How gender and generation shape perceptions of place and time as told through the voices of Mexican teenage girls This book examines the lived experiences of Mexican teenage girls raised in transnational families and the varied ways they make meaning of their lives. Under the Bracero Program and similar recruitment programs, Mexican men have for decades been recruited for temporary work in the U.S., leaving their families for long periods of time to labor in the fields, factories, and service industry before returning home again. While the conditions for these adults who cross the border for work has been extensively documented, very little attention has been paid to the lives of those left behind. Over a six-year period, Lilia Soto interviewed more than sixty teenage girls in Napa, California and Zinapecuaro, Michoacan to reveal the ruptures and continuities felt for the girls surrounded by the movement of families, ideas, and social practices across borders. As they develop their subjective selves, these Mexican teens find commonality in their fathers' absence and the historical, structural, and economic conditions that led to their movement. Tied to the ways U.S. immigration policies dictate the migrant experiences of fathers and the traditional structure of their families, many girls develop a sense of time-lag, where they struggle to plan for a present or a future. In Girlhood in the Borderlands, Soto highlights the "structure of feeling" that girls from Zinapecuaro and Napa share, offering insight into the affective consequences of growing up at these social and geographic intersections.

For most of the 19th century, Germans represented the largest continental immigrant population in Britain, yet to date no study has concentrated on them. They entered the country for a combination of religious, political and economic reasons and established themselves in thriving immigrant communities. Hostility towards them spread throughout the 1800s and escalated with the growth of Anglo-German hostility in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I.

In August 1914 the German labour movement did not oppose the decision to go to war, and workers responded with as much enthusiasm as other social strata: one of the most powerful labour movements in the world failed to live up to the ideal of class solidarity. The movement's relations with foreign workers, particularly Polish coal miners, in the Ruhr in the decades before the war foreshadowed this failure. The rural origins of the Polish migrants and their traditional Catholic religious beliefs led most observers, including their fellow workers as well as recent historians, to view them as obstacles to the labour movement and resistant to working-class consciousness. This study, based on extensive research in archives in Germany and Poland, documents a very different history - one in which Polish miners' militancy exceeded that of native miners, and whose relations with German workers were marked by both xenophobia and solidarity.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aThe book is useful, too, to sociologists and antropologists who seek to understand how American kinship norms and narratives are changing with Americaas shifting demographic landscape.a
--"American Journal of Sociology"

aBooks like Dorowas perform a vital role in drawing international attention to oneas consequence of Chinaas population policy.a
&3151;"Journal of American Studies"

"Provides an original and exciting global framework for understanding the political economy of international adoption."
--Catherine Ceniza Choy, author of "Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History"

"This is a fascinating project, a book that (at last!) gives the phenomenon of transnational China/U.S. adoption the sustained, serious attention that it deserves."
--Laura Briggs, author of "Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico"

Each year, thousands of Chinese children, primarily abandoned infant girls, are adopted by Americans. Yet we know very little about the local and transnational processes that characterize this new migration.

Transnational Adoption is a unique ethnographic study of China/U.S. adoption, the largest contemporary intercountry adoption program. Sara K. Dorow begins by situating the popularity of the China/U.S. adoption process within a broader history of immigration and adoption. She then follows the path of the adoption process: the institutions and bureaucracies in both China and the United States that prepare children and parents for each other; the stories and practices that legitimate them coming together as transnational families; the strainsplaced upon our common notions of what motherhood means; and ways in which parents then construct the cultural and racial identities of adopted children.

Based on rich ethnographic evidence, including interviews with and observation of people on both sides of the Pacific--from orphanages, government officials, and adoption agencies to advocacy groups and adoptive families themselves--this is a fascinating look at the latest chapter in Chinese-American migration.

