrants and immigrants, and its reliance on monoculture raises environmental concerns. In this book Jane Adams and contributors—anthropologists and political scientists among them—analyze the political dynamics that have transformed agriculture in the United States and Canada since the 1920s. The contributors demonstrate that people become politically active in arenas that range from the state to public discourse to relations between growers and their contractors or laborers, and that politics is a process that is intimately local as ...
Many indigenous Hawaiians who have moved to the islands' cities languish at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale and are thought to have lost their cultural roots. Initially apolitical urban Hawaiians were often skeptical of activists who sought to revitalize traditional ways; yet, as Karen L. Ito shows, Hawaiian women in particular continue to maintain and express crucial aspects of their cultural heritage in their lifestyle and interactions with others. Ito conducted intensive fieldwork with six Honolulu families, all of which shared the distinguishing characteristics of Hawaii's matrifocal society. In her close examination of the friendships and family relations among the women in these ...
In one of the first books devoted to the experience of Sudanese immigrants and exiles in the United States, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf places her community into context, showing its increasing historical and political significance. Abusharaf herself participates in many aspects of life in the migrant community and in the Sudan in ways that a non-Sudanese could not. Attending religious events, social gatherings, and meetings, Abusharaf discovers that a national sense of common Sudanese identity emerges more strongly among immigrants in North America than it does at home. Sudanese immigrants use informal transatlantic networks to ease the immigration process, and act on the local level to help o...
When a nursing facility for AIDS patients is planned for a city neighborhood, residents might be expected to respond, "Not in my backyard." But, as Jane Balin recounts in A Neighborhood Divided, when that community is known for its racial and ethnic diversity and liberal attitudes, public reaction becomes less predictable and in many ways more important to comprehend.An ethnographer who spent two years talking with inhabitants of a progressive neighborhood facing this prospect, Jane Balin demonstrates that the controversy divided residents in surprising ways. She discovered that those most strongly opposed to the facility lived furthest away, that families with young children were evenly rep...
This collection of fascinating historical case studies reveals the remarkable inner workings of the modern food provisioning system and the complex web of institutions that move food from the farm to the dinner table.
St. Petersburg, Florida, has become virtually synonymous with retirement and old age. The city of green benches once courted its elderly population; now, however, it seeks to rejuvenate its image, to attract the young through urban revitalization. In this humane and sensitive book, Maria Vesperi, an anthropologist and journalist, looks at the realities of being old and poor in the rapidly changing downtown of St. Petersburg. Vesperi provides a complete and carefully observed picture of the elderly: the conditions of their_ lives, representative social programs created to provide for them, and their interaction with the city around them. The life of the old in St. Petersburg, she notes, is ch...
In this ethnography of Catholic religious practice in Fresno, California, David P. Sandell unveils ritualized storytelling that Mexican and Mexican American people of faith use to cope with racism and poverty associated with colonial, capitalist, and modern social conditions. Based on in-depth interviews and extensive field research conducted in 2000 and 2001, Sandell's work shows how people use story and religious ritual (including the Matachines dance, the Mass, the rosary, pilgrimage, and processions) to create a space in their lives free from oppression. These people give meaning to the expression "open your heart," the book argues, through ritual and stories, enabling them to engage the...