Color/Identity/Justice: Chicano Trials

This Book Review seeks to rectify in small measure the omission of color from American documents of black/white legal and political struggle. Enlarging the spectrum of struggle beyond the black/white paradigm not only works to correct the historical record of color in law, but also helps to advance the progress of color in society. As a starting point for this revision, the review turns to Ian F. Haney Lopez's new book, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Racism on Trial broadens and deepens the study of indigenous and immigrant legal and political struggle by documenting the defense of the Chicano movement in its rise out of the East Los Angeles Mexican community of California amid the turmoil of the 1960s

The Citizenship of Others

The liberal notion of citizenship provides equality to all citizens, without regard to ascriptive or other differentiating characteristics. In this sense, citizenship promises to be dispositive of the treatment of all individuals who enjoy it; citizenship is uniform, unalloyed, and indivisible. These are the attributes of citizenship within a liberal national system, governing the relationships between citizens and the state, and among citizens within the state. But must these characteristics extend into the international realm, or may states choose to look beyond the mantle of citizenship when evaluating the citizens of others? And if states do choose to differentiate, and thereby discriminate, among the citizens of others, what obligations do those citizens\u27 states bear? This Article considers two instances in which the formal equality of citizenship is jeopardized by discrimination on the basis of national origin (the place of one\u27s birth) and ancestry (the place of one\u27s ancestors\u27 birth)

The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras

[Excerpt] This book describes how people cope with rapid social change. It tells the story of the small town of La Quebrada, Honduras, which, over a five-year period from 2001-2006, transformed from a relatively isolated community of small-scale coffee farmers into a hotbed of migration from Honduras to the United States and back.1 During this time, the everyday lives of people in La Quebrada became connected to the global economy in a manner that was far different, and far more intimate, than anything they had experienced in the past. Townspeople did not generally view this transformation as a positive step toward progress or development. They saw migration as a temporary response to economic crisis, even as it became an ever more inescapable part of their livelihood. The chapters that follow trace the effects of migration across various domains of local life — including politics, religion, and family dynamics — describing how individuals in one community adapt to economic change. This is not a story about an egalitarian little Eden being corrupted by the forces of capitalist modernization. La Quebrada\u27s residents have lived with social inequality, violence, political conflict, and economic instability for generations. As coffee farmers, their fortunes have long been tied to the vicissitudes of global markets. However, the social changes wrought by migration presented qualitatively new challenges, as a functioning local economy became dependent on migrants working in distant places such as Long Island and South Dakota who lived in ways that most people in La Quebrada struggled to comprehend or explain. The new reality of migration created a sense of confusion that was especially strong in the early stages of La Quebrada\u27s migration boom, when communication between villagers and migrants was rare. The decline of coffee markets and the rise of the migration economy happened so quickly and chaotically that people struggled to understand, evaluate, and give meaning to the changes they wereexperiencing. Therefore, migration was experienced as sociocultural disintegration in 2003-2005, when the bulk of the research for this study was conducted

The decline of the 'WASP' in Canada and the United States

Book synopsis: The impact of liberal globalization and multiculturalism means that nations are under pressure to transform their national identities from an ethnic to a civic mode. This has led, in many cases, to dominant ethnic decline, but also to its peripheral revival in the form of far right politics. At the same time, the growth of mass democracy and the decline of post-colonial and Cold War state unity in the developing world has opened the floodgates for assertions of ethnic dominance. This book investigates both tendencies and argues forcefully for the importance of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary world

Unspeakable Suspicions: Challenging the Racist Consensual Encounter

[Excerpt] In recent years, law enforcement officials have honed a new technique for fighting the War on Drugs: the suspicionless police sweep of stations and vehicles involved in interstate mass transportation. Single officers or groups of officers approach unfortunate individuals in busses, trains, stations and airline terminals. A targeted traveller is requested to show identification and tickets, explain the purpose of his or her travels, and finally, at times, to consent to a luggage search. As long as a reasonable person would understand that he or she could refuse to cooperate, the encounter between the law-enforcement official and the traveller is deemed consensual, not subject to the constraints of the Fourth Amendment