Internal displacement has become one of the most pressing geo-political concerns of the twenty-first century. There are currently over 45 million internally displaced people worldwide due to conflict, state collapse and natural disaster in such high profile cases as Syria, Yemen and Iraq. To tackle such vast human suffering, in the last twenty years a global United Nations regime has emerged that seeks to replicate the long-established order of refugee protection by applying international law and humanitarian assistance to citizens within their own borders. This book looks at the origins, structure and impact of this new UN regime and whether it is fit for purpose.

aGerber uses sophisticated social theory -- quite elegantly -- for a readable and insightful analysis of the immigrants and what migration meant to them.a
--"Journal of American History"

a[I]n this excellent study . . . Gerber uses sophisticated social theory -- quite elegantly -- for a readable and insightful analysis of the immigrants and what migration meant to them. . . . Gerber also breaks new ground by analyzing the arhythma of letter writing -- how immigrantsa writing changed over time and what that reveals about their psychology, emotion, and adjustment. . . . Altogether, Gerber provides a fresh model and another high standard for scholars of American immigration.a
--"Journal of American History"

aGerber provides an insightful examination of the role letters play in the shaping of identity. . . . Will certainly help historians to address personal immigrant letters more critically.a
--"American Historical Review"

aAuthors of Their Lives is the definitive study of American and Canadian immigrant letters. David Gerber employs psychology, epistolary scholarship, as well as his superlative capacities as an empathetic reader, to reveal how letters constitute not only a record of immigrant experience, but were an agent in fashioning that experience. Authors of Their Lives is an invaluable contribution to transnational history at the most personal and persuasive level.a
--John R. Gillis, author of "Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World"

aDavid Gerber provides a new reading of the immigrant letter. Though informed by social theory, it is Gerber's astute analysis which provides the reader a rare entree to the psychology ofparticular immigrants. A unique achievement!a
--Rudolph J. Vecoli, Professor of History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

aThis is a fascinating book. David Gerber carefully analyzes the letter itself to focus on the development of individual identities in the face of migration.a
--Jon Gjerde, author of "The Minds of the West: The Ethnocultural Evolution of the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917"

aModern world history is populated by untold millions of international migrants. They remain mainly anonymous. But some of them wrote home, notably from America. These letters are the most audible voice of such people. David Gerber interrogates this wonderful genre from every conceivable angle. He subjects letter-writing to the very closest dissection and in the most thoughtful and sensitive fashion. His book challenges the essential meaning of the act of letter-writing which, in this age of texting and instant communication, could not be more immediate in terms of our own daily lives.a
--Eric Richards, Professor of History, Flinders University, Australia

aThis is an agenda-setting book, and historians of immigration would be well served by, if not taking up its entire methodology, at least heeding its invocation to better incorporate the study of the personal into their histories.a
--"History: Reviews of New Books"

aEssential reading for scholars studying and interpreting the letters of immigrants, regardless of ethnic group.a
--"Journal of American Ethnic History"

In the era before airplanes and e-mail, how did immigrants keep in touch with loved ones in their homelands, as well as preserve links with pasts that were rooted in places from which they voluntarily left?Regardless of literacy level, they wrote letters, explains David A. Gerber in this path-breaking study of British immigrants to the U.S. and Canada who wrote and received letters during the nineteenth century.

Scholars have long used immigrant letters as a lens to examine the experiences of immigrant groups and the communities they build in their new homelands. Yet immigrants as individual letter writers have not received significant attention; rather, their letters are often used to add color to narratives informed by other types of sources.

Authors of Their Lives analyzes the cycle of correspondence between immigrants and their homelands, paying particular attention to the role played by letters in reformulating relationships made vulnerable by separation. Letters provided sources of continuity in lives disrupted by movement across vast spaces that disrupted personal identities, which depend on continuity between past and present. Gerber reveals how ordinary artisans, farmers, factory workers, and housewives engaged in correspondence that lasted for years and addressed subjects of the most profound emotional and practical significance.

In this unique and insightful book, Markus Bell explores the hidden histories of the men, women, and children who traveled from Japan to the world's most secretive state-North Korea. Through vivid ethnographic details and interviews with North Korean escapees, Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and from North Korea reveals the driving forces that propelled thousands of ordinary people to risk it all in Kim Il-Sung's "Worker's Paradise", only to escape back to Japan half a century later.

