Since 2000, approximately 440,000 Mexicans have migrated to the United States every year. Tens of thousands have left children behind in Mexico to do so. For these parents, migration is a sacrifice. What do parents expect to accomplish by dividing their families across borders? How do families manage when they are living apart? More importantly, do parents' relocations yield the intended results? Probing the experiences of migrant parents, children in Mexico, and their caregivers, Joanna Dreby offers an up-close and personal account of the lives of families divided by borders. What she finds is that the difficulties endured by transnational families make it nearly impossible for parents' sacrifices to result in the benefits they expect. Yet, paradoxically, these hardships reinforce family members' commitments to each other. A story both of adversity and the intensity of family ties, Divided by Borders is an engaging and insightful investigation of the ways Mexican families struggle and ultimately persevere in a global economy.

The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico—the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo. Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public. Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division—the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.

Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity is a collection of essays on history, literature and culture by the celebrated commentator on Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture in the United States, Juan Flores. He is the recipient of the prestigious Casa de las Americas award for his monograph on Puerto Rican identity. Included are: ñPuerto Rican Literature in the United States: Stages and Perspectives,î ñThe Insular Vision: Pedreira and the Puerto Rican Misere,î ñNational Culture and Migration: Perspectives of the Puerto Rican Working Class,î ñLiving Borders / Buscando America: Languages of Latino Self Formationî and many others.

"Just a phone call away, but what anguish! As employers of migrants who care for our children, clean our houses, work in fast food restaurants--or on the shop floor--we are so often blind to the sacrifices made by parents who see no other choice but to leave their children back home in Mexico and come to the U.S. for work. With passion and insight, Divided by Borders explores the agony that unfolds between husbands and wives, across generation, and the consequences on children left behind and those who cross the border."--Carol B. Stack, author of All Our Kin and Call To Home "In this compelling, intimate, and heartbreaking look into the lives of Mexican migrants who leave children, Dreby brings an impressive blend of ethnography, interviews, and surveys with parents, children, and caregivers--collected over four years on both sides of the border--to bear. This is a story of migration where parental sacrifice is monumental, yet dreams for intergenerational mobility are ultimately dashed. The work is rich with both sociological insight and policy importance. This is the rare academic work that readers will find hard to put down."--Kathy Edin, author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Choose Motherhood Before Marriage "Joanna Dreby's excellent book illuminates dimensions of migration and transnational life that have remained too often in the dark. Her focus on what happens inside the 'black box' of the migrant family shows how migrants and their children live their lives in difficult circumstances. She deepens our understanding of many important issues, and does so via intimate, ethnographic research. For example, her work sheds light on the gendered practices and ideologies surrounding parental leave taking, and sheds light on the incompatibility of migrant time and developmental time. Her work on the power children wield in the intra-family negotiations on whether and when to reunite, and the long term human cost of migration, is pathbreaking. Watching Joanna Dreby's work develop into this book over the years has been a great joy, and reading it is even more so."--Robert Courtney Smith, Professor of Sociology, Immigration Studies and Public Affairs, Baruch College School of Public Affairs, and Sociology Department, Graduate Center, CUNY "Family separation brought about by labor migration is not new, but hostile immigration policies have made for prolonged separations for parents and children. How do families cope? In this gripping and acutely observed study of Mexican migrant families, Joanna Dreby reveals the multi-faceted challenges facing the parents, their children and teens (who often harbor resentment against parents), and the grandmothers who serve as caregivers 'back home.' This engagingly written book is ideal for classroom adoption, and it will become a classic contribution to the scholarship on families and contemporary immigration."--Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of God's Heart Has No Borders

Borders of Belonging investigates a pressing but previously unexplored aspect of immigration in America—the impact of immigration policies and practices not only on undocumented migrants, but also on their family members, some of whom possess a form of legal status. Heide Castañeda reveals the trauma, distress, and inequalities that occur daily, alongside the stratification of particular family members' access to resources like education, employment, and health care. She also paints a vivid picture of the resilience, resistance, creative responses, and solidarity between parents and children, siblings, and other kin. Castañeda's innovative ethnography combines fieldwork with individuals and family groups to paint a full picture of the experiences of mixed-status families as they navigate the emotional, social, political, and medical difficulties that inevitably arise when at least one family member lacks legal status. Exposing the extreme conditions in the heavily-regulated U.S./Mexico borderlands, this book presents a portentous vision of how the further encroachment of immigration enforcement would affect millions of mixed-status families throughout the country.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of border and boundary enactments in post-war and “deeply divided” societies. By exploring everyday places in post-conflict societies, it critically examines official narratives of how ethno-national divisions arise and are sustained. It challenges traditional accounts regarding the role that international intervention has in producing and/or weakening boundaries in such societies, while questioning clear-cut distinctions between the local and the international.

What do Germany’s memorials, films, artworks, memory debates and national commemorations tell us about the lives of Germans today? How did the Wall in the Head come to replace the Wall that fell in 1989? The old identities of East and West, which all but dissolved in joyous embraces as the Berlin Wall fell, emerged once more after formal re-unification a year later in 1990. 2015 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of that German re-unification. Yet Germany remains divided; a mutual distrust lingers, and national history remains contentious. The material, social, cultural and psychic effects of re-unification on the lives of eastern and western Germans since 1989 all demand again asking fundamental questions about history, social change and ideology. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders puts affective life at the centre of these questions, both in the role affect played in mobilizing East Germans to overthrow their regime and as a sign of disappointment after formal reunification. Using contemporary Germany as a lens the book explores broader debates about borders, memory and subjectivity.