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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.

Brown Bodies, White Babies contributes to an active field of literature on reproductive technologies while addressing understudied aspects of surrogacy within this scholarship. With notable exceptions, feminist analyses of surrogacy have largely focused on the gendered implications of the practice and minimized the role of race. Brown Bodies, White Babies takes intersectionality as a crucial starting point, examining the ways in which identity categories come together to form nexuses of privilege and oppression. Fertility clinics, surrogacy agencies, and intended parents often dismiss the role of race in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly in comparison to the race of egg and sperm donors who will contribute their genetic material. A surrogate is measured instead by markers of appropriate femininity, including the completeness of her own biological family, and the perceived authenticity of her altruistic motivations. Yet gender identity is not isolated from socially identified race, and thus the race of the surrogate takes on varying levels of importance in relation to other intersectional constructs. As new media narratives of surrogacy are constantly being produced and innovations in reproductive technologies advance at a rapid rate, it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep pace. However, the arguments and theoretical frameworks that underpin this research remain relevant, largely because this project resonates beyond the specificity of ARTs and draws historicized comparisons that tap into a much longer tradition of cross-racial reproductive labor.

This book explores the twenty-first-century consequences of immigration through an examination of how the so-called second generation is faring educationally in six countries: France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. This book brings together a team of renowned social science researchers from around the globe to compare the educational achievements of children from low-status immigrant groups to those of mainstream populations in these countries, asking what we can learn from one system that can be usefully applied in another. The chapters conclude that educational processes do, in fact, play a part in creating unequal status for immigrant groups in these societies. In most countries, the youth coming from the most numerous immigrant populations lag substantially behind their mainstream peers, implying that they will not be able to integrate economically and civically as traditional mainstream populations shrink. Despite this fact, the comparisons highlight features of each system that hinder the educational advance of immigrant-origin children, allowing the chapters to identify a number of policy solutions to help fix the problem. A comprehensive look at a growing global issue, the book represents a major achievement in the fields of education and immigration studies.

This book tells the compelling stories of Latin-American immigrant women living in public housing in two Boston-area neighborhoods. It argues that these immigrant women parlay social ties that provide support and leverage to develop networks and achieve social positioning to get ahead. The strong voices of these women demonstrate how they successfully negotiate the world and achieve social mobility through their own individual agency, skillfully navigating both constraints and opportunities. The book makes it clear that many immigrant women are able to develop the social support needed for a rich social life, and leverage ties that open options for them to develop their social and human capital. However, it also shows that factors such as neighborhood and domestic violence and the unavailability of social services leave many women without the ability to strategize towards social mobility. Ultimately, the book makes important local and international policy recommendations on issues ranging from public housing to world labor visas, demonstrating how policy can help to improve the lives of these and other low-income people.

Patterns of migration and the forces of globalization have brought the issues of mixed race to the public sphere in far more visible and far more dramatic ways than ever before. This book examines the contemporary experiences of people of mixed descent in nations around the world, moving beyond U.S. borders to explore the dynamics of racial mixing and multiple descent in Zambia, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Okinawa, Australia, and New Zealand. In particular, the book asks: how have new global flows of ideas, goods, and people affected the lives and social placements of people of mixed descent? The book addresses the ways mixed-race individuals defy, bolster, speak, and live racial categorization, paying attention to the ways that these experiences help us think through how we see and engage with social differences. The chapters highlight how mixed-race people can sometimes be used as emblems of multiculturalism, and how these identities are commodified within global capitalism while still considered by some as not pure or inauthentic. The book considers the many different meanings of racial mixedness.

Despite the growing presence of intercultural couples in the United States and worldwide, their stories often go untold. This book provides a rare and comprehensive understanding of the multidimensional experiences of intercultural couples, drawing mainly upon in-depth interviews with persons living in domestic partnerships—heterosexual and same-sex—representing a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, socioeconomic, and national backgrounds. In these relationships, each partner brings a different set of cultural experiences that may include gender expectations, ideas about appropriate relations with family members, childrearing, financial matters, and general lifestyle. Sometimes differences may be unrecognized or seen as minimal, yet some can become salient, forming the basis for conflict, enriching diversity, or both. This book shows that, despite hurtful incidents from persons outside of the couple partnerships, intercultural unions are a source of satisfaction for the partners, and are able to bridge divisions and reduce inequalities between persons of diverse backgrounds, providing a rich portrait of how these couples negotiate their identities as individuals and as couples in relation to the outside world.

This book sheds new light on the work lives of Latina teachers who service two underperforming multiracial schools in metropolitan Los Angeles. It traces the social mobility pathways and professional workplace experiences of college-educated Latinas entering the teaching field—a new employment niche concentration for them and one in which they are working where the majority of their co-workers are other racial/ethnic minorities rather than whites. This work site– based ethnography argues that Latina teachers are “cultural guardians” who devise and fashion ethical alternatives to subtractive schooling practices and cultural deficit models. Latina teachers actively assist Latino families in schools by creatively moving beyond institutionalized curricula—which is typically geared towards a white- middle-class mainstream. They use their own life histories to draw on Latino cultural resources and serve as agents of ethnic mobility, actively teaching their students how to navigate American race and class structures while retaining their cultural roots. Their efforts meet with varying results in two elementary schools, one predominantly Latino/Black and another predominantly Latino/Asian, as there is interracial conflict with African Americans and attempts at working with Asians.