Despite economic growth in Kazakhstan, more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan's ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany to date. Disappointing experiences of the migrants, along with other aspects of life in Germany, have been transmitted through transnational networks to ethnic Germans still living in Kazakhstan. Consequently, Germans in Kazakhstan today feel more alienated than ever from their 'historic homeland'. This book explores the interplay of those memories, social networks and state policies, which play a role in the 'construction' of a Kazakhstani German identity.

This is the first book that probes the lived experiences of Chinese immigrant faculty in North American higher education institutions: their struggles, challenges, successes, etc. It explores how their past experiences in China have shaped who they are now, what they do and how they pursue their teaching, research, and service, as well as the reality of their everyday life that inevitably intertwines with their present and past diverse cultural backgrounds and unique experiences. Different from previous books that explore immigrant/minority faculty defined ambiguously and broadly and from the theoretical framework of ethnic relations, this book has a particular focus on mainland Chinese immigrant faculty, which offers a richer and deeper understanding of their cross-culture experiences through autoethnographic research and by multiple lenses. Through authors' vivid portray of the ebbs and flows of their life in the academe, readers will gain an enjoyable and holistic knowledge of the cultural, political, linguistic, scholarly, and personal issues contemporary Chinese immigrant faculty encounter as they cross the border of multiple worlds. All contributors to this book had the experience of being the first-generation Chinese immigrants, and they either are currently teaching or used to teach in North American higher education institutions, who were born, brought up, educated in Mainland China and came to North America for graduate degrees from early 1980s to 2000.

Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers' pathways and draw links between the town's earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.

This innovative book documents border porosities that have developed and persisted between Greece and North Macedonia over different temporalities and at different localities. By drawing on geology's approaches to studying porosity, Dimova argues that similar to rocks and minerals that only appear solid and impermeable, seemingly impenetrable borders are inevitably traversed by different forms of passage. The rich ethnographic case studies, from the history of railroads in the southern Balkans, border town beauty tourism, child refugees during the Greek Civil War, mining and environmental activism, and the urban renovation project in Skopje, show that the political borders between states do not only restrict or regulate the movement of people and things, but are also always permeable in ways that exceed state governmentality. -- .

Higher education institutions in Anglophone countries often rely on standardized English language proficiency exams to assess the linguistic capabilities of their multilingual international students. However, there is often a mismatch between these scores and the initial experiences of international students in both academic and social contexts. Drawing on a digital ethnography of Chinese international students' first semester languaging practices, this book examines their challenges, needs and successes on their initial languaging journeys in higher education. It analyzes how they use their rich multilingual and multi-modal communicative repertories to facilitate languaging across contexts, in order to suggest how university support systems might better serve the needs of multilingual international students.

This book examines the close relationship between the portrayal of foreigners and the delineation of culture and identity in antebellum American writing. Both literary and historical in its approach, this study shows how, in a period marked by extensive immigration, heated debates on national and racial traits, during a flowering in American letters, encouraged responses from American authors to outsiders that not only contain precious insights into nineteenth-century America's self-construction but also serve to illuminate our own time's multicultural societies. The authors under consideration are alternately canonical (Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville), recently rediscovered (Kirkland), or simply neglected (Arthur). The texts analyzed cover such different genres as diaries, letters, newspapers, manuals, novels, stories, and poems.

"The Ambivalent Welcome" describes how leading magazines and the New York Times covered and interpreted U.S. immigration policy, and public attitudes about the impact of immigrants on the American economy and social fabric. Rita J. Simon and Susan H. Alexander examine print media coverage of immigration issues from 1880, the onset of the new immigration, to the present, and find that most magazines, like most Americans, have vehemently opposed new immigrants.

