New Migrant Destinations

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans recreate the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

In this essay, I describe the nexus of global capitalism, the precipitous rise in US deportations and return migration over the last decade, and the criminalization of Latino youth and immigrants in Mexico and the United States as manifested in the “call center narratives” of call center employees in Mexico City. The call center is the setting for an emergent transnational subculture within the economic imperatives of neoliberal globalization. For a disproportionate number of returning and deported youth, the transnational call center figures as an uncertain safe haven, a community of support and a temporary economic safety net. Even as the presence of former and active Latino gang members threaten the seeming safety in numbers, the call center narrators deconstruct the dominant discourse of “every immigrant is a (potential) criminal” in both the United States and in Mexico. And, as testimonios, the call center narratives speak from the “elsewhere” of deportation and return to US-based readers, voicing new perspectives on transnational and immigrant identity and solidarity.

The lives of undocumented youth are fundamentally characterized by the legal and social contradiction that arises from growing up in the United States yet facing barriers to full participation in US society. As such, the production of migrant youth “illegality” is marked by both distinct forms of regulation and exclusion as well as a sustained connection to institutions central to US society. In this article, I bring 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented Latino youth activists in California into conversation with Stuart Hall’s notion of (re-)articulation in order to identify three articulatory practices among undocumented youth – brokering illegality, staking a claim to “citizen” participation and breaching the code of silence. I argue that the tension between their juridical identities as undocumented migrants and their sub- jective identities as US-raised children has served as a catalyst to political action among undocumented youth activists in California.

Now available for free as part of the special virtual issue (link below)

The influx of Latin American immigrants into the U.S. South since the early 1990s has changed the demographic face of the region, particularly among school-aged populations where the rate of growth among Latinos has been the fastest. Despite an emerging literature addressing changing racial and ethnic relations in the New U.S. South, relatively little research has addressed the incorporation of Latino youths within southern schools. Relying on data from a four year ethnographic and in-depth interview study in one North Carolina town, findings suggest powerful benefits of ethnic-identity based clubs for Latino youths in new immigrant destination schools. While both Latino and African American respondents faced discrimination within their community, Latino students received more formal support at school which helped shield them from the negative impacts of discrimination.