The Cultural Politics Of Us Immigration

Download or read book The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration written by Leah Perry and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the immigration policies and popular culture of the 1980's fused to shape modern views on democracy In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcomed exclusively as laborers. In The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration, Leah Perry argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular media, such as Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca, Perry shows how even while “multicultural” immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between law and culture, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.

Download or read book Immigrant Acts written by Lisa Lowe and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Reproduction written by Maya Unnithan-Kumar and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charting the experiences of internally or externally migrant communities, the volume examines social transformation through the dynamic relationship between movement, reproduction, and health. The chapters examine how healthcare experiences of migrants are not only embedded in their own unique health worldviews, but also influenced by the history, policy, and politics of the wider state systems. The research among migrant communities an understanding of how ideas of reproduction and “cultures of health” travel, how healing, birth and care practices become a result of movement, and how health-related perceptions and reproductive experiences can define migrant belonging and identity.

Download or read book Migrant Imaginaries written by Alicia Schmidt Camacho and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-24 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2009 Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association 2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Explores the transnational movements of Mexican migrants, including their expressive culture and social movement practices Migrant Imaginaries explores the transnational movements of Mexican migrants in pursuit of labor and civil rights in the United States from the 1920s onward. Working through key historical moments such as the 1930s, the Chicano Movement, and contemporary globalization and neoliberalism, Alicia Schmidt Camacho examines the relationship between ethnic Mexican expressive culture and the practices sustaining migrant social movements. Combining sustained historical engagement with theoretical inquiries, she addresses how struggles for racial and gender equity, cross-border unity, and economic justice have defined the Mexican presence in the United States since 1910. Schmidt Camacho covers a range of archives and sources, including migrant testimonials and songs, Amrico Parede’s last published novel, The Shadow, the film Salt of the Earth, the foundational manifestos of El Movimiento, Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs, narratives by Marisela Norte and Rosario Sanmiguel, and testimonios of Mexican women workers and human rights activists, as well as significant ethnographic research. Throughout, she demonstrates how Mexicans and Mexican Americans imagined their communal ties across the border, and used those bonds to contest their noncitizen status. Migrant Imaginaries places migrants at the center of the hemisphere’s most pressing concerns, contending that border crossers have long been vital to social change.

Download or read book Walls and Mirrors written by David G. Gutiérrez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-03-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering more than one hundred years of American history, Walls and Mirrors examines the ways that continuous immigration from Mexico transformed—and continues to shape—the political, social, and cultural life of the American Southwest. Taking a fresh approach to one of the most divisive political issues of our time, David Gutiérrez explores the ways that nearly a century of steady immigration from Mexico has shaped ethnic politics in California and Texas, the two largest U.S. border states. Drawing on an extensive body of primary and secondary sources, Gutiérrez focuses on the complex ways that their pattern of immigration influenced Mexican Americans' sense of social and cultural identity—and, as a consequence, their politics. He challenges the most cherished American myths about U.S. immigration policy, pointing out that, contrary to rhetoric about "alien invasions," U.S. government and regional business interests have actively recruited Mexican and other foreign workers for over a century, thus helping to establish and perpetuate the flow of immigrants into the United States. In addition, Gutiérrez offers a new interpretation of the debate over assimilation and multiculturalism in American society. Rejecting the notion of the melting pot, he explores the ways that ethnic Mexicans have resisted assimilation and fought to create a cultural space for themselves in distinctive ethnic communities throughout the southwestern United States.

Download or read book Shaping Immigration News written by Rodney Benson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

Download or read book Debates on U.S. Immigration written by Judith Gans and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 1050 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This issues-based reference work (available in both print and electronic formats) shines a spotlight on immigration policy in the United States. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants. Yet while the lofty words enshrined with the Statue of Liberty stand as a source of national pride, the rhetoric and politics surrounding immigration policy all-too-often have proven far less lofty. In reality, the apparently open invitation of Lady Liberty seldom has been without restriction. Throughout our history, impassioned debates about the appropriate scope and nature of such restriction have emerged and mushroomed, among politicians, among scholars of public policy, among the general public. In light of the need to keep students, researchers, and other interested readers informed and up-to-date on status of U.S. immigration policy, this volume uses introductory essays followed by point/counterpoint articles to explore prominent and perennially important debates, providing readers with views on multiple sides of this complex issue. While there are some brief works looking at debates on immigration, as well as some general A-to-Z encyclopedias, we offer more in-depth coverage of a much wider range of themes and issues, thus providing the only fully comprehensive point/counterpoint handbook tackling the issues that political science, history, and sociology majors are asked to explore and to write about as students and that they will grapple with later as policy makers and citizens. Features & Benefits: The volume is divided into three sections, each with its own Section Editor: Labor & Economic Debates (Judith Gans), Social & Cultural Debates (Judith Gans), and Political & Legal Debates (Daniel Tichenor). Sections open with a Preface by the Section Editor to introduce the broad theme at hand and provide historical underpinnings. Each section holds 12 chapters addressing varied aspects of the broad theme of the section. Chapters open with an objective, lead-in piece (or "headnote") followed by a point article and a counterpoint article. All pieces (headnote, point article, counterpoint article) are signed. For each chapter, students are referred to further readings, data sources, and other resources as a jumping-off spot for further research and more in-depth exploration. Finally, volume concludes with a comprehensive index, and the electronic version includes search-and-browse features, as well as the ability to link to further readings cited within chapters should they be available to the library in electronic format.