2021 — Silver Medal, Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book – International Latino Book Awards, Latino Literacy Now An in-depth look at an emerging Latino presence in Orlando, Florida, where Puerto Ricans and others navigate differences of race, class, and place of origin in their struggle for social, economic, and political belonging. Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, Patricia Silver situates her findings in Orlando’s historically black-white racial landscape, post-1960s claims to “color-blindness,” and neoliberal celebrations of individualism. Through the voices of diverse participants, Silver brings anthropological attention to the question of how social difference affects collective identification and political practice. Sunbelt Diaspora asks what constitutes community and how criteria for membership and legitimate representation are negotiated.

Puerto Ricans make up half of Orlando-area Latinos, arriving from Puerto Rico as well as from other long-established diaspora communities to a place where Latino politics has long been about Cubans in Miami. Together with other Latinos from multiple places, Puerto Ricans bring diverse experiences of race and class to this Sunbelt city. Tracing the emergence of the Puerto Rican and Latino presence in Orlando from the 1940s through an ethnographic moment of twenty-first-century electoral redistricting, Sunbelt Diaspora provides a timely prism for viewing how differences of race, class, and place play out in struggles to claim political, social, and economic ground for Latinos. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, oral history, and archival research, Patricia Silver situates her findings in Orlando’s historically black-white racial landscape, post-1960s claims to “color-blindness,” and neoliberal celebrations of individualism. Through the voices of diverse participants, Silver brings anthropological attention to the question of how social difference affects collective identification and political practice. Sunbelt Diaspora asks what constitutes community and how criteria for membership and legitimate representation are negotiated.

"On July 4th, 1876, during the centennial celebration of U.S. independence, the city of Key West held a different type of celebration. In some areas in post-Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from 4th of July festivities, which would lead to reflecting on the events of the Civil War. However, Key West's celebration, led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos, marked the centennial in the halls of an institution that boasted an interracial school and proudly hung a Cuban flag outside its building. Deep into the Radical Reconstruction era, this represented one of the most profound exercises in interracial democracy. Gomez explores how race shaped the first Cuban-American communities in South Florida, specifically in Key West and Tampa, which were the locations of the first groups of Cuban Americans, with race being a central factor of unity and division during Radical Reconstruction, the Cuban independence movement, Jim Crow, and Cuba's 1912 Race War. While looking at factors such as ethnicity, gender, labor and foreign policy, Gomez makes the argument that Cuban-American interracial unity in the nineteenth century disintegrated due to the racism held by white Cuban-Americans, which then led Black Cubans to organize with Florida's multiethnic Black communities"--

While federal action on immigration faces an uncertain future, states, cities and suburban municipalities craft their own responses to immigration. Twenty-First-Century Gateways, focuses on the fastest-growing immigrant populations in metropolitan areas with previously low levels of immigration—places such as Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Dallas-Fort Worth, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. These places are typical of the newest, largest immigrant gateways to America, characterized by post-WWII growth, recent burgeoning immigrant populations, and predominantly suburban settlement. More immigrants, both legal and undocumented, arrived in the United States during the 1990s than in any other decade on record. That growth has continued more slowly since the Great Recession; nonetheless the U.S. immigrant population has doubled since 1990. Many immigrants continued to move into traditional urban centers such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but burgeoning numbers were attracted by the economic and housing opportunities of fast-growing metropolitan areas and their largely suburban settings. The pace of change in this new geography of immigration has presented many local areas with challenges—social, fiscal, and political. Edited by Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell, Twenty-First-Century Gateways provides in-depth, comparative analysis of immigration trends and local policy responses in America's newest gateways. The case examples by a group of leading multidisciplinary immigration scholars explore the challenges of integrating newcomers in the specific gateways, as well as their impact on suburban infrastructure such as housing, transportation, schools, health care, economic development, and public safety. The changes and trends dissected in this book present a critically important understanding of the reshaping of the United States today and the future impact of

This “important and well-researched” study of 1960s urban Latino activism and religion is “brimming with the ideas and voices of . . . Latinx activists” (Llana Barber, author of Latino City). In the late 1960s, American cities found themselves in steep decline, with poor and working-class families hit the hardest. Many urban religious institutions debated whether to move to the suburbs. Against the backdrop of the Black and Brown Power movements, which challenged economic inequality and white supremacy, young Latino radicals began occupying churches and disrupting services to compel church communities to join their protests against urban renewal, poverty, police brutality, and racism. Apostles of Change tells the story of these occupations and establishes their context within the urban crisis. It underscores the tensions they created and the activists’ bold, new vision for the church and the world. Through case studies from Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston, Felipe Hinojosa reveals how Latino freedom movements crossed the boundaries of faith and politics. He argues that understanding these radical politics is essential to understanding the dynamic changes in Latino religious groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

Mexican Waves is the fascinating history of how borderlands radio stations shaped the identity of an entire region as they addressed the needs of the local population and fluidly reached across borders to the United States. In so doing, radio stations created a new market of borderlands consumers and worked both within and outside the constraints of Mexican and U.S. laws. Historian Sonia Robles examines the transnational business practices of Mexican radio entrepreneurs between the Golden Age of radio and the early years of television history. Intersecting Mexican history and diaspora studies with communications studies, this book explains how Mexican radio entrepreneurs targeted the Mexican population in the United States decades before U.S. advertising agencies realized the value of the Spanish-language market. Robles’s robust transnational research weaves together histories of technology, performance, entrepreneurship, and business into a single story. Examining the programming of northern Mexican commercial radio stations, the book shows how radio stations from Tijuana to Matamoros courted Spanish-language listeners in the U.S. Southwest and local Mexican audiences between 1930 and 1950. Robles deftly demonstrates Mexico’s role in creating the borderlands, adding texture and depth to the story. Scholars and students of radio, Spanish-language media in the United States, communication studies, Mexican history, and border studies will see how Mexican radio shaped the region’s development and how transnational listening communities used broadcast media’s unique programming to carve out a place for themselves as consumers and citizens of Mexico and the United States.

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country. Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.