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Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies approaches the social histories and contemporary lives of a diverse range of Latina and Latino populations, including immigrants, exiles, refugees, and US-born groups from across the Americas. Adopting a comparative ethnic studies lens that captures histories of US imperialism, local and transnational perspectives on community, national and pan-ethnic identifications, and diverse social and demographic trends, this anthology emphasizes the breadth and dynamism of the ideas, debates, and questions that drive the dynamic field of Latinx/a/o Studies. The edited volume is unique, not only in its comparative, humanistic social science focus but also in its structure and organization of key discussions, what we call “critical diálogos,” in Latinx/a/o Studies. The anthology deliberately considers each contribution, not exclusively as a stand-alone piece but as part of a larger disciplinary theme and interdisciplinary conversation. This specific “diálogo framing” allows readers to identify specific areas of thematic interest, while remaining unavoidably attentive to the diversity and complexity of the everyday lives of Latinx populations, the political economic structures that shape enduring racialization and cultural stereotyping, and the continuing efforts to carve out new lives as diasporic, transnational, global, and colonial subjects. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies will introduce scholars and students to new approaches, theoretical trends, and understudied topics in Latinx/a/o Studies, while also fostering rigorous classroom discussion and scholarly research in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research areas.

South Asian American men are not usually depicted as ideal American men. They struggle against popular representations as either threatening terrorists or geeky, effeminate computer geniuses. To combat such stereotypes, some use sports as a means of performing a distinctly American masculinity. Desi Hoop Dreams focuses on the South Asian–only basketball leagues common in major U.S. and Canadian cities to show that basketball for these South Asian American players is not simply a hobby, but a means to navigate and express their identities in 21st-century America. The participation of young men in basketball is one platform among many for performing South Asian American identity. South Asian–only leagues and tournaments become spaces in which to negotiate the relationships between masculinity, race, and nation. Faced with stereotypes that portray them as effeminate, players perform sporting feats on the court to represent themselves as athletic. And though they draw on black cultural styles, they carefully set themselves off from African American players, who are deemed “too aggressive.” Accordingly, the same categories of their own marginalization—masculinity, race, class, and sexuality—are those through which South Asian American men exclude women, queer masculinities, and working-class masculinities, along with other racialized masculinities, in their effort to lay claim to cultural citizenship. One of the first works on masculinity formation and sport participation in South Asian American communities, Desi Hoop Dreams focuses on an American popular sport to analyze the dilemma of belonging within South Asian America in particular and the U.S. in general.

Chinese adoption is often viewed as creating new possibilities for the formation of multicultural, cosmopolitan families. For white adoptive families, it is an opportunity to learn more about China and Chinese culture, as many adoptive families today try to honor what they view as their children's “birth culture.” However, transnational, transracial adoption also presents challenges to families who are trying to impart in their children cultural and racial identities that they themselves do not possess, while at the same time incorporating their own racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Many of their ideas are based on assumptions about how authentic Chinese and Chinese Americans practice Chinese culture. Based on a comparative ethnographic study of white and Asian American adoptive parents over an eight-year period, this book explores how white adoptive parents, adoption professionals, Chinese American adoptive parents, and teens adopted from China as children negotiate meanings of Chinese identity in the context of race, culture, and family. Viewing Chineseness as something produced, rather than inherited, the book examines how the idea of “ethnic options” differs for Asian American versus white adoptive parents as they produce Chinese adoptee identities, while re-working their own ethnic, racial, and parental identities. The book analyzes how both white and Asian American adoptive parents engage in changing understandings of and relationships with “Chineseness” as a form of ethnic identity, racial identity, or cultural capital over the life course.

The book considers illegality, deportability, and deportation in the lives of young people—those who migrate as well as those who are affected by the migration of others. A primary focus of the volume is to understand how children and youth encounter, move through, or are outside of a range of legal processes, including border enforcement, immigration detention, federal custody, courts, and state processes of categorization. Even if young people do not directly interact with state immigration systems—because they are U.S. citizens or have avoided detention—they are nonetheless deeply impacted by the reach of the government in its many forms. Combining different perspectives from advocates, service providers, attorneys, researchers, and, significantly, young immigrants, the book presents ethnographically rich accounts that can contribute to informed debates and policy reforms. By underscoring the ways in which young people encounter and/or avoid legal systems, the book problematizes the policies, laws, and legal categories that shape so much of daily life of young immigrants. The book makes visible the burdens, hopes, and potential of a population of young people and their families who have been largely hidden from public view and are currently under siege, following young people as they move into, through, and out of the complicated immigration systems and institutions in the United States.

