Legal Violence and Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants

The Institute for the Study of Social Change presents:

Legal Violence and the Family Lives of Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants

Thursday, November 8, 12:00-1:30 pm

ISSC Conference Room, 2420 Bowditch Street (at Haste), Berkeley, CA

Cecilia Menjívar, Associate Professor of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University

with Ramón Grosfoguel, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, as respondent

This presentation will examine the effects of legal violence, created by federal immigration laws, local level ordinances, and special statuses that lead to liminal legality, on the lives of individuals and their families. The research is based on the experiences of Salvadorans and Guatemalans in different U.S. cities over the past 15 years. Long term family separations have detrimental consequences for the children who stay in the countries of origin as well as for family reunification in the United States . Legal status emerges as central in shaping the lives of immigrants, and it can constitute a new axis of social stratification.

Cecilia Menjívar, Associate Professor of Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University

Menjívar has been studying the effects of legal, social and economic exclusion on different spheres of social life among immigrants, such as social networks, family, gender relations, religious participation, and transnational ties, focusing primarily on Central American immigrants in the United States . She also is examining the militarization of the U.S. border and its effects for the immigrants who cross it (or perish in attempts to do so). She is the editor of When States Kill: Latin America, the US and Technologies of Terror (University of Texas Press 2005) and Through the Eyes of Women: Gender, Social Networks, Family and Structural Change in Latin America and the Caribbean (De Sitter Publications 2003) and author of Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (University of California Press 2000).

Ramón Grosfoguel, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Grosfoguel is the author of Colonial Subjects: Puerto Rico in a Global Perspective (University of California Press 2003). He is a senior researcher at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He has published many articles on Caribbean migration to Western Europe and the United States and on Latin American/Caribbean development. He is coeditor of the volume Puerto Rican Jam! Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses (University of Minnesota Press 1997).

Co-sponsored by ISSC’s Center on Culture, Immigration and Youth Violence Prevention, the Center for Latino Policy Research, and the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative.

This colloquium is wheelchair accessible (please call one day in advance), free, and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

For more information, please contact Usree Bhattacharya , Institute for the Study of Social Change, ubhattacharya@berkeley.edu or call (510) 642 0813.

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