This book is a highly original study of transnationalism among immigrants from the county of Taishan, from which, until 1965, a high percentage of the Chinese in the United States originated. The author vividly depicts the continuing ties between Taishanese remaining in China and their kinsmen seeking their fortune in "Gold Mountain."

A New History of Asian America is a fresh and up-to-date history of Asians in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on current scholarship, Shelley Lee brings forward the many strands of Asian American history, highlighting the distinctive nature of the Asian American experience while placing the narrative in the context of the major trajectories and turning points of U.S. history. Covering the history of Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Southeast Indians as well as Chinese and Japanese, the book gives full attention to the diversity within Asian America. A robust companion website features additional resources for students, including primary documents, a timeline, links, videos, and an image gallery. From the building of the transcontinental railroad to the celebrity of Jeremy Lin, people of Asian descent have been involved in and affected by the history of America. A New History of Asian America gives twenty-first-century students a clear, comprehensive, and contemporary introduction to this vital history.

Crossing anthropology with urban studies and architecture, this is the first book to explore how Mexican migrants are building houses and other structures in Mexico with the money they earn in the US. The author defines this as the development of remittance space, a phenomenon that is changing the landscapes and economies of villages and towns throughout Mexicoand, not incidentally, of several US cities as well, including LA and Chicago. While remittance building is not unique to Mexico, the remittance corridor from the US to our southern neighbor is the largest in the world: a flow of about 22 billion dollars in 2010 alone. Lopez has identified a correspondence between this monetary flow and the construction boom in rural Mexico. In fact, she proposes that a Mexican s capacity to build in rural villages itself motivates migration and changes social and cultural life for migrants and their families. Through careful ethnographic and architectural analysis, Lopez brings migrant hometowns to life and positions them in larger critical debates about migration. The research was conducted on both sides of the border: Lopez worked and lived with migrants in Los Angeles and Chicago, and she pursued her subject throughout the south of Jalisco, not far from Guadalajara. This is a dangerous area: drug wars are raging, and it takes courage and care to spend time there, a matter covered in the book."

The term “Heartland” in American cultural context conventionally tends to provoke imageries of corn-fields, flat landscape, hog farms, and rural communities, along with ideas of conservatism, homogeneity, and isolation. But as the Midwestern and Southern states experienced more rapid population growth than that in California, Hawaii, and New York in the recent decades, the Heartland region has emerged as a growing interest of Asian American studies. Focused on the Heartland cities of Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri, this book draws rich evidences from various government records, personal stories and interviews, and media reports, and sheds light on the commonalities and uniqueness of the region, as compared to the Asian American communities on the East and West Coast and Hawaii. Some of the poignant stories such as “the Three Moy Brothers,” “Alla Lee,” and “Save Sam Wah Laundry” told in the book are powerful reflections of Asian American history.

Reading Chinese Transnationalisms responds to the growing interest in transnational cultural studies by examining Chinese transnationalism from a variety of perspectives. In interrogating social practices and literary and filmic texts which frequently cross national borders in imagining Chineseness, the contributors to this volume also challenge received notions of Chinese transnationalism, opening up new perspectives on the topic. The structure of the book is clearly subdivided into sections on society, literature, and films for quick reference, and each essay is written in accessible language without sacrificing intellectual rigor and critical relevance. The international list of contributors and the wide-ranging subjects they address make Reading Chinese Transnationalisms a unique work in its field. This volume will appeal to all with an interest in Chinese transnationalism, and in particular those who come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and social science.

“The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied,” writes Jean Barman, “and it is up to each of us to act as best we can.” The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class. Working to recognize past actors that have been underrepresented in mainstream histories, Barman’s focus is BC on “the cusp of contact.” The essays in this collection include fascinating, though largely forgotten, life stories of the frontier—that space between contact and settlement, where, for a brief moment, anything seemed possible. This volume, featuring over thirty archival photographs and illustrations, makes these important and very readable essays accessible to a broader audience for the first time.