The election of Donald Trump has called attention to the border wall and anti-Mexican discourses and policies, yet these issues are not new. Building Walls puts the recent calls to build a border wall along the US-Mexico border into a larger social and historical context. This book describes the building of walls, symbolic and physical, between Americans and Mexicans, as well as the consequences that these walls have in the lives of immigrants and Latin communities in the United States. The book is divided into three parts: categorical thinking, anti-immigrant speech, and immigration as an experience. The sections discuss how the idea of the nation-state itself constructs borders, how political strategy and racist ideologies reinforce the idea of irreconcilable differences between whites and Latinos, and how immigrants and their families overcome their struggles to continue living in America. They analyze historical precedents, normative frameworks, divisive discourses, and contemporary daily interactions between whites and Latin individuals. It discusses the debates on how to name people of Latin American origin and the framing of immigrants as a threat and contrasts them to the experiences of migrants and border residents. Building Walls makes a theoretical contribution by showing how different dimensions work together to create durable inequalities between U.S. native whites, Latinos, and newcomers. It provides a sophisticated analysis and empirical description of racializing and exclusionary processes. View a separate blog for the book here: https://dornsife.usc.edu/csii/blog-building-walls-excluding-people/

The election of Donald Trump has called attention to the border wall and anti-Mexican discourses and policies, yet these issues are not new. Building Walls puts the recent calls to build a border wall along the US-Mexico border into a larger social and historical context. This book describes the building of walls, symbolic and physical, between Americans and Mexicans, as well as the consequences that these walls have in the lives of immigrants and Latin communities in the United States. The book is divided into three parts: categorical thinking, anti-immigrant speech, and immigration as an experience. The sections discuss how the idea of nation state constructs border, how political strategy and racist ideologies construct the idea of irreconcilable differences between whites and Latinos, and how immigrants and their families overcome their struggles to continue living in America. They analyze historical precedents, normative frameworks, divisive discourses, and contemporary daily interactions between whites and Latin individuals. It discusses the debates on how to name people of Latin American origin and the framing of immigrants as a threat and contrasts them to the experiences of migrants and border residents. Building Walls makes a theoretical contribution by showing how different dimensions work together to create durable inequalities between U.S. native whites, Latinos, and newcomers. It provides a sophisticated analysis and empirical description of racializing and exclusionary processes.

WestWords is a collection of columns by Dennis West that have appeared in The Beacon, a newspaper that covers the Walworth County, Wisconsin, area. The essays, most of which are humorous, contain a great deal of information, trivia and (non-caloric) food for thought. Among the subjects treated in WestWords are: Pogo, the Old English Sheep Dog who was in the running for worlds dumbest canine The authors mother, a frustrated nurse who painfully injected her children with penicillin the consistency of toothpaste every time they sneezed A musical career that ended when the author took a shot at playing drum major instead of his sousaphone and couldnt keep 100 University of Illinois band members from marching through a hedge A Roman used-chariot salesman who invented a truth serum plus essays about language misuse, TV commercials, heavy-metal music and much more. Add a generous helping of trivia and you have a humorously entertaining, informative and thought-provoking collection by award-winning journalist Dennis West, publisher and editor of a wildly popular small-town newspaper called The Beacon.