According to the Latina health paradox, Mexican immigrant women have less complicated pregnancies and more favorable birth outcomes than many other groups, in spite of socioeconomic disadvantage. Alyshia Gálvez provides an ethnographic examination of this paradox. What are the ways that Mexican immigrant women care for themselves during their pregnancies? How do they decide to leave behind some of the practices they bring with them on their pathways of migration in favor of biomedical approaches to pregnancy and childbirth? This book takes us from inside the halls of a busy metropolitan hospital’s public prenatal clinic to the Oaxaca and Puebla states in Mexico to look at the ways Mexican women manage their pregnancies. The mystery of the paradox lies perhaps not in the recipes Mexican-born women have for good perinatal health, but in the prenatal encounter in the United States. Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers is a migration story and a look at the ways that immigrants are received by our medical institutions and by our society

The stories of 18 immigrant families from East Harlem and their experiences with one of New York’s deeply-rooted organizations On any given weekday, people stream in and out of Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service’s bright, airy building on 115th Street. They are mostly mothers who find their way to LSA, sometimes only weeks after crossing the border from Mexico, having heard of the support that las hermanitas (“the little sisters”) offer. Opening a window into the world of New York’s Spanish-speaking newcomers, Mutuality in El Barrio combines oral histories with archival research of the history, spirituality, and ministry of LSA to present how this well-established organization serves vulnerable populations with a unique approach they call “mutuality.” LSA is part of a network of East Harlem’s powerful grassroots organizations that draws from the remarkable strengths of local families in its community. It is a place of healing and empowerment focused on the overall holistic health of resident families. Long-term relationships are cultivated here rather than quick fixes, and it is a place that nurtures people’s full potential as leaders, parents, and advocates for themselves. In Mutuality in El Barrio, eighteen mothers share how, through the help of LSA, they managed to navigate a strange city and an unfamiliar language in a neighborhood that has long been a site of incredible challenges and extraordinary strength, creativity, and cultural vitality. These personal accounts of mothers, long-time LSA staff, and nuns reveal how these women found solidarity, accompaniment, care, neighborhood transformation, and binding connections through mutuality that helped them grow and connect in East Harlem. Their stories shine a light on an organization that began as a small community of vowed nuns who, like these mothers, also trace their origins abroad.

Mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have in recent decades produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. In migrant-receiving countries, this has raised questions about extending rights to newcomers. In migrant-sending countries, it has prompted states to search for new ways to include their emigrant citizens into the nation state. This book situates new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship, and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them, in a broader political–economic context. It shows how the ability of people to act as transnational citizens is mediated by inequalities along the axes of gender, race, nationality and class, both in and between source and destination countries, resulting in a plethora of possible relations between states and migrants. The volume provides cross-disciplinary and theoretically engaging discussions, as well as empirically diverse case studies from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that have been transformed into ‘emigrant states’ in recent years, offering new concepts and theory for the study of transnational citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

An eye-opening, unapologetic explanation of what "racial profiling" is in modern-day America: systematic targeting of communities and placing of suspicion on populations, on the basis of not only ethnicity but also certain places that are linked to the social identity of that group. In 21st-century, post–civil rights era America, "race" has become complex and intersectional. It is no longer simply a matter of color—black versus white—contends author D. Marvin Jones, but equally a matter of space or "geographies of fear," which he defines as spaces in which different groups are particularly vulnerable to stereotyping by law enforcement: blacks in the urban ghetto, Mexicans at the functional equivalent of the border, Arabs at the airport. Dangerous Spaces: Beyond the Racial Profile demonstrates how society has constructed a set of threat narratives in which certain widespread problems—immigration, drugs, gangs, and terrorism, for example—have been racialized and explains the historical and social origins of these racializing threat narratives. The book identifies how these narratives have led directly to relentless profiling that results in arrest, deportation, massive surveillance, or even death for members of suspect populations. Readers will come to understand how the problem of profiling is not merely a problem of institutional bias and individual decision making, but also a deeply rooted cultural issue stemming from the processes of meaning-making and identity construction.

