Migrant Brothers

Migrant Brothers
Author: Patrick Chamoiseau
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300240058

“If justice had a Jericho trumpet, Chamoiseau would be it.”—Junot Díaz As migrants embark on perilous journeys across oceans and deserts in pursuit of sanctuary and improved living conditions, what is the responsibility of those safely ensconced in the nations they seek to enter? Moved by repeated tragedies among immigrants attempting to enter eastern and southern Europe, Patrick Chamoiseau assails the hypocrisy and detachment that allow these events to happen. Migrant Brothers is an urgent declaration of our essential interconnectedness that asserts the necessity to understand one another as part of one human community, regardless of national origin.

The Far Away Brothers

The Far Away Brothers
Author: Lauren Markham
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-05-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101906200

The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California—fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war, the United States was a distant fantasy to identical twins Ernesto and Raul Flores—until, at age seventeen, a deadly threat from the region’s brutal gangs forces them to flee the only home they’ve ever known. In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, journalist Lauren Markham follows the Flores twins as they make their way across the Rio Grande and the Texas desert, into the hands of immigration authorities, and from there to their estranged older brother in Oakland, CA. Soon these unaccompanied minors are navigating school in a new language, working to pay down their mounting coyote debt, and facing their day in immigration court, while also encountering the triumphs and pitfalls of teenage life with only each other for support. With intimate access and breathtaking range, Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | WINNER OF THE RIDENHOUR BOOK PRIZE | SILVER WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD | FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE | SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/BOGRAD WELD PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

Lights in the Distance

Lights in the Distance
Author: Daniel Trilling
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786632780

Immersive, engrossing report on the European refugee crisis A mother puts her children into a refrigerator truck and asks, “What else could I do?” A runaway teenager comes of age on the streets, sleeping in abandoned buildings. A student leaves his war-ravaged country behind because he doesn’t want to kill. Everyone among the thousands of people who come to Europe in search of asylum each year possesses a unique story. But those stories don’t end as they cross into the West. In Lights in the Distance, acclaimed journalist Daniel Trilling draws on years of reporting to build a portrait of the refugee crisis as seen through the eyes of the people who experienced it firsthand. As the European Union has grown, so has a tangled and often violent system designed to filter out unwanted migrants. Visiting camps and hostels, sneaking into detention centers, and delving into his own family’s history of displacement, Trilling weaves together the stories of people he met and followed from country to country. In doing so, he shows that the terms commonly used to define them—“refugee” or “economic migrant,” “legal” or “illegal,” “deserving” or “undeserving”—fall woefully short of capturing the complex realities. The founding story of the EU is that it exists to ensure the horrors of the twentieth century are never repeated. Now, as it comes to terms with the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, its declared values of freedom, tolerance and respect for human rights are being put to the test. Lights in the Distance is a uniquely powerful and illuminating exploration of the nature and human dimensions of the crisis.

The Circuit

The Circuit
Author: Francisco Jiménez
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 1997
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780826317971

A collection of stories about the life of a migrant family.

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Author: Seth M. Holmes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520399455

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a substantive new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a current examination of the challenges facing farmworkers and the lives and resistance of the protagonists featured in the book.

Illegal

Illegal
Author: Eoin Colfer
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1492662151

A powerfully moving, award-winning graphic novel that explores the current plight of undocumented immigrants from New York Times bestselling author Eoin Colfer and the team behind the Artemis Fowl graphic novels. How can a human being be illegal for simply existing? Ebo is alone. His brother, Kwame, has disappeared, and Ebo knows it can only be to attempt the hazardous journey to Europe, and a better life—the same journey their sister set out on months ago. But Ebo refuses to be left behind in Ghana. He sets out after Kwame and joins him on the quest to reach Europe. Ebo's epic journey takes him across the Sahara Desert to the dangerous streets of Tripoli, and finally out to the merciless sea. But with every step he holds on to his hope for a new life, and a reunion with his family. An achingly poignant tale for learning about immigration and current global issues. This book is fiction, but it is based on a very real and terrible journey. There are young people who have lived this, and it is a story those young people want us to know about. 2019 Excellence in Graphic Literature Award Winner A New York Public Library Best Book of 2018 A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2018 An Amazon Best Book of 2018 A Kirkus Reviews Best Middle Grade Graphic Novel of 2018 An American Library Association Notable Book for 2019 2019 YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens 2019 CBC Notable Social Studies Book A Junior Library Guild Selection

