The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954 offers a comprehensive history of the INS in the southwestern borderlands, tracing the ways in which local immigration officials both made and enforced the nation's immigration laws.

At a time when migration is mostly discussed in terms of “conflict” and “crisis”, it is decidedly important to acknowledge the discursive traditions, narrative patterns, and conceptual categories that continue to inform how migration is represented, analyzed and theorized in contemporary Europe. This volume focuses on the potential of artistic and critical practices to challenge hegemonic framings of migration and embrace the ambivalence inherent in migration as a conflictual, often violent, yet also liberating uprooting. By placing special emphasis on “peripheral” perspectives and subject positions, the volume provides new insights into topics such as belonging and exclusion, the “migrant crisis”, and memory. By bringing into dialogue creative practices and academic discourses, it explores how new modes of seeing and theorizing may emerge through experiences and representations of migration. Situated within the field of literary and cultural studies, it complements historical and social analyses in the emerging interdisciplinary field of migration studies.

The book investigates the formation of the Cristero diaspora, a network of Mexican emigrants, exiles, and refugees across the United States who supported a Mexican Catholic uprising during the late 1920s. These emigrants had a profound and enduring impact on Mexican American community formation, political affiliations, and religious devotion.

Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

The present volume explores through cultural and literary representations the contributions of women to the construction of knowledge in an ever changing, global world as migrant subjects. The essays contained in this book also focus on the female body as a site of physical violence and abuse, fighting prevalent stereotypes about women’s representations and identities. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. Women’s strategies for building possible identities are seen to be based on their own experiences, seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body within the western male imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal identities. The different articles contained in this volume examine issues of gender and boundaries, the realities of women as colonial and postcolonial subjects, and darker realities such as alienation and discrimination as a result of migration, racism, and colonization analysed through a variety of critical perspectives. The gendered, raced, classed dimensions and mixed heritages not only of white women but also of women of the African Diaspora; these are important issues for the construction of knowledge and identity in our present multicultural societies, and can potentially change the ways we conceptualize, situate and engage the humanities in our scholarly work and in our social and cultural policies. These women, their presumed sexuality and their capacity to produce hybrid subjects, as well as their supposed irrationality make them a singularly disruptive figure in our contemporary world; this interpretation has its roots in the treatment of women in colonial times, especially when they were out of the margins of respectable society. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholarly and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies, marked by the intercultural exchanges of migratory subjects from a gender perspective.