CELEBRATING UNDOCU MONTH

Summary:

In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.

Summary:

The story of a group of college students, who from their first days at Dartmouth College, were committed to advancing and promoting the rights and dignity of undocumented peoples. Sparked by an instance of anti-immigrant sentiment in their library catalog, these students carried their advocacy all the way from Dartmouth Library to the halls of Congress. The film shows how an instance of campus activism entered the national spotlight, and how a cataloging term became a flashpoint in the immigration debate on Capitol Hill.

Summary:

Citizen Illegal is a book composed in the space between Mexico & America. It is a celebration of Chicano joy, a shout against erasure, and a vibrant re-imagining of Mexican American life.

"In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the story, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, and gentrifying barrios. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between."--Provided by publisher.

Summary:

The movement of people--what Americans call 'immigration' and the rest of the world calls 'migration'--is among the defining issues of our time. Technology and information crosses countries and continents at blistering speed. Corporations thrive on being multinational and polyglot. Yet the world's estimated 244 million total migrant population, particularly those deemed 'illegal' by countries and societies, are locked in a chaotic and circular debate about borders and documents, assimilation and identity. An issue about movement seems immovable: politically, culturally and personally. Dear America: Notes Of An Undocumented Citizen is an urgent, provocative and deeply personal account from Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who happens to be the most well-known undocumented immigrant in the United States. Born in the Philippines and brought to the U.S. illegally as a 12-year-old, Vargas hid in plain-sight for years, writing for some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country (The Washington Post, The New Yorker) while lying about where he came from and how he got here. After publicly admitting his undocumented status--risking his career and personal safety--Vargas has challenged the definition of what it means to be an American, and has advocated for the human rights of immigrants and migrants during the largest global movement of people in modern history. Both a letter to America and a window into Vargas's America, this book is a transformative argument about migration and citizenship, and an intimate, searing exploration on what it means to be home when the country you call your home doesn't consider you one of its own--

Summary:

What if you dreamed of a new life, and it came to you? What if that new life led you to a new country, where no one spoke your language, where you felt alone and ignored? What if you had to make that new place your home? What if you found that home in a world of books? And what if it all were true?--Jacket.

Summary:

The journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva: Nava's 1972 award-winning thirty-minute student film, based on the life of Spanish poet and playwright Federico GarciÃÅa Lorca, depicting the life of a fictional poet caught in the Spanish Civil War and jailed, but then set free on the condition he leaves his country and never returns.

Summary:

Based on the Los Angeles Times series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, this is a timeless story of families torn apart. When Enrique was five, his mother, too poor to feed her children, left Honduras to work in the United States. The move allowed her to send money back home so Enrique could eat better and go to school past the third grade. She promised she would return quickly, but she struggled in America. Without her, he became lonely and troubled. After eleven years, he decided he would go find her. He set off alone, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he made the dangerous trek up the length of Mexico, clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. He and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. To evade bandits and authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call the Train of Death. It is an epic journey, one thousands of children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.--From publisher description.

Summary:

This powerful documentary exposes the direct connection between the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America and the immigration crisis we face today. From the territorial expansionist policies that decimated the young economies of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba, to the covert operations that imposed oppressive military regimes in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Harvest of Empire provides an unflinching look at the origins of the growing Latino presence in the United States. Adapted from the landmark book written by journalist Juan Gonzalez, the film tells the story of an epic human saga that is largely unknown to the great majority of citizens in the U.S., but must become part of our national conversation about immigration.

Summary:

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans-from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many as were abolished-to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity. Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways-that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Summary:

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as legal, masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

Summary:

My world seems upside down. I have grown up but I feel like I'm moving backward. And I can't do anything about it. -Esperanza Over two million of the nation's eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.

Summary:

Scope and content: "For an undocumented immigrant, what is the true cost of the American dream? Julissa Arce shares her story in a riveting memoir. When she was 11 years old Julissa Arce left Mexico and came to the United States on a tourist visa to be reunited with her parents, who dreamed the journey would secure her a better life. When her visa expired at the age of 15, she became an undocumented immigrant. Thus began her underground existence, a decades long game of cat and mouse, tremendous family sacrifice, and fear of exposure. After the Texas Dream Act made a college degree possible, Julissa's top grades and leadership positions landed her an internship at Goldman Sachs, which led to a full time position--one of the most coveted jobs on Wall Street. Soon she was a vice president, a rare Hispanic woman in a sea of suits and ties, yet still guarding her 'underground' secret. In telling her personal story of separation, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce shifts the immigrant conversation, and changes the perception of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant"--Provided by publisher

Summary:

"La travesia llena de peligros, resiliencia, dolor y esperanza de tres adolescentes guatemaltecos que cruzan la frontera entre Mexico y Estado Unidos. En este impresionante retrato de tres vidas injustamente destrozadas, basado en hechos reales, Jenny Torres Sanchez resalta el sacrificio de los migrantes en la frontera sur a traves de una narracion vivida y conmovedora."--Page 4 of cover.

Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief. Pequena has her pride. And these three teens have one another. But, none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in and the dangers that surround them. Even with the love of family, threats lurk around every corner. And when those threats become all too real, the trio knows they have no choice but to run: from their country, from their families, from their beloved home. Crossing from Guatemala through Mexico, they follow the route of La Bestia, the perilous train system that might deliver them to a better life -- if they are lucky enough to survive the journey. With nothing but the bags on their backs and desperation drumming through their hearts, Pulga, Chico, and Pequena know there is no turning back, despite the unknown that awaits them. And the darkness that seems to follow wherever they go.

Summary:

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues the ideology that US is a nation of immigrants is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US's history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality. This idea was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, and social equality which obscures the fact that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. By stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and ahistorical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the US, the author asserts that we can start examining the roots of racism and structural inequality, and bringing forward alternative narratives and movement.

Summary:

Weaving together footage from over a quarter of a century, Rocío follows the family of undocumented Mexican immigrant and Harvard University student Dario Guerrero as they struggle to stay together in the face of his mother's terminal illness and the punishing constraints of U.S. immigration law. When news of Rocío Meneses Díaz's diagnosis with cancer forces Dario to take a leave of absence from Harvard, he returns to his family's Los Angeles home to help care for her and document the way illness profoundly transforms his family's life. After exhausting available treatment options in the U.S., Dario makes the life-altering decision to accompany his mother to an alternative treatment center in Mexico, throwing the future of his immigration status and education into doubt. In spite of his status as a DACA recipient, Dario faces opposition from immigration authorities when he attempts to return to the U.S., culminating in a struggle for temporary humanitarian parole that garners national media attention. Interweaving poignant scenes from childhood home movies with intimate family discussions of mortality, Guerrero crafts a narrative of migration and loss. Touching on topics ranging from the indeterminacies of immigration status, familial memory, and traditional medicine, Rocío locates the core of its emotional narrative at the intersection of private experience and political reality.

Summary:

Sin Papeles is a collaborative film directed by Valeria Luongo and Rhys Aaron Lewis. The film, set in 2017, follows Joseph Josue Mora, an undocumented Mexican immigrant living in Chicago, observing how the Mexican-American community will be affected by the President’s decision to cancel DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) a program which had guaranteed protection to certain illegal migrants who had arrived to the country as children. Joseph Josue Mora is a young artist who has lived in the USA almost his whole life. In the film he travels through Chicago’s large Mexican neighbourhoods, meeting with friends and locals and discussing how they will move forward. Language plays a central role in the film, as a marker for the Mexican American identity in Chicago. Spanish, the language spoken by the first generation of Mexicans arrived to the US is transmitted and learnt by the second or third generations. In the situation of the DACA community bilingualism is an additional proof of their status: they identify themselves as both American and Mexican.

Summary:

When Reyna Grande's father leaves his wife and three children behind in a village in Mexico to make the dangerous trek across the border to the United States, he promises he will soon return from El Otro Lado (The Other Side) with enough money to build them a dream house where they can all live together. His promises become harder to believe as months turn into years. When he summons his wife to join him, Reyna and her siblings are deposited in the already overburdened household of their stern, unsmiling grandmother. The three siblings are forced to look out for themselves; in childish games they find a way to forget the pain of abandonment and learn to solve very adult problems. When their mother at last returns, the reunion sets the stage for a dramatic new chapter in Reyna's young life: her own journey to El Otro Lado to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father. -- Jacket, p. [2].

Summary:

A docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who are detained by Border Patrol and thrown into a shadowy for-profit detention center on purpose. Marco and Viri are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical DREAMers who are on a mission to stop unjust deportations. And the best places to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when Marco and Viri attempt a daring reverse prison break,' things don't go according to plan. By weaving together documentary footage of the real infiltrators with re-enactments of the events inside the detention center, THE INFILTRATORS tells an incredible and thrilling true story in a genre-defying new cinematic language.

Summary:

THE UNAFRAID is a feature-length documentary that follows the lives of three DACA students in Georgia, a state that has banned them from attending its top public universities, and from qualifying for in-state tuition at any other public college. Using observational footage shot over three years, THE UNAFRAID tells the personal stories of a group of friends connected by an underground movement called Freedom University. Through the stories of Alejandro, Silvia, and Aldo, viewers learn what it's like to be both a young American and undocumented in the U.S. at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is growing, emboldened by a President who has issued orders to end DACA and restrict immigration. The narratives of their lives will intersect at protests and rallies, and then expand out from this unifying force to the personal daily challenges faced by them and their families.

Summary:

Waking Dream weaves together the stories of six undocumented young people as they sit in limbo between deportation and a path to citizenship. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) has provided nearly 800,000 undocumented young people a chance to work legally, go to college, start businesses, and pursue the "American Dream." After DACA is rescinded, Waking Dream follows the unfolding fate of six of these young people as they fight for legal status in the U.S., struggle with the deportation of family members, and pursue their dreams in a country that is trying harder and harder to push them out. They know their fate must go one direction and they are fighting for their future in America.