Shaping Twenty-first-century Civil Rights Advocacy: Latinos in Metro Atlanta

Abstract

AbstractThis article chronicles the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund's civil rights history in Atlanta and the Southeast from 2000 to 2009 and beyond. It draws on testimonies of maldef officials, as well as pertinent historical, social science, and legal scholarship and media accounts, to reveal changing regional Latino migration and settlement patterns and emerging twenty-first-century legal advocacy strategies. Also covered are organized responses to state and local anti-immigrant ordinances passed after September 11, 2001, resistance to residential and workplace discrimination faced by suburban undocumented immigrants, and the fragile nature of coalitions in the contemporary Latino civil rights movement