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How do interracial couples negotiate ethnoracial boundaries? Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage from the United States to Brazil takes a novel approach to answering this question by examining how contemporary black-white couples make sense of ethnoracial boundaries in their lives. Based on over 100 qualitative interviews with husbands and wives in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Boundaries of Love unpacks the cultural repertoires of race-mixing in these two post-Atlantic slavery societies and shows how different approaches to race mixture - celebrated in Brazil versus illegal for much of U.S. history - influence the meanings that contemporary interracial couples give to their lives and social interactions. Employing an innovative “critical constructivist” approach to race and ethnicity, Boundaries of Love compares the experiences of couples involving black men and white women with those of black women with white men in these two diverse, multicultural settings. It reveals the influence of ethnoracial boundaries on: dating preferences throughout the life course in their “romantic career;” comparisons between their own racial identity and how their spouse sees their blackness or whiteness; how parents identify their children and its implications for affirmative action eligibility; how white families handle the introduction of a black in-law; and the compromises couples make spending time together in public. Through its fresh qualitative comparative approach, Boundaries of Love provides a unique perspective on racial dynamics in the United States and Brazil and clearly illuminates the familiar adage that race is a social construction.

Kids at Work is the first book to look at the participation of child street vendors in the United States. The children portrayed in this book are the children of undocumented Latinx immigrants who are relegated to street vending because they lack opportunities to work in the formal sector of the economy. On the streets of Los Angeles, California, the children help their parents prepare and sell ethnic food from México and Central America, such as pozole, pupusas, tamales, champurrado, tacos, and tejuino. Shedding light on the experiences of children in this occupation highlights the complexities and nuances of family relations when children become economic co-contributors. This book captures a preindustrial form of family work life in a postindustrial urban setting where a new form of childhood emerges. Child street vendors experience a childhood period and family work relations that lies in the intersection of two polar views of childhood, which embodies a mutually protective and supportive aspect of the economic relationship between parent and child. This book is primarily based on the point of view of street vending children, and it is complemented with parent interviews and rich ethnographic fieldwork that humanizes their experience.

Community policing structures erected in the wake of rising crime rates and civil disorder throughout the 1990s were supposed to provide civilians a platform from which to influence law enforcement policy. Yet the fires that burned in Ferguson in 2014 raise doubts about how much influence the public has on police, particularly in marginalized communities. This book challenges the common narrative that community policing has democratized the police, when there is ample evidence that US police powers have expanded alongside the proliferation of community-based strategies. It reveals how community governance works to limit civilian power and turn residents into appendages of the state—their “eyes and ears” on the street as well as their mouthpieces during crises. Further, the authors argue that disputes about who does and does not count as community complicate mobilization. Finally, they argue that until police departments are forced to adapt directly to the needs of communities of color, grassroots organizations should lead initiatives that purport to be community based.

The Little Old Lady Killer focuses on the female serial killer Juana Barraza Samperio, a Mexican lucha libre wrestler who, disguised as a government nurse, strangled sixteen elderly women in Mexico City. The search for the Mataviejitas (the killer of old women) was the first ever undertaken for a serial killer in Mexico. Following international profiling norms for serial killers, the police were initially looking for an ordinary-looking man, but after witness accounts described the Mataviejitas as wearing a wig and makeup, police changed their focus and began to search for a “travesti.” The book undertakes an analysis of the classed, gendered, and sexed transitions described in police reports and media accounts in relation to international criminological discourses and Mexican popular culture. On January 26, 2006, Juana Barraza was arrested as she fled the home of an elderly woman who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. Two years later, Barraza was convicted and sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; she remains in Santa Martha Acatitla to this day. I argue that La Dama del Silencio, Barraza’s masked wrestling identity, more than the woman herself became figured in official and popular discourse as the serial killer, La Mataviejitas. This displacement of personas reinforces national imaginaries of masculinity, femininity, and criminality. The national imaginaries of what constitutes a criminal female or male, in turn, determine crucial notions of mexicanidad within the country’s pigmentocratic culture, who counts as a victim, and how a criminal is constructed.

Social Poverty draws on 192 interviews with young, low-income, unmarried parents to investigate the concept of social poverty, using the setting of a government-funded relationship education program. While commentators and academics have excoriated such programs for the value system they imply and their intervention results, participants are huge fans of them. Although critics view participants’ financial needs as dominating their social concerns, participants themselves are acutely aware of their relational needs. These needs drive their participation in and enthusiasm for the program. This study illustrates the fundamental importance to policy and poverty studies of properly understanding social poverty. Social poverty means not having adequate high-quality, trusting social relationships to meet core socioemotional needs. Poverty scholars typically focus on the economic use value of social ties—how relationships enable access to job leads, informal loans, or a spare bedroom. While such resources can be essential, this focus ignores the fundamental place of socioemotional needs in our lives and the extent to which avoiding or alleviating social poverty is a central motivation for many. As one young mother says, without her boyfriend she would “probably be the loneliest person on Earth.” Therefore, to accurately assess policy impacts and comprehend individuals’ behaviors, we must pay attention to both material and social hardships.