In From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders, Norma Fuentes-Mayorga compares the immigration and integration experiences of Dominican and Mexican women in New York City, a traditional destination for Dominicans but a relatively new one for Mexicans. Her book documents the significance of women-led migration within an increasingly racialized context and underscores the contributions women make to their communities of origin and of settlement. Fuentes-Mayorga’s research is timely, especially against the backdrop of policy debates about the future of family reunification laws and the unprecedented immigration of women and minors from Latin America, many of whom seek human rights protection or to reunite with families in the US. From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders provides a compelling look at the suffering of migrant mothers and the mourning of family separation, but also at the agency and contributions that women make with their imported human capital and remittances to the receiving and sending community. Ultimately the book contributes further understanding to the heterogeneity of Latin American immigration and highlights the social mobility of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous migrant women in New York. 

The essays in this volume tackle the construction and significance of race and ethnicity as boundary-making processes among diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Race and ethnicity can both unite and divide. The individual scholars contributing to this volume model, deploy, and explain notions of 'borders' and 'boundaries' in various ways, but collectively they emphasize the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities that are shaped, negotiated, and contested in specific contexts and situations. Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries also captures the range of spaces in which ethnicity and race become salient-the university, the immigrant enclave, the detention center, the work place, the nightclub, and even the trans-Atlantic passage. This interdisciplinary work features essays on a diverse range of immigrant populations from past to present and will interest scholars from across disciplines.

The essays in this volume tackle the construction and significance of race and ethnicity as boundary-making processes among diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Race and ethnicity can both unite and divide. The individual scholars contributing to this volume model, deploy, and explain notions of "borders" and "boundaries" in various ways, but collectively they emphasize the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities that are shaped, negotiated, and contested in specific contexts and situations. Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries also captures the range of spaces in which ethnicity and race become salient-the university, the immigrant enclave, the detention center, the work place, the nightclub, and even the trans-Atlantic passage. This interdisciplinary work features essays on a diverse range of immigrant populations from past to present and will interest scholars from across disciplines.