In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a “public charge,” or a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to “pay back” benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform. Park argues that the notions of “public charge” and “public burden” were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of “disciplining” immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the “public charge” doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of “public charge” continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.
Winner, Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award, presented by the Environment & Technology section of the American Sociological Association How the elite ski resort reshaped the socio-economic and demographic landscape in pursuit of profit and pleasure Environmentalism usually calls to mind images of peace and serenity, a oneness with nature, and a shared sense of responsibility. But one town in Colorado, under the guise of environmental protection, passed a resolution limiting immigration, bolstering the privilege of the wealthy and scapegoating Latin American newcomers for the area’s current and future ecological problems. This might have escaped attention save for the fact that this wasn’t some rinky-dink backwater. It was Aspen, Colorado, playground of the rich and famous and the West’s most elite ski town. Tracking the lives of immigrant laborers through several years of exhaustive fieldwork and archival digging, The Slums of Aspen tells a story that brings together some of the most pressing social problems of the day: environmental crises, immigration, and social inequality. Park and Pellow demonstrate how these issues are intertwined in the everyday experiences of people who work and live in this wealthy tourist community. Offering a new understanding of a little known class of the super-elite, of low-wage immigrants (mostly from Latin America) who have become the foundation for service and leisure in this famous resort, and of the recent history of the ski industry, Park and Pellow expose the ways in which Colorado boosters have reshaped the landscape and altered ecosystems in pursuit of profit and pleasure. Of even greater urgency, they frame how environmental degradation and immigration reform have become inextricably linked in many regions of the American West, a dynamic that interferes with the efforts of valorous environmental causes, often turning away from conservation and toward insidious racial privilege.
In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a “public charge,” or a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to “pay back” benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform. Park argues that the notions of “public charge” and “public burden” were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of “disciplining” immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the “public charge” doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of “public charge” continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.
Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism — and the anxieties over it — date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups — including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves — helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism. Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships — sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.
In this second edition, America’s Urban History now includes contemporary analysis of race, immigration, and cities under the Trump administration and has been fully updated with new scholarship on early urbanization, mass incarceration and cities, the Great Society, the diversification of the suburbs, and environmental justice. The United States is one of the most heavily urbanized places in the world, and its urban history is essential to understanding the fundamental narrative of American history. This book is an accessible overview of the history of American cities, including Indigenous settlements, colonial America, the American West, the postwar metropolis, and the present-day landscape of suburban sprawl and an urbanized population. It examines the ways in which urbanization is connected to divisions of society along the lines of race, class, and gender, but it also studies how cities have been sources of opportunity, hope, and success for individuals and the nation. Images, maps, tables, and a guide to further reading provide engaging accompaniment to illustrate key concepts and themes. Spanning centuries of America’s urban past, this book’s depth and insight make it an ideal text for students and scholars in urban studies and American history.
Winner of the 2013 John Hope Franklin Book Prize presented by the American Studies Association A necessary read that demonstrates the ways in which certain people are devalued without attention to social contexts Social Death tackles one of the core paradoxes of social justice struggles and scholarship—that the battle to end oppression shares the moral grammar that structures exploitation and sanctions state violence. Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth. With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore “unthinkable” politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.
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