Resurgent immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, and gender is one of the fundamental social categories anchoring and shaping immigration patterns. Yet the intersection of gender and immigration has received little attention in contemporary social science literature and immigration research. This book brings together some of the best work in this area, including essays by pioneers who have logged nearly two decades in the field of gender and immigration, and new empirical work by both young scholars and well-established social scientists bringing their substantial talents to this topic for the first time.

With large numbers of people migrating to other countries after World War II, a substantial amount of scholarship has focused on the status, problems, and successes of women immigrants since 1945. The first comprehensive compilation of the international literature on these women, this bibliography--with over 5,100 entries--reveals the breadth of scholarship on feminist immigration issues. Focusing particularly on sources from North America and Western Europe, where most immigrant women settled, the book includes feminist analyses, bibliographies, demographic studies, economic comparisons, educational research, health and medical reports, legal discussions, biographies and autobiographies, psychological case studies, religious reports, sociological investigations, and publications dealing with general aspects of female immigration. The book covers such legal issues as citizenship, international conventions on contract workers, the traffic in women, and services and government benefits to immigrants. Medical entries include such topics as female genital mutilation, comparative obstetric results, and equity of treatment. Education entries cover such subjects as adult education and the second-language programs necessary for assimilation. With entries in several languages, the bibliography includes books, journal articles, essays and chapters in books, dissertations, ERIC reports, national and international government documents, and statistical sources. With immigration a major political and social issue in most countries today, the book provides an important research tool.

"We were poor but we had everything we needed," reminisces Do?a Epifania. Nonetheless, when a man she knew told her about a job in Philadelphia, she grasped the opportunity to leave Coamas. "He went to Puerto Rico and told me there were beans to cook. I came here and cooked for fourteen workers." In San Lorenzo, Do?a Carmen and her husband made the same decision: "We didn't want to, nobody wanted to leave. . . . There wasn't any alternative." Don Florencio recalls that in Salinas work had gotten scarce, "especially for the youth, the young men. . . . The farmworker that was used to cutting cane, already the sugar cane was disappearing," and government licensing regulations made fishing "more difficult for the poor."Puerto Rican migration to the mainland following World War II took place for a range of reasons-globalization of the economy, the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, state policies, changes in regional and local economies, social networks, and, not least, the decisions made by individual immigrants. In this wide-ranging book, Carmen Whalen weaves them all into a tapestry of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.Like African Americans and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were recruited for low-wage jobs, only to confront racial discrimination as well as economic restructuring. As Whalen shows, they were part of that wave of newcomers who come from areas in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia characterized by a heavy U.S. military and economic presence, especially export processing zones, looking for a new life in depressed urban environments already populated by earlier labor migrants. But Puerto Rican immigration was also unique, especially in its regional and gender dimensions. Many migrants came as part of contract labor programs shaped by competing agendas.By the 1990s, economic conditions, government policies, and racial ideologies had transformed Puerto Rican labor migrants into what has been called "the other underclass." Professor Whalen analyzes this continuation of "culture of poverty" interpretations and contrasts it with the efforts of Philadelphia Puerto Ricans to recreate their communities and deal with the impact of economic restructuring and residential segregation in the City of Brotherly Love. Author note: Carmen Teresa Whalen is Assistant Professor of Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.

This interdisciplinary study--the first book-length study of Chicago's Puerto Rican community rooted not simply in contemporary ethnographic source material but also in extensive historical research--shows the varied ways Puerto Ricans came to understand their identities and rights within and beyond the city they made home.

The Latina/o population in the United States has become the largest minority group in the nation. Latinas/os are a mosaic of people, representing different nationalities and religions as well as different levels of education and income. This edited volume uses a multidisciplinary approach to document how Latinas and Latinos have changed and continue to change the face of America. It also includes critical methodological and theoretical information related to the study of the Latino/a population in the United States.

Attempts to do justice to the complexity of contemporary families and to situate them in their economic, political, and cultural contexts. This book explores the ways in which family life is gendered and reflects on the work of maintaining family and kin relationships, especially as social and family power structures change over time.