“Neutral” Talk in Educating for Activism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary J. Adler
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Undocumented Immigration ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The U.S

Gary J. Adler, Jr.’s chapter argues that in discussions about undocumented immigration, progressive religious organizations and actors employ a style of “formal neutrality,” which allows them to represent “all sides” of this contentious debate and protect their “non-partisan” status. Based on participant observation with BorderLinks, a transnational organization that leads weeklong immersion trips across the U.S.-Mexico border as part of its strategy of “raising awareness, inspiring action” against the injustices done to undocumented migrants, immigrant communities, and border cities, the chapter finds that this “neutral” style of talk may not generate the activism that its practitioners hope, since it fails to fully connect the experiences of participants with narratives of injustice or pathways to potential action.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimmy Patiño
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Immigration Policies ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Immigrant Rights ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
And Control ◽  
The U.S

The Conclusion is a brief analysis of how the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) both conceded to and fragmented the Chicano/Mexicano immigrant rights mobilizations facilitated in part by the CCR. Signed by a Republican, it was the first mass amnesty act revealing the influence of the human rights components of Chicano/Mexicano organizing that activists in San Diego had taken part in formulating beginning in the late 1960s. Yet the act also marginalized the abolitionist position of the movement, giving concessions by providing amnesty to a subsection of undocumented migrants, while further militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. The chapter concludes with an analysis of two divergent responses by Chicano/Mexicano activists o the new law: those who invested their energies in politicizing and assisting undocumented migrants who qualified for the amnesty provisions of IRCA by working with immigration state mechanisms and other activists who continued to criticize the “carrot and stick” immigration policies and maintain the call to abolish immigration state apparatuses.

Myth Busting

2019 ◽  
pp. 205-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Bussert-Webb ◽  
María E. Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Extracurricular Activities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Agency Staff ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Parents Involvement ◽  
The U.S

This longitudinal qualitative study, involving low-income parents and children, tutorial-agency staff, and one college student (all Latinx), took place in a city along the U.S./Mexico border. Data sources included field notes through participant observation, questionnaires, and interviews. The authors asked, “How are parents involved in their children's education? What limitations or barriers do they express?” Using a social justice framework and grounded-theory data analysis, these types of parental involvement emerged: academic, social skills, school volunteerism, extracurricular activities, community, and college enrollment. Conversely, parents expressed involvement obstacles. Implications relate to changing the deficit discourse regarding low-income, immigrant parents' involvement. Collaborating with families to create equitable educational outcomes for minoritized children is imperative.

Myth Busting

2021 ◽  
pp. 353-376
Author(s):  
Kathy Bussert-Webb ◽  
María E. Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Extracurricular Activities ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Agency Staff ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Parents Involvement ◽  
The U.S

This longitudinal qualitative study, involving low-income parents and children, tutorial-agency staff, and one college student (all Latinx), took place in a city along the U.S./Mexico border. Data sources included field notes through participant observation, questionnaires, and interviews. The authors asked, “How are parents involved in their children's education? What limitations or barriers do they express?” Using a social justice framework and grounded-theory data analysis, these types of parental involvement emerged: academic, social skills, school volunteerism, extracurricular activities, community, and college enrollment. Conversely, parents expressed involvement obstacles. Implications relate to changing the deficit discourse regarding low-income, immigrant parents' involvement. Collaborating with families to create equitable educational outcomes for minoritized children is imperative.

The Borderlands of Authoritarianism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Harford Vargas
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
The People ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Narrative Justice

Chapter 2 teases out the fraught links between authoritarianism, authority, and authorship, using Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. The characters stage a revolution against the author of their world, whom they accuse of controlling the plots of their lives and using omniscient narration to profit from their stories. In contrast to the author-as-god analogy, the chapter explores the analogy of the author-as-dictator. The layout of the novel formally reflects the effects of surveillance and visually depicts the struggle against the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the exploitation of undocumented migrants. The novel grapples with the problem of defending the rights of agricultural laborers and people without papers in the pages of a novel that circulates as a commodity and poses questions about possible alternative economic and narrative ethics that could be used in the service of social and narrative justice. The chapter ultimately wrestles with the contradiction that writing, which is as a form of power and violence, is used to resist repressive power.

scholarly journals Sensors, Cameras, and the New ‘Normal’ in Clandestine Migration: How Undocumented Migrants Experience Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico Border

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryce Clayton Newell ◽  
Ricardo Gomez ◽  
Verónica E. Guajardo
Keyword(s):  
Technology Use ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Irregular Migrants ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Government Surveillance ◽  
Border Surveillance ◽  
The U.S

This paper presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of undocumented (irregular) migrants to the United States with various forms of surveillance in the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico, we find that migrants generally have a fairly sophisticated understanding about U.S. Border Patrol surveillance and technology use and that they consciously engage in forms of resistance or avoidance. Heightened levels of border surveillance may be deterring a minority of migrants from attempting immediate future crossings, but most interviewees were undeterred in their desire to enter the U.S., preferring to find ways to avoid government surveillance. Furthermore, migrants exhibit a general lack of trust in the “promise” of technology to improve their circumstances and increase their safety during clandestine border-crossing—often due to fears that technology use makes them vulnerable to state surveillance, tracking, and arrest.

Ghost Dancing

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Ghost Dance ◽  
The Government ◽  
Wasted Energy ◽  
The U.S

Native American dancers in the 1890s rebelling against the U.S. government’s failure to uphold treaties protecting land rights and rations were accused of fomenting a dancing ‘craze’. Their dancing—which hoped for a renewal of Native life—was subject to intense government scrutiny and panic. The government anthropologist James Mooney, in participant observation and fieldwork, described it as a religious ecstasy like St. Vitus’s dance. The Ghost Dance movement escalated with the proliferation of reports, telegraphs, and letters circulating via Washington, DC. Although romantically described as ‘geognosic’—nearly mineral—ancestors of the whites, Native rebels in the Plains were told to stop dancing so they could work and thus modernize; their dancing was deemed excessive, wasteful, and unproductive. The government’s belligerently declared state of exception—effectively cultural war—was countered by one that they performed ecstatically. ‘Wasted’ energy, dancers maintained, trumped dollarization—the hollow ‘use value’ of capitalist biopower.

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