The nation's Latina/o population has now reached over 50 million, or 15 percent of the estimated total U.S. population of 300 million, and a growing portion of the world's population now lives and works in cities that are increasingly diverse. This book provides the first national perspective on Latina/o urban policy, addressing a wide range of planning policy issues that impact both Latinas/os in the United States, as well as the nation as a whole, tracing how cities develop, function, and are affected by socio-economic change. The three sections of the book address the politics of planning and its historic relationship with Latinas/os, the relationship between the Latina/o community and conventional urban planning issues and challenges, and the future of urban policy and Latina/o barrios. Moving beyond a traditional analysis of Latinas/os in the Southwest, the book expands the understanding of the important relationships between urbanization and Latinas/os including Mexican Americans of several generations within the context of the restructuring of cities, in view of the cultural and political transformation currently encompassing the nation.

The Lebanese are the largest group of Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States, and Lebanese immigrants are also prominent across Europe and the Americas. Based on over eighty interviews with first-generation Lebanese immigrants in the global cities of New York, Montreal and Paris, this book shows that the Lebanese diaspora—like all diasporas—constructs global relations connecting and transforming their new societies, previous homeland and world-wide communities. Taking Lebanese immigrants' forms of identification, community attachments and cultural expression as manifestations of diaspora experiences, the book delves into the ways that members of Lebanese diasporic communities move beyond nationality, ethnicity and religion, giving rise to global solidarities and negotiating their social and cultural spaces. The book explores new forms of identities, alliances and cultural expressions, elucidating the daily experiences of Lebanese immigrants and exploring new ways of thinking about immigration, ethnic identity, community, and culture in a global world. By criticizing and challenging our understandings of nationality, ethnicity and assimilation, the book shows that global immigrants are giving rise to new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

Few world regions today are of more pressing social and political interest than the Middle East: hardly a day has passed in the last decade without events there making global news. Understanding the region has never been more important, yet the field of Middle East studies in the United States is in flux, enmeshed in ongoing controversies about the relationship between knowledge and power, the role of the federal government at universities, and ways of knowing other cultures and places. This book explores the big-picture issues affecting the field, from the geopolitics of knowledge production to structural changes in the university to broader political and public contexts. Tracing the development of the field from the early days of the American university to the Islamophobia of the present day, this book explores Middle East studies as a discipline and, more generally, its impact on the social sciences and academia. Topics include how different disciplines engage with Middle East scholars, how American universities teach Middle East studies and related fields, and the relationship between scholarship and U.S.–Arab relations, among others. This book presents a comprehensive, authoritative overview of how this crucial field of academic inquiry came to be and where it is going next.

While there has been significant growth in studies of “multiracial,” or “mixed-race,” individuals, very few have investigated the experiences of the descendants of multiracial individuals—the so-called multigeneration multiracials. As interracial unions and disparate types of multiracial people continue to increase in many societies, what effect does this have on our understanding of racial categories and boundaries? How do multiracial people think about race in relation to themselves and their children? Using in-depth interviews, this book investigates how and why multiracial people racially identify and raise their children in particular ways, as well as their attitudes toward the transmission of minority ancestries to their children. Delving into parents’ concerns about racism and the strategies they use to address it with their children, the book also explores their thoughts about their children’s futures in a society in which mixing and mixed-race people are increasingly part of the mainstream.

As Turkey pushes for its place in the global pecking order and embraces neoliberal capitalism, the nation has seen a period of unprecedented shifts in political, religious, and gender and sexual identities. This book shows how this social transformation in Turkey is felt most strongly among its young people, eager to surrender to the seduction of sexual modernity, but also longing to reman attached to traditional social relations, identities and histories. Engaging a wide array of upwardly-mobile young adults, Ozyegin links the biographies of individuals with the biography of a nation, revealing their creation of conflicted identities in a country which has existed uneasily between West and East, modern and traditional, and secular and Islamic. For these young people sexuality, gender expression, and intimate relationships in particular serve as key sites for reproducing and challenging patriarchy and paternalism that was hallmark of earlier generations. As the book evocatively shows, the quest for sexual freedom and an escape frpm patriarchal constructions of selfless femininity and protective masculinity promise both personal transformations and profound sexual guilt and anxiety. A poignant and original study, the book presents a snapshot of cultural change on the eve of rapid globalization in the Muslim world.

One fifth of the population of the United States belongs to the immigrant or second generations. While the United States is generally thought of as the immigrant society par excellence, it now has a number of rivals in Europe. This book brings together studies from top immigration scholars to explore how the integration of immigrants affects the generations that come after. The chapters explore the early beginnings of the second generation in the United States and Western Europe, exploring the overall patterns of success of the second generation. While there are many striking similarities in the situations of the children of labor immigrants coming from outside the highly developed worlds of Europe and North America, wherever one looks, subtle features of national and local contexts interact with characteristics of the immigrant groups themselves to create variations in second-generation trajectories. The book shows that these issues are of the utmost importance for the future, for they will determine the degree to which contemporary immigration will produce either durable ethno-racial cleavages or mainstream integration.

When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. This book places the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. It compares and contrasts how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, and bioterrorism threats and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. It argues that uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.