In Proving Patriotismo, the authors examine Latino military recruitment and question whether military service is perceived and functions as a vehicle by which Latinos in the United States can be accepted as first-class citizens and improve their economic station? This work provides the first empirical analysis of the poverty draft by asking over 1,800 Latino high school students in South Texas about their experiences with military recruitment. The authors then employ additional original interview data with high school faculty and administration to assess how the military seeks to attract Latino students. Veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces are also surveyed to understand their military experience and assess whether their service improved their acceptance as American and improved their post-service quality of life. The work concludes with an examination of national survey data where Latinos provide their views of the U.S. military and Latino military service. The result of this work is a complex picture where the intersection of poverty, ethnicity and patriotism demonstrates why the U.S. military targets a growing Latino population for recruitment and why Latinos in the United States seeking to improve their economic station and their acceptance as American are open to these overtures.

An in-depth and troubling look at a little-known group of immigrants—non-citizen soldiers who enlist in the US military. While the popular image of the US military is one of citizen soldiers protecting their country, the reality is that nearly 5 percent of all first-time military recruits are noncitizens. Their reasons for enlisting are myriad, but many are motivated by the hope of gaining citizenship in return for their service. In Green Card Soldier, Sofya Aptekar talks to more than seventy noncitizen soldiers from twenty-three countries, including some who were displaced by conflict after the US military entered their homeland. She identifies a disturbing pattern: the US military’s intervention in foreign countries drives migration, which in turn supplies the military with a cheap and desperate labor pool—thereby perpetuating the cycle. As Aptekar discovers, serving in the US military is no guarantee against deportation, and yet the promise of citizenship and the threat of deportation are the carrot and stick used to discipline noncitizen soldiers. Viewed at various times as security threats and members of a model minority, immigrant soldiers sometimes face intense discrimination from their native-born colleagues and superiors. Their stories—stitched through with colonial legacies, white supremacy, exploitation, and patriarchy—show how the tensions between deservingness and suspicion shape their enlistment, service, and identities. Giving voice to this little-heard group of immigrants, Green Card Soldier shines a cold light on the complex workings of US empire, globalized militarism, and citizenship.

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.

This fascinating account of how two young Americans turned traitor during the Cold War is an “absolutely smashing real-life spy story” (The New York Times Book Review). At the height of the Cold War, some of the nation’s most precious secrets passed through a CIA contractor in Southern California. Only a handful of employees were cleared to handle the intelligence that came through the Black Vault. One of them was Christopher John Boyce, a hard-partying genius with a sky-high IQ, a passion for falconry, and little love for his country. Security at the Vault was so lax, Boyce couldn’t help but be tempted. And when he gave in, the fate of the free world would hang in the balance. With the help of his best friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, a drug dealer with connections south of the border, Boyce began stealing classified documents and selling them to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. It was an audacious act of treason, committed by two spoiled young men who were nearly always drunk, stoned, or both—and were about to find themselves caught in the middle of a fight between the CIA and the KGB. This Edgar Award–winning book was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed film starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn—a true story as thrilling as any dreamed up by Ian Fleming or John le Carré. Before Edward Snowden, there were Boyce and Lee, two of the most unlikely spies in the history of the Cold War.