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Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. This book explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. It pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, the book shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This book challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil's Protestants, provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country's struggle to combat racism.

The canyon in central Mexico was ablaze with torches as hundreds of people filed in. So palpable was their shared shock and grief, they later said, that neither pastor nor priest was needed. The event was a memorial service for one of their own who had died during an attempted border passage. Months later a survivor emerged from a coma to tell his story. The accident had provoked a near-death encounter with God that prompted his conversion to Pentecostalism. Today, over half of the local residents of El Alberto, a town in central Mexico, are Pentecostal. Submitting themselves to the authority of a God for whom there are no borders, these Pentecostals today both embrace migration as their right while also praying that their “Mexican Dream”—the dream of a Mexican future with ample employment for all—will one day become a reality. This book provides an in-depth look at the dynamic relationship between religion, migration, and ethnicity across the U.S.-Mexico border. Faced with the choice between life-threatening danger at the border and life-sapping poverty in Mexico, residents of El Alberto are drawing on both their religion and their indigenous heritage to demand not only the right to migrate, but also the right to stay home. If we wish to understand people's migration decisions, the book argues, we must take religion seriously. It is through religion that people formulate their ideas about life, death, and the limits of government authority.

National immigration debates have thrust both opponents of immigration and immigrant rights supporters into the news. But what happens once the rallies end and the banners come down? What is daily life like for Latinos who have been presented nationally as “terrorists, drug smugglers, alien gangs, and violent criminals”? This book offers an ethnography of the Latino and non-Latino residents of a small Indiana town, showing how national debate pitted neighbor against neighbor—and the strategies some used to combat such animosity. It conveys the lived impact of divisive political rhetoric on immigration and how race, gender, class, and ethnicity inform community belonging in the twenty-first century. The book illuminates how community membership was determined yet simultaneously remade by those struggling to widen the scope of who was imagined as a legitimate resident citizen of this Midwestern space. It draws on interviews with Latinos—both new immigrants and long-standing U.S. citizens—and whites, as well as African Americans, to provide a sense of the racial dynamics in play as immigrants asserted their right to belong to the community. Latino Hoosiers asserted a right to redefine what belonging meant within their homes, at their spaces of worship, and in the public eye. Through daily acts of ethnic belonging, Spanish-speaking residents navigated their own sense of community that did not require them to abandon their difference just to be accepted. The book addresses the politics of immigration, showing us how increasingly diverse towns can work toward embracing their complexity.

A great mobilization began in South Korea in the 1990s: adult transnational adoptees began to return to their birth country and meet for the first time with their birth parents—sometimes in televised encounters which garnered high ratings. What makes the case of South Korea remarkable is the sheer scale of the activity that has taken place around the adult adoptees' return, and by extension the national significance that has been accorded to these family meetings. Informed by the author's own experience as an adoptee and two years of ethnographic research in Seoul, as well as an analysis of the popular television program “I Want to See This Person Again,” which reunites families, this book sheds light on an understudied aspect of transnational adoption: the impact of transnational adoptees on their birth country, and especially on their birth families. The book offers a complex and fascinating contribution to the study of new kinship models, migration, and the anthropology of media, as well as to the study of South Korea.

This book illuminates how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship and social relations, as well as new forms of self-presentation and belonging for global labor migrants. It shows how migrants create new portrayals of themselves which work both to overcome the class and racial biases that they had faced in their home country, as well as to control the images they share of themselves with others back home. Migrant videos, for example, which document migrants' lives for family back home, are often sanitized to avoid causing worry. This book examines the conditions under which racialized Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru to migrate to the United States, how they fare, and what constrains their movement and their attempts to maintain meaningful social relations across borders. By exploring the ways in which migration is mediated between the Peruvian Andes and the United States—by documents, money, and images and objects in circulation—this book makes a major contribution to the documentation and theorization of the role of technology in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. In its focus on the forms of sociality and belonging that these mediations enable, the book adds to key anthropological debates about affect, subjectivity, and sociality in today's mobile world. It also makes significant contributions to studies of inequality in Latin America, showcasing the intersection of transnational mobility with structures and processes of exclusion in both national and global contexts.