Part One begins with a chapter providing statistics on the number of immigrants and refugees by country of origin from 1810 to 1990, and estimates of the number of illegals who have entered the United States. Chapter 2 discusses U.S. immigration acts and summarizes the major political party platforms on immigration from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. Results of all national poll data regarding immigrants and refugees since the availability of such data (1930s) are reported in Chapter 3. Part Two discusses in detail particular magazines, including "North American RevieW," "Saturday Evening Post," "Literary Digest, Harper'S," "Scribner's, Atlantic Monthly," "The Nation," "Christian Century," "Commentary," "Commonweal," "Reader's Digest," "Time," "Life," "Newsweek," "U.S. News and World Report," and the editorials of the "New York TimeS." Following a summary chapter, Appendix A provides a profile of each of the magazines, including the date of its founding, its editors and publishers, circulation, characteristics of its readers, and an assessment of its influence on immigration. Appendix B describes the major American anti-immigration movements.

Deeply traditional in their thinking but inherently pragmatic by nature, Japanese immigrants in Hawaii were driven by conviction to unite under the mantra, "For the Sake of the Children " to commit to raising their island-born children as full-fledged Americans irrevocably committed to America's highest ideals.

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives in My Two Italies to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its passion for art, food, and family. From his Calabrian father's time as a military internee in Nazi Germany - where he had a love affair with a local Bavarian woman - to his adventures amid the Renaissance splendour of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal portrait of Italy that leaps past facile cliches about Mafia madness and Tuscan sun therapy. He delves instead into why Italian Americans have such a complicated relationship with the "old country," and how Italy produces some of the world's most astonishing art while suffering from corruption, political fragmentation, and an enfeebled civil society. With topics ranging from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italies" - the earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the refined northern Italian realm of his professional life - join and clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by love.

America's Irish Catholic rich have long enjoyed the designation of F.I.F., or First Irish Family or "Real Lace", as it delineates their place in the "Irishtocracy", where names such as Cuddihy, Murray, Doheny, and McDonnell inspire respect and awe. Yet, in almost every case, their origins in this country were humble. Fleeing the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, they found themselves penniless in the slums of New York and Boston where they were regarded as "invaders" and a curse, humiliated by signs that said 'No Irish Need Apply' and forced to accept jobs too degrading to be accepted by native and other immigrant populations. Nonetheless, they possessed one important advantage over other immigrants: they spoke the language. They were also, by nature and tradition, political. And they had ambition, courage, a fighting spirit, and-perhaps most important-Irish charm. Here, in this engrossing and often hilarious book, we read of how the Irish elite emerged-frequently in less than a generation's time-out of poverty into positions of both social and business prominence. One of the F.I.F., Robert J. Cuddihy, was behind one of the great publishing stories of the twentieth century, the rise and fall of the Literary Digest. Another, Thomas E. Murray, though little schooled, possessed an engineering genius that led to his control of a number of electrical and other patents, second only to Thomas Edison. Still another, Edward Doheny, was a key figure in the great Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding years. We read of the F.I.F.'s struggles to cling to their faith, and their determination to cope with the "Irish curse": alcohol. In Real Lace Stephen Birmingham recounts the ultimate rags-to-riches story of the American Irish in a social history as entertaining as it is important.

In 2008 for the first time the majority of the planet's inhabitants lived in cities and towns. Becoming globally urban has been one of mankind's greatest collective achievements over time and raises many questions. How did global city systems evolve and interact in the past? How have historic urban patterns impacted on those of the contemporary world? And what were the key drivers in the roller-coaster of urban change over the millennia - market forces such as trade and industry? rulers and governments? competition and collaboration between cities? or the urban environment and demographic forces? This pioneering comparative work by fifty leading scholars drawn from a range of disciplines offers the first detailed comparative study of urban development from ancient times to the present day.
The Handbook explores not only the main trends in the growth of cities and towns across the world - in Asia and the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas - and the different types of cities from great metropolitan centres to suburbs, colonial cities, and market towns, but also many of the essential themes in the making and remaking of the urban world: the role of power, economic development, migration, social inequality, environmental challenge and the urban response, religion and representation, cinema, and urban creativity. Split into three parts covering Ancient cities, the medieval and early modern period, and the modern and contemporary era, it begins with an introduction by the editor identifying the importance and challenges of research on cities in world history as well as the crucial outlines of urban development since the earliest cities in ancient Mesopotamia to the present.

This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions. It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.