Undocumented Storytellers

Undocumented Storytellers
Author: Sarah C. Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190917156

"Undocumented Storytellers offers a critical exploration of the ways immigrants without legal status harness the power of storytelling as a means of activism. The book offers broad insights into the role of strategic framing and autobiographical story sharing in advocacy and social movements"--

My (Underground) American Dream

My (Underground) American Dream
Author: Julissa Arce
Publisher: Center Street
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1455540250

A National Bestseller! What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States? JULISSA ARCE knows firsthand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple-and often just plain wrong. On the surface, Arce's story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends. From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce-the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs-had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today- people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. By opening up about the story of her successes, her heartbreaks, and her long-fought journey to emerge from the shadows and become an American citizen, Arce shows us the true cost of achieving the American dream-from the perspective of a woman who had to scale unseen and unimaginable walls to get there.

Dear America: Young Readers' Edition

Dear America: Young Readers' Edition
Author: Jose Antonio Vargas
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0062914618

In this young readers’ adaptation of his adult memoir Dear America, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas tells his story, in light of the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Jose Antonio Vargas was only twelve years old when he was brought to the United States from the Philippines to live with his grandparents. He didn’t know it, but he was sent to the U.S. illegally. When he applied for a learner’s permit, he learned the truth, and he spent the next almost twenty years keeping his immigration status a secret. Hiding in plain sight, he was writing for some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country. Only after publicly admitting his undocumented status—risking his career and personal safety—was Vargas able to live his truth. This book asks questions including, How do you define who is an American? How do we decide who gets to be a citizen? What happens to those who enter the U.S. without documentation? By telling his personal story and presenting facts without easy answers, Jose Antonio Vargas sheds light on an issue that couldn’t be more relevant.

Documenting the Undocumented

Documenting the Undocumented
Author: Marta Caminero-Santangelo
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813063361

Looking at the work of Junot Díaz, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and other Latino/a authors who are U.S. citizens, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines how writers are increasingly expressing their solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Through storytelling, these writers create community and a sense of peoplehood that includes non-citizen Latino/as. This volume also foregrounds the narratives of unauthorized migrants themselves, showing how their stories are emerging into the public sphere. Immigration and citizenship are multifaceted issues, and the voices are myriad. They challenge common interpretations of "illegal" immigration, explore inevitable traumas and ethical dilemmas, protest their own silencing in immigration debates, and even capitalize on the topic for the commercial market. Yet these texts all seek to affect political discourse by advancing the possibility of empathy across lines of ethnicity and citizenship status. As border enforcement strategies escalate along with political rhetoric, detentions, and deaths, these counternarratives are more significant than ever before, and their perspectives cannot be ignored. What we are witnessing, argues Caminero-Santangelo, is a mass mobilization of stories. This growing body of literature is critical to understanding not only the Latino/a immigrant experience but also alternative visions of nation and belonging.

Underground America

Underground America
Author: Peter Orner
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786632268

These remarkable oral histories of undocumented men and women struggling to carve a life for themselves in the U.S. “[fill] a gap in our understanding of [immigration] by humanizing the people at the center of an otherwise cold debate” (Huffington Post) They arrive from around the world for countless reasons. Many come simply to make a living. Others are fleeing persecution in their native countries. Millions of immigrants risk deportation and imprisonment by living in the U.S. without legal status. They are living underground, with little protection from exploitation at the hands of human smugglers, employers, or law enforcement. Underground America presents the remarkable stories of U.S. immigrants. Among the narrators: Farid, an Iranian-American business owner who employs a number of American citizens while he himself remains undocumented. A critic of the Iranian government, he fears for his safety if he is deported to his native country. Diana, who along with thousands of other Latino workers helped rebuild the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. After completing her work, she and many others were detained and imprisoned for not having proper documentation. Liso, who was enticed to come to the United States as a religious missionary, but on arrival was forced into unpaid domestic labor. Underground America is part of the Voice of Witness book series—co-founded by acclaimed author Dave Eggers—which uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world.

Dear America

Dear America
Author: Jose Antonio Vargas
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062851365

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American.” —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow “l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured.” —Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins “This book couldn’t be more timely and more necessary.” —Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. “This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.” —Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations

Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational subjectivities, cultural expressions, and political contestations
Author: Lina Rincón
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031217845

This book focuses our attention on yet another community that has been scantily represented in Latino/a/x studies scholarship. US Colombians are no longer content to be characterized as “the other Latinos,” and the editors of this special issue make the case that study of US Colombianidades enhances and productively troubles Latino/a/x studies. This engaging set of essays highlights the rich diversity of US Colombianidades as well as the group’s similarities and differences with other Latino/a/x groups. With its innovative cultural studies and social sciences perspectives and interpretive theories, this volume offers a deep dive into issues such as how racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic realities shape US Colombian experience; the representation of US Colombians in popular culture; interethnic relations between Colombians and other Latina/o/xs; the political participation of Colombians in US electoral politics; Colombian transnational understandings of identity; and much more. I want to thank the editors of this special issue—Lina Rincón, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda—for curating a set of articles that will most certainly inspire Latino/a/x studies scholars to expand our notions of Latinidades and be attentive to the ways in which a focus on US Colombianidades complicates and enriches our field. Previously published in Latino Studies Volume 18, issue 3, September 2020

Symbolism 2020

Symbolism 2020
Author: Rüdiger Ahrens
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110716968

This special anniversary volume of Symbolism explores the nexus between symbolic signification and the future from an interdisciplinary perspective. How, contributors ask, has the future been variously rendered in symbolic terms? How do symbols and symbolic reference shape our ideas of the future? To what extent are symbols constitutive of futures, and to what extent do they restrain communication about what is possible and the imagination of fundamental change? Moreover, how have symbolic practices shaped not only artistic representations of the future, but also scientific attempts at forecasting and modelling it? What, then, is the relevance of symbolism for negotiations of the future in cultural and academic production? In essays ranging from literary and film studies to the philosophy of art and ecological modelling, the volume seeks to lay groundwork in theorizing and historicising ‘symbols of the future’ as much as ‘the future of symbolism’.

Children of the Land

Children of the Land
Author: Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062825607

An NPR Best Book of the Year A 2020 International Latino Book Award Finalist An Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence. “You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.” When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary. With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor. Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.