This book explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. As one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated and well-integrated in mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally “Japanese” foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance in a multicultural America where racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. Different generations of Japanese Americans have responded to such pressures in ways that range from demands that their racial citizenship as bona fide Americans be recognized to a desire to maintain or recover their ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland. This ethnographic study argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which increasing assimilation gradually erodes the significance of ethnic heritage and identity over generations. While inheriting the assimilative patterns of previous generations, each new generation of Japanese Americans has also negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a confluence of various historical and contemporary factors. In addition, this book analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through taiko drumming ensembles, as well as placing Japanese Americans in transnational and diasporic contexts.

This book about Korean American immigrant families is the result of a collaboration between an anthropologist and a psychologist. Combining quantitative surveys with family ethnography, the book explored the central question, How do Korean American teens and parents navigate immigrant America? Both survey and ethnographic data revealed that acculturation differences between parents and teens—long assumed in the psychological literature to account for distress—did not necessarily make for family hardship. Instead, this research found that families struggle together, although not always easily, to figure out how best to navigate an American society that they all understood to be racist. This is not to say that the parents did not speak about cultural distinctions or that they were unconcerned about academic achievement. But what these parents anguished over most was how to fortify their children with protective psychological health and character traits that would allow them to succeed. Ethnographic chapters on five Korean American immigrant families introduce the parenting strategies and adolescents’ responses, which were at times defiantly resistant, sometimes accommodating, and at other times enormously appreciative. The book examines the delicate negotiations between parents and teens in the intimacy of family life, following them from homes to shopping malls, music recitals, church, workplaces, and school. The five families reflect a diversity of family dynamics, but uniting them all is the hard work that parents and children engage in to maintain the bonds of their family relationships.

In our contemporary period of human mobility and global capitalism, political identifications are being configured in multiple sites beyond the nation-state. The book’s theoretical innovation is to analyze what happens at work in terms of larger processes of political belonging. In particular, it examines how the recognitions and reciprocities entailed by care work affect the political belonging of new African migrants in the United States. Care for America’s growing seniors is increasingly provided by migrants, and it is only expected to grow, as experts in health care anticipate a care crunch. Because of the demand for elder care and the low barriers to entry, new African immigrants have adopted elder care as a niche employment sector. However, elder care puts care workers into racialized, gendered and age hierarchies, and made it difficult to achieve social and economic mobility. Through working in elder care, African care workers see the United States as uninhabitable, in the sense that it does not reciprocate their labor and makes a respected personhood impossible. This book highlights a more complex process of racialization and incorporation for Black immigrants than is commonly posited.

This book argues that unique rural cultural dynamics shape women’s experiences of incarceration and release from prison in the remote, predominantly white communities that many Americans still think of as “the Western frontier.” Together, these dynamics comprise an architecture of gendered violence, a theoretical lens applicable to women’s experiences of prison throughout the United States in its focus on how the synchronous operations of addiction and compromised mental health, poverty, fraught relationships, and felony-related discrimination undergird women’s lives. The architecture of gendered violence that comprises the primary pathway to incarceration among the Wyoming women in this study reflects the way the suite of concerns facing currently and formerly incarcerated women throughout the United States manifests in a remote rural context far from the coastal metropolises that dominate the production of criminal justice discourse and scholarship.

Mónica waits in the Anti-Venereal Medical Service of the Zona Galactica, the legal, state-run brothel where she works in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Mexico. Surrounded by other sex workers, she clutches the Sanitary Control Cards that deem her registered with the city, disease-free, and able to work. On the other side of the world, Min stands singing karaoke with one of her regular clients, warily eyeing the door lest a raid by the anti-trafficking Public Security Bureau disrupt their evening by placing one or both of them in jail. Whether in Mexico or China, sex work-related public policy varies considerably from one community to the next. A range of policies dictate what is permissible, many of them intending to keep sex workers themselves healthy and free from harm. Yet often, policies with particular goals end up having completely different consequences. This book examines cross-cultural public policies related to sex work, bringing together ethnographic studies from around the world—from South Africa to India—to offer a nuanced critique of national and municipal approaches to regulating sex work. The book offers new theoretical and methodological perspectives that move beyond already well-established debates between “abolitionists” and “sex workers' rights advocates” to document both the intention of public policies on sex work and their actual impact upon those who sell sex, those who buy sex, and public health more generally.

