From the Bookshelves: Global Connections and Local Receptions
Over the last 20 years, immigration from Latin America has accelerated to the Southern part of the United States. To satisfy local labor needs, Latino immigrant communities have emerged in Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and other parts of the Southeast that previously had seen relatively low levels of immigration. Latino immigration has transformed communities and cultures throughout the southeastern United States-and become the focus of a sometimes furious national debate. Here is an exciting new book from the University of Tennessee Press analyzing these developments in the New South.
Global Connections and Local Reception: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States is one of the first books to provide an in-depth consideration of this profound demographic and social development. Examining Latino migration at the local, state, national, and binational levels, this book includes studies of southeastern locales and a statewide overview of Tennessee. Leading migration scholar Alejandro Portes offers a national analysis while Raúl Delgado Wise provides a Mexican perspective on the migration issue and its policy implications for both the United States and Mexico.
This collection contains a broad base of contributions from legal scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists. Readers will find demographic data charting trends in immigration, descriptions of organizing and of individual experiences, a quantitative comparison of new and old destinations, a critical history of U.S. immigration policy in recent decades, a report on access to housing and efforts to enact anti-immigrant laws, an assessment of how mass outmigration currently affects the national economy and communities in Mexico, analysis of the way dominant ideology frames “black-brown” relationships in southern labor markets, and a concluding essay with detailed recommendations for making U.S. immigration policy just and humane.
The Editors
Frances L. Ansley is Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville. She is the author of numerous book chapters and the principal humanities adviser to a documentary film. Her articles have been published in the California Law Review, Cornell Journal of International Law, Georgetown Journal of Poverty Law & Policy, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor & Employment Law, and numerous additional publications.
Jon Shefner is associate professor of sociology and director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Global Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the coeditor of Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America. His recent book is The Illusion of Civil Society: Democratization and Community Mobilization in Low-Income Mexico.
Here is a table of contents to the book (Download Table of Contents_12-31) and a sketch of some of the chapters.
Jon Shefner opens the book by situating immigration within the larger context of globalization.
Alejandro Portes, a a renowned sociologist, offers an overview of Latino immigration in the US and some issues he sees facing the Latino immigrant community.
Raul Delgado-Wise, an economist at the Institute for Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, contributes what I think is a brilliant analysis of the “cheap labor export model” that he says neoliberalism has brought to Mexican development, and what that model has meant for workers and communities in Mexico.
Anita Drever, a geographer and demographer, sketches what is happening with Latino migration to Tennessee in particular.
Sandy Smith-Nonini, a journalist turned activist-anthropologist, has a chapter on the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the H2A program in North Carolina.
Steve Striffler, an anthropologist who worked in a chicken plant for many months and was on the board of a local worker center when he was teaching in Arkansas, has a case study of a failed prosecution against Tyson in Shelbyville, Tennessee, contextualized with a sketch about the recent history of Latino immigration and chicken processing in that town.
Marielena Hincapie, director of the National Immigration Law Center and a long-term advocate for low-wage immigrant workers, has a chapter that lays out a legal history of the last several decades of U.S. Immigration law, including a bunch of stuff about how the law impacts low-wage undocumented workers on the job.
Guadalupe Luna and Fran Ansley, two law professors, discuss the rash of local ordinances that restrict access to housing for undocumented immigrants in “new destinations.”
Jamie Winders, a geographer, reports on a series of interviews she did with Latino/a immigrants in Nashville.
Stephanie Bohon, a sociologist, presents quantitative data comparing patterns of self-employment for Latinos in different kinds of host communities.
Sociologist Dan Cornfield has a chapter in which he draws possible lessons for labor organizing from a series of focus groups he did with Nashville immigrants and refugees.
Barbara Ellen Smith, a sociologist and women’s studies person who was chair of the board at the Highlander Center for several years, shares interviews conducted with Black and Latino workers in Memphis, and reflects on how the relationships between those groups of workers can be better understood and perhaps transformed if the analysis is not captured by a neoliberal frame.
Fran Ansley has a concluding chapter that discusses immigration policy, arguing that immigration policy is impossible to “fix” unless labor standards and neoliberal development models in the US and Latin America are also tackled.
KJ