This two-volume reference work addresses the dynamic lives of undocumented immigrants in the United States and establishes these individuals' experiences as a key part of our nation's demographic and sociological evolution. This two-volume work supplies accessible and comprehensive coverage of this complex subject by consolidating the insights of hundreds of scholars who have studied the issues of undocumented immigration in the United States for years. It provides a historical perspective that underscores the exponential growth of the undocumented population in the last three decades and presents a more nuanced, more detailed, and therefore more accurate portrait of undocumented immigrants than is available in general media. Also included are recommended resources that will serve researchers seeking more information on topics regarding undocumented immigrants.

Expanding the social justice discourse surrounding "reproductive rights" to include issues of environmental justice, incarceration, poverty, disability, and more, this crucial anthology explores the practical applications for activist thought migrating from the community into the academy. Radical Reproductive Justice assembles two decades’ of work initiated by SisterSong Women of Color Health Collective, creators of the human rights-based “reproductive justice” framework to move beyond polarized pro-choice/pro-life debates. Rooted in Black feminism and built on intersecting identities, this revolutionary framework asserts a woman's right to have children, to not have children, and to parent and provide for the children they have. "The book is as revolutionary and revelatory as it is vast." —Rewire

Reveals the impossible choices and downright terror mixed-status families often face for their loved ones Living in a mixed-status immigrant family might mean that your grandmother could be deported at any moment, your son could be arrested at work, or your mother’s deportation hearing is postponed—again. Such uncertainty and fear are the reality of life for mixed-status families—those that include both undocumented immigrants and US citizens. In Contested Americans, Cassaundra Rodriguez explores how members of mixed-status families experience and articulate belonging in the United States. The sixteen million people in the US who fall under this classification share the fear of a family member’s possible deportation or the anxiety of leaving behind a child or elderly relative. Rodriguez highlights how different members of the same mixed-status families mediate undocumented statuses while maintaining the collective whole of a family. For many young adults, this may mean negotiating the sponsorship of their immigrant parents, and for the parents, planning for the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of their children in case of deportation. Contested Americans is a timely book, filled with vivid storytelling, that shows how immigration policies, racism, and privilege collide in the backdrop of the lives of millions of mixed-status families.

A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture explores the cultural and creative lives of the largely young undocumented Mexican population in New York City since September 11, 2001. Inspired by a dialogue between the landmark works of Paul Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldúa, it develops a new analytic framework, the Atlantic Borderlands, which bridges Mexican diasporic experiences in New York City and the black diaspora, not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are connected via capitalist economies and technological developments. This book is based on ten years of fieldwork in New York City, with members of a vibrant community of young Mexican migrants who coexist and interact with people from all over the world. It focuses on youth culture including hip hop, graffiti, muralism, labor activism, arts entrepreneurship and collective making.

While we have an incredible amount of statistical information about immigrants coming in and out of the United States, we know very little about how migrant families stay together and raise their children. Beyond the numbers, what are the everyday experiences of families with members on both sides of the border? Focusing on Mexican women who migrate to New York City and leave children behind, this book examines parenting from afar, as well as the ways in which separated siblings cope with different experiences across borders. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic research, Gabrielle Oliveira offers a unique look at the many consequences of maternal migration. Oliveira illuminates the life trajectories of separated siblings, including their divergent paths, and the everyday struggles that the undocumented mother may go through in order to be a good parent to all of her children, no matter where they live. Despite these efforts, the book uncovers the far-reaching effects of maternal migration that influence both the children who accompany their mothers to New York City, and those who remain in Mexico.

"This book--a story of social reproduction and change--illustrates how the larger ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valuable, and who is an American are worked out by young people through their everyday acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family. It uses the experiences of everyday high schoolers, some undocumented and some from families with mixed legal standing, to understand the roles that education and a broad definition of achievement play in shaping how young people, who are today the focus of xenophobic ire, come to understand their national identity and sense of belonging to the United States"--