Mexican labor in the United States

Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant “illegality” and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant “illegality” as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the “illegality” of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of “illegalization” themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production ...

The Mexican-Us Border: The Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands

Abstract: This review traces the development of an anthropology of borderlands. The ideas of early ethnography and applied anthropology about border regions are considered along with contemporary perspectives on reterritorialized communities and practices illustrated specifically by Mexican migration and transborder processes. The argument is made that the conceptual parameters of borderlands, borders, and their crossings, stemming from work done on the Mexican-US border, in particular, illustrate the contradiction, paradox, difference, and conflict of power and domination in contemporary global capitalism and the nation-state, especially as manifested in local-level practices. Furthermore, the borderlands genre is a basis upon which to redraw our conceptual frameworks of community and culture area.

Status Struggles: Network Centrality and Gender Segregation in Same- and Cross-Gender Aggression

Abstract: Literature on aggression often suggests that individual deficiencies, such as social incompetence, psychological difficulties, or troublesome home environments, are responsible for aggressive behav...