Divided by the Wall

Divided by the Wall
Author: Emine Fidan Elcioglu
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520340353

The construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—whether to build it or not—has become a hot-button issue in contemporary America. A recent impasse over funding a wall caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, sharpening partisan divisions across the nation. In the Arizona borderlands, groups of predominantly white American citizens have been mobilizing for decades—some help undocumented immigrants bypass governmental detection, while others help law enforcement agents to apprehend immigrants. Activists on both the left and the right mobilize without an immediate personal connection to the issue at hand, many doubting that their actions can bring about the long-term change they desire. Why, then, do they engage in immigration and border politics so passionately? Divided by the Wall offers a one-of-a-kind comparative study of progressive pro-immigrant activists and their conservative immigration-restrictionist opponents. Using twenty months of ethnographic research with five grassroots organizations, Emine Fidan Elcioglu shows how immigration politics has become a substitute for struggles around class inequality among white Americans. She demonstrates how activists mobilized not only to change the rules of immigration but also to experience a change in themselves. Elcioglu finds that the variation in social class and intersectional identity across the two sides mapped onto disparate concerns about state power. As activists strategized ways to transform the scope of the state’s power, they also tried to carve out self-transformative roles for themselves. Provocative and even-handed, Divided by the Wall challenges our understanding of immigration politics in times of growing inequality and insecurity.

Brothers & Fathers

Brothers & Fathers
Author: John A. Esseff
Publisher: EME Press
Total Pages: 622
Release: 2010-12-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0984295364

On the surface, John and George Esseff seem to have traveled very different paths in life: George as a successful scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist with a wife, children, and grandchildren; John as a celibate priest whose life has been spent mostly with the poor. But from their humble beginnings in Depression-era Wilkes-Barre, PA to this day, the Esseff brothers' lives have been very much intertwined. Their shared story takes us from the poorest places on the planet to the bastions of wealth and power, with these remarkable men touching and changing lives all along the way. Gripping and inspirational, this book is the story of faith made real in the lives of two men who are BROTHERS & FATHERS.

Being Available and Reachable

Being Available and Reachable
Author: Mbeanwoah Tazanu
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-06-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9956727229

The book investigates what have become of Cameroonian transnational family and friendship ties in the age of the mobile phone and the internet that make people readily available and reachable. Most theoretical literature states that these tools of sociality cement transnational social relationships through instantaneous interaction. To capture the different experiences and impressions on the significance of these media in easing communication for migrants and non-migrants, Tazanu draws on ethnographic accounts based on his fieldwork in Freiburg (Germany) and Buea (Cameroon). He argues that it is mainly the migrants who maintain or are expected to maintain ties with non-migrants back in Cameroon through calls and material support. The main finding of the study is that cell phones and the internet have facilitated discontents, grudges, insults, fights, avoidance, arguments and estrangement of relationships much more than they have contributed to binding friends or families through direct mediation. Underlying these aspects of distanciation are the high expectations and sometimes contradictory motives for instant virtual interaction. Non-migrants accounts suggest that direct availability and reachability should lead to uninterrupted transnational interaction and also that the cultural practices of remittances from migrants are easily requested and coordinated. Such motives are generally contrary to migrants wishes, willingness or ability to support friends and families in Cameroon. These unexpected outcomes arising from rapid speed of interaction questions the advantages that are often associated with instant sociality across space and time. The finding is a call for the cultural background and life-world experiences of media users to be taken into consideration when theorising the significance of information technology in the debate on media globalisation.

Urban Lives

Urban Lives
Author: Martin Dribe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2024
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0197761097

Through the lens of a Swedish industrial city, Landskrona, Urban Lives looks at economic and demographic change at the micro level to understand the societal transformations that profoundly changed people's lives during the twentieth century. Based an original data infrastructure, the book follows individuals across generations and situates them in their social, institutional, and environmental contexts. Chapter authors provide novel insights into the micro-level foundations of long term economic-demographic processes, and cover important research questions related to health, family, migration, and residential segregation.