Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States

This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expression. Empirically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix from 1989 to 2001. The article lends support to arguments about the continued centrality of the nation-state in the lives of immigrants

Repensando el rol del gerente financiero

Hasta hace unos veinte años, la ventaja de una empresa estaba centrada en su capital económico, su infraestructura y demás recursos; la dirección se preocupaba por obtener su materia prima al menor costo y tiempo. En la actualidad esos temas continúan siendo importantes, pero son relativamente fáciles de lograr pues los mercados se han liberalizado, las fronteras económicas han caído y los medios de comunicación permiten el comercio más fluido, por lo que el talento humano se ha vuelto el eje central. Sus habilidades, conocimientos y actitudes representan una clave para el éxito de las empresas, tanto que si habláramos en términos contables, diríamos que es el activo más valioso y costoso de gestionar, especialmente cuando se dan altos índices de rotación. No obstante lo anterior, muchas empresas, especialmente en Latinoamérica, aún no terminan de reconocer esta aseveración y descuidan la labor de gestionarlo correctamente, pese a que existen estudios que muestran al talento humano como una ventaja competitiva, principalmente para aquellas cuyos procesos son muy complejos, su cadena de valori muy particular, y las horas invertidas en entrenamiento y preparación resultan ser de alto costo. El Gerente Financiero debe ser el primero en reconocer la importancia de la gestión adecuada de su equipo de trabajo y de la compañía, por ser quien cuantifica los gastos del proceso de reclutamiento, selección, contratación e inducción del personal; sin contar que en este proceso están inmersas la seguridad y confiabilidad de la información del negocio, la lealtad y fidelización del personal, entre otros. Además, identificar al área de Finanzas como clave, cuya rotación continua puede representar un alto riesgoii por los factores mencionados, especialmente su propio rol. Usted se preguntará por qué el Director Financiero y no el Director General, o el Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Bueno, todas las áreas que conforman la empresa contribuyen en su éxito, pero en esta investigación nos concentraremos en el desempeño del Gerente Financiero o Chief Financial Officer (CFO, por sus siglas en inglés), debido a la evolución de su rol durante las últimas dos décadas, que le demanda un mayor protagonismo en el mundo globalizado actual; pasando de ser el gestor tradicional de las consecuencias financieras de las decisiones directivas, a contribuir con las diferentes áreas, asesorándolas para la toma de las mejores decisiones . En muy poco tiempo sus funciones han cambiado, pasando de dar seguimiento a los costos a tener el control absoluto sobre éstos; de solicitar la información a brindarla; de divergir en los proyectos de inversión de largo plazo y con mayor riesgo a respaldarlos; no se trata únicamente de alcanzar objetivos, como la implementación y ejecución de normas de gestión y control, sino de contribuir en el cumplimiento de la meta primordial “la supervivencia de la empresa”, además de poder brindar los lineamientos de su rumbo financiero. Por tal razón, el CFO debe aprender a gestionarse a sí mismo; a conocer las tendencias de los mercados, los gustos de los consumidores, las preferencias e intereses de los inversionistas y demás stakeholdersiii, y poder contribuir con el crecimiento y continuidad de la empresa, pero sobre todo, garantizar su propia continuidad, con un rol que cada día se vuelve más demandante y competitivo, siendo necesario conocer qué hacer para lograrlo, y que se resume a continuación

In These Neoliberal Times: Blackness in the Multicultural Costa Rican Nation

The socio-­‐economic restructuring that occurred in Central America in the aftermath of the civil wars led to the rise of neoliberal discourses and multicultural discussions. This rhetoric resulted in a new “awareness” of cultural diversity and ethnic pluralism, and led to the emergence of multicultural initiatives at local and national levels. The spillover effect of such projects on contemporary literary production in noteworthy, particularly when it involves narratives that aim to rewrite History from a black perspective. This essay focuses on two Costa Rican novels and the strategies they use to take their intended readers to “black times” and “black places” on the Atlantic Coast, enveloping them in a wider neoliberal and multiculturalist project that aims to reassess both national and regional identities

Making Immigrants into Criminals: Legal Processes of Criminalization in the Post-IIRIRA Era

