GFP Alum Books

From Deportation To Prison: The Poplitics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

Patrisia Macías-Rojas
2016

By Patrisia Macías-Rojas. Criminal prosecutions for immigration offenses have more than doubled over the last two decades, as national debates about immigration and criminal justice reforms became headline topics. What lies behind this unprecedented increase?

From Deportation to Prison unpacks how the incarceration of over two million people in the United States gave impetus to a federal immigration initiative—The Criminal Alien Program (CAP)—designed to purge non-citizens from dangerously overcrowded jails and prisons. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic and...

The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules: Latinos and African Americans in South Los Angeles

Cid Gregory Martinez
2016

By Cid Gregory Martinez. South Los Angeles is often seen as ground zero for inter-racial conflict and violence in the United States. Since the 1940s, South LA has been predominantly a low-income African American neighborhood, and yet since the early 1990s Latino immigrants—mostly from Mexico and many undocumented—have moved in record numbers to the area. Given that more than a quarter million people live in South LA and that poverty rates exceed 30 percent, inter-racial conflict and violence surprises no one. The real question is: why hasn't there been more? Through vivid...

Hard Work In Not Enough: Gender and Racial Inequality In An Urban Workspace

Katrinell M. Davis
2017

By Katrinell M. Davis. Drawing on archival material and interviews with African American women transit workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Katrinell Davis grapples with our understanding of mobility as it intersects with race and gender in the postindustrial and post–civil rights United States. Considering the consequences of declining working conditions within the public transit workplace of Alameda County, Davis illustrates how worker experience--on and off the job--has been undermined by workplace norms and administrative practices designed to address flagging...

Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco

Els De Graauw
2016

By Els De Graauw. More than half of the 41 million foreign-born individuals in the United States today are noncitizens, half have difficulty with English, a quarter are undocumented, and many are poor. As a result, most immigrants have few opportunities to make their voices heard in the political process. Nonprofits in many cities have stepped into this gap to promote the integration of disadvantaged immigrants. They have done so despite notable constraints on their political activities, including limits on their lobbying and partisan electioneering, limited organizational...

Política: Nuevomexicanos and American Political Incorporation, 1821-1910

Phillip B. Gonzales
2016

By Phillip B. Gonzales. Política offers a stunning revisionist understanding of the early political incorporation of Mexican-origin peoples into the U.S. body politic in the nineteenth century. Historical sociologist Phillip B. Gonzales reexamines the fundamental issue in New Mexico’s history, namely, the dramatic shift in national identities initiated by Nuevomexicanos when their province became ruled by the United States.

Gonzales provides an insightful, rigorous, and controversial interpretation of how Nuevomexicano political competition was woven into...

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora

Jualynne E. Dodson
2019

Edited by William Ackah, Jualynne E. Dodson, R. Drew Smith. Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings.

Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia

Willow Lung-Amam
2017

By Willow Lung-Amam. Beyond the gilded gates of Google, little has been written about the suburban communities of Silicon Valley. Over the past several decades, the region’s booming tech economy spurred rapid population growth, increased racial diversity, and prompted an influx of immigration, especially among highly skilled and educated migrants from China, Taiwan, and India. At the same time, the response to these newcomers among long-time neighbors and city officials revealed complex attitudes in even the most well-heeled and diverse communities....

Mass Incarceration: Keynotes in Criminology and Criminal Justice Series

Keramet Reiter
2017

By Keramet Reiter. In this brief, timely text, Keramet Reiter explores the least visible, but arguably most important, characteristics of mass incarceration in the United States: the systematic constriction of prisoners' constitutional rights; the treatment of the mentally ill in prison; the long-term consequences of having served time in prison; the problem of prisoner disenfranchisement; and the privatization of multiple aspects of the prison industry. Each chapter begins with a narrative account of one individual's experience within the prison system, drawn from actual...

Claiming Home, Shaping Community: Testimonios de los valles

Gloria H. Cuadraz
Yolanda Flores
2017

Edited by Gloria H. Cuadraz and Yolanda Flores. To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community shares testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican-origin people who left the rural, agricultural Imperial and San Joaquín Valleys to pursue higher education at a University of California campus.

While symbolically their journeys embody the master...

23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

Keramet Reiter
2018

By Keramet Reiter. Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful...