The Xaripu Community Across Borders

During the past three decades there have been many studies of transnational migration. Most of the scholarship has focused on one side of the border, one area of labor incorporation, one generation of migrants, and one gender. In this path-breaking book, Manuel Barajas presents the first cross-national, comparative study to examine a Mexican-origin community’s experience with international migration and transnationalism. He presents an extended case study of the Xaripu community, with home bases in both Xaripu, Michoacán, and Stockton, California, and elaborates how various forms of colonialism, institutional biases, and emergent forms of domination have shaped Xaripu labor migration, community formation, and family experiences across the Mexican/U.S. border for over a century. Of special interest are Barajas’s formal and informal interviews within the community, his examination of oral histories, and his participant observation in several locations. Barajas asks, What historical events have shaped the Xaripus’ migration experiences? How have Xaripus been incorporated into the U.S. labor market? How have national inequalities affected their ability to form a community across borders? And how have migration, settlement, and employment experiences affected the family, especially gender relationships, on both sides of the border?

Communities across Borders examines the many ways in which national, ethnic or religious groups, professions, businesses and cultures are becoming increasingly tangled together. It show how this entanglement is the result of the vast flows of people, meanings, goods and money that now migrate between countries and world regions. Now the effectiveness and significance of electronic technologies for interpersonal communication (including cyber-communities and the interconnectedness of the global world economy) simultaneously empowers even the poorest people to forge effective cultures stretching national borders, and compels many to do so to escape injustice and deprivation.

This expansive, four-volume ready-reference work offers critical coverage of contemporary issues that impact people of color in the United States, ranging from education and employment to health and wellness and immigration. People of Color in the United States: Contemporary Issues in Education, Work, Communities, Health, and Immigration examines a wide range of issues that affect people of color in America today, covering education, employment, health, and immigration. Edited by experts in the field, this set supplies current information that meets a variety of course standards in four volumes. Volume 1 covers education grades K–12 and higher education; volume 2 addresses employment, housing, family, and community; volume 3 examines health and wellness; and volume 4 covers immigration. The content will enable students to better understand the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities as well as current social issues and policy. The content is written to be accessible to a wide range of readers and to provide ready-reference content for courses in history, sociology, psychology, geography, and economics, as well as curricula that address immigration, urbanization and industrialization, and contemporary American society.

"Through first-person testimonies, this anthology demonstrates the transformative power of higher education and its impact on the working class"--Provided by publisher.

Focusing on what can be referred to as the ‘precarity-agency-migration nexus’, this comprehensive volume leverages the political, economic, and social dynamics of migration to better understand both deepening inequality and popular resistance. Drawing on rich ethnographic and interview-based studies of the United States and Latin America, the authors show how migrants are navigating and challenging conditions of insecurity and structures of power. Detailed case studies illuminate collective survival strategies along the migrant trail, efforts by nannies and dairy workers in the northeast United States to assert dignity and avoid deportation, strategies of reintegration used by deportees in Guatemala and Mexico, and grassroots organizing and public protest in California. In doing so they reveal varied moments of agency without presenting an overly idyllic picture or presuming limitless potential for change. Anchoring the study of migration in the opposition between precarity and agency, the authors thus provide a new window into the continuously unfolding relationship between national borders, global capitalism, and human freedom. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Studies middle class Mexican American families across three generations and their experiences of racism and assimilation.

Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities. This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.