Queering Family Trees explores the lived experience of family-making among queer mothers in the United States between 1991 and 2015. While the legalization of same-sex marriage and adoption has provided avenues toward equality for some couples, structural and economic barriers have meant that others—especially queer women of color who often have fewer financial resources—are not, in practice, able to avail themselves of supports necessary to create and sustain their families. This interdisciplinary ethnographic research draws on interviews with Indigenous, African American, Latina, Asian American, and white queer mothers living in a range of US states, considered in relation to news media, public law, and policy debates. I apply a reproductive justice analysis, critically exploring the ways intersections of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation shape the experiences of families navigating social and legal contexts that define queer families as “illegitimate.” I explore these debates in relation to policy changes in adoption, welfare, and immigration, making evident how same-sex marriage furthers a neoliberal economic agenda. Little mainstream or scholarly attention has been given to the lives and families of lesbians of color. Indeed, the erasure of queers of color from these debates was crucial to maintaining a narrative equating marriage with equality. The family-making narratives of these mothers challenge the assimilation versus resistance framework that has shaped understandings of LGBTQ marriage debates. I argue that, contrary to public narratives celebrating equality through marriage, the federal legalization of same-sex marriage reinforces existing structures of inequality grounded in race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. This book employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, it demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. The book addresses how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.

This volume represents the efforts of anthropologists and others to explore to spaces of security. Today, security is one of the most prominent topics in anthropology. Spatial metaphors and images saturate research on security, yet anthropology has not developed a coherent approach to this important dimension of security. This volume draws together ethnographic research on spaces of security from different regions and scales, range from blast-proof bedrooms in Israel to biometric identification in India, and from border control in Argentina to counterterrorism in East Africa. Each contribution focuses on specific spatio-temporal configurations, infrastructural interventions and shifts in discourse and practice. The different emphasis in each contribution shows the multiplicity of ways that one might grapple with the rascal concept of security, and demonstrate the power of a spatial lens to bring into focus the ways that security acquires its discursive content and concrete form.

This book seeks to contextualize sustainability in three key ways: interdisciplinary formations, specifically the sciences, arts, societies, scale, and social justice. “Situating” sustainability suggests an analytic that can be applied to any of the individual contributions in this book: it implies an awareness as to the multiple ways that sustainability is marshalled and lack of sustainability/ justice experienced in social and political life. Each section has an “anchor” or framing chapter that will set the stage for the individual chapters to follow as well as a praxis-oriented contribution that enacts the ideas in each section.

In the wake of school lunch reform debates, heated classroom cupcake wars, and worries about childhood obesity, children’s food is a locus of anxiety and “crisis” in the United States. What does the feeding of children—and adults’ often impassioned, worried talk about the foods children eat—say about middle-class parents’ understandings of what it means to parent well, and about the kinds of individuals they feel compelled to create in their children? How are these understandings reflective of a larger political economic moment, and how do they reinforce existing forms of social inequality? This book takes up those questions through in-depth ethnographic research in “Hometown,” an urban Atlanta charter school community. Embedding herself in school events, after-school meetings, school lunchrooms, and private homes, the author observed how children’s food was a locus for fundamental moral tensions about how to live, how to present oneself, and how to be protected from harm in a neoliberal environment. Middle-class parents took responsibility for protecting their children from an industrialized food system and for cultivating children’s self-management in food and other realms; yet they did so in ways that ultimately and unintentionally tended to reinforce class privilege and the effects of social inequality. Listening closely to adults’—and children’s—food concerns and contextualizing them both very locally and vis-à-vis a broader political economy, this book interrogates those unintended effects and asks how the “crisis” of children’s food might be reimagined toward different ends.

This is a book about people who make their living by engaging in street-based sex trading and criminal justice and social services efforts to curtail it through the work of police officers, public defenders, judges, probation officers, or court-mandated therapeutic treatment providers. Coauthored by an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book explores these interactions and the cultural context in which they take place by drawing upon six years of ethnographic research with hundreds of women involved in street-based prostitution and illicit drug use, as well as dozens of the criminal justice and social services professionals who regularly interact with them. The book focuses on the criminal justice–social services alliance, which positions itself as a punitive-therapeutic partnership among law enforcement agencies and state, municipal, or independent nonprofit social services entities that police or otherwise regulate women involved in street-based prostitution and illicit drug use. Such policing and regulation rely on an interventionist discourse that positions the women’s decision making as the product of traumatic interpersonal encounters rather than of the exclusionary socioeconomic realities that frame their lives. The book’s balanced approach results from its unique methodology, with Dewey inhabiting a number of distinct roles as a participant observer on the streets, in services providers’ offices, and in correctional facilities, and as an alliance professional through her work as the admissions coordinator of one of the few transitional housing facilities for women leaving street-based sex trading.