During a post-election TV interview that aired mid-November 2016, then President-Elect Donald Trump claimed that there are millions of so-called “criminal aliens” living in the United States: “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate.” This claim is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. A recent report by the Migration Policy Institute suggests that just over 800,000 (or 7 percent) of the 11 million undocumented individuals in the United States have criminal records. Of this population, 300,000 individuals are felony offenders and 390,000 are serious misdemeanor offenders — tallies which exclude more than 93 percent of the resident undocumented population (Rosenblum 2015, 22-24).[1] Moreover, the Congressional Research Service found that 140,000 undocumented migrants — or slightly more than 1 percent of the undocumented population — are currently serving time in prison in the United States (Kandel 2016). The facts, therefore, are closer to what Doris Meissner, former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner, argues: that the number of “criminal aliens” arrested as a percentage of all fugitive immigration cases is “modest” (Meissner et al. 2013, 102-03). The facts notwithstanding, President Trump’s fictional tally is important to consider because it conveys an intent to produce at least this many people who — through discourse and policy — can be criminalized and incarcerated or deported as “criminal aliens.” In this article, we critically review the literature on immigrant criminalization and trace the specific laws that first linked and then solidified the association between undocumented immigrants and criminality. To move beyond a legal, abstract context, we also draw on our quantitative and qualitative research to underscore ways immigrants experience criminalization in their family, school, and work lives. The first half of our analysis is focused on immigrant criminalization from the late 1980s through the Obama administration, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement practices first engineered in the 1990s. Most significant, we argue, are the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). The second section of our analysis explores the social impacts of immigrant criminalization, as people’s experiences bring the consequences of immigrant criminalization most clearly into focus. We approach our analysis of the production of criminality of immigrants through the lens of legal violence (Menjivar and Abrego 2012), a concept designed to understand the immediate and long-term harmful effects that the immigration regime makes possible. Instead of narrowly focusing only on the physical injury of intentional acts to cause harm, this concept broadens the lens to include less visible sources of violence that reside in institutions and structures and without identifiable perpetrators or incidents to be tabulated. This violence comes from structures, laws, institutions, and practices that, similar to acts of physical violence, leave indelible marks on individuals and produce social suffering. In examining the effects of today’s ramped up immigration enforcement, we turn to this concept to capture the violence that this regime produces in the lives of immigrants. Immigrant criminalization has underpinned US immigration policy over the last several decades. The year 1996, in particular, was a signal year in the process of criminalizing immigrants. Having 20 years to trace the connections, it becomes evident that the policies of 1996 used the term “criminal alien” as a strategic sleight of hand. These laws established the concept of “criminal alienhood” that has slowly but purposefully redefined what it means to be unauthorized in the United States such that criminality and unauthorized status are too often considered synonymous (Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015). Policies that followed in the 2000s, moreover, cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a “criminal alien,” such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag. Simultaneously and in contrast, the practices that produce “criminal aliens” are coherent insofar as they condition immigrant life in the United States in now predictable ways. This solidity allows us to turn in our conclusion to some thoughts about the likely future of US immigration policy and practice under President Trump. [1] These numbers are based on the assumption that “unauthorized immigrants and lawful noncitizens commit crimes at similar rates” (Rosenblum 2015, 22). However, there is research that provides good support that criminality among the undocumented is lower than for the foreign-born population overall (Rumbaut 2009; Ewing, Martínez, and Rumbaut 2015)

Transformative Effects of Immigration Law: Immigrants’ Personal and Social Metamorphoses through Regularization

This article examines the enduring alterations in behaviors, practices, and self-image that immigrants’ evolving knowledge of and participation in the legalization process facilitate. Relying on close to 200 interviews with immigrants from several national origin groups in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the authors identify transformations that individuals enact in their intimate and in their civic lives as they come in contact with U.S. immigration law en route to and as a result of regularization. Findings illustrate the power of the state to control individuals’ activities and mind-sets in ways that are not explicitly formal or bureaucratic. The barriers the state creates, which push immigrants to the legal margins, together with anti-immigrant hostility, create conditions under which immigrants are likely to undertake transformative, lasting changes in their lives. These transformations reify notions of the deserving immigrant vis-à-vis the law, alter the legalization process for the immigrant population at large, and, ultimately, shape integration dynamics

Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants

This article analyzes how Central American immigrants in tenuous legal statuses experience current immigration laws. Based on ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2009 with immigrants in Los Angeles and Phoenix and individuals in sending communities, this study reveals how the convergence and implementation of immigration and criminal law constitute forms of violence. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the authors use the analytic category “legal violence” to capture the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law. The analysis focuses on three central and interrelated areas of immigrants’ lives—work, family, and schooling—to expose how the criminalization of immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels is not only exclusionary but also generates violent effects for individual immigrants and their families, affecting everyday lives and long-term incorporation processes

Evaluación de resultados en siete casos de cirugía para epilepsia médicamente intratable en pacientes de edad pediátrica en El Salvador

La epilepsia es un problema global que afecta a pacientes de toda edad y de ambos sexos. Entre los pacientes más afectados se encuentran aquellos menores de edad, particularmente aquellos en edad pediátrica. Según un estudio realizado en el Hospital Nacional de Niños Benjamín Bloom (HNNBB), en El Salvador existen datos que revelan que la epilepsia corresponde a un 55% del total de la consulta neurológica (Valencia C., 1995). Durante el año 2008, según las estadísticas del hospital, se contabilizó un aproximado de 2,065 pacientes con diagnóstico de epilepsias parciales