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This paper develops a gender lens to analyze the effects of US deportation policy on immigrant families from Latin America. Whereas most research on deportation focuses on the deportees, we concentrate on their families who remain in the United States. We draw on our qualitative study of 125 families in Los Angeles, California, who have been separated from a close relative because of deportation. Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (Latino Stud 11(3):271–292, 2013) describe deportation as a “gendered racial removal system” because men from Mexico and Central America make up the vast majority of migrants who have been detained and deported by the US government since the mid-1990s. We argue that this gendered racial system disproportionately burdens Latina immigrants in the United States, and also that forced separation leads to changing gender practices and relations within these families.

Not Working chronicles the devastating effects of the 1996 welfare reform legislation that ended welfare as we know it. For those who now receive public assistance, “work” means pleading with supervisors for full-time hours, juggling ever-changing work schedules, and shuffling between dead-end jobs that leave one physically and psychically exhausted. Through vivid story-telling and pointed analysis, Not Working profiles the day-to-day struggles of Mexican immigrant women in the Los Angeles area, showing the increased vulnerability they face in the welfare office and labor market. The new “work first” policies now enacted impose time limits and mandate work requirements for those receiving public assistance, yet fail to offer real job training or needed childcare options, ultimately causing many families to fall deeper below the poverty line. Not Working shows that the new “welfare-to-work” regime has produced tremendous instability and insecurity for these women and their children. Moreover, the authors argue that the new politics of welfare enable greater infringements of rights and liberty for many of America's most vulnerable and constitute a crucial component of the broader assault on American citizenship. In short, the new welfare is not working.

Research has shown that as the size of government assistance programs grow, and the recipients of such programs are increasingly non-white and/or non-citizen, public support for them declines. Our study examines this phenomenon on the question of deservingness in federal disaster assistance. Using a 2018 survey experiment that leverages two devastating hurricanes—Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey—that hit different parts of the United States in 2017, we explore how the social identities of race/ethnicity and partisanship affect attitudes about disaster deservingness. Our results demonstrate that although federal disaster assistance has broad support, it is contingent on perceptions about the disaster victim and the type of assistance. Respondents were less likely to support disaster assistance to Hurricane Maria–affected people than those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Moreover, white and Republican respondents were more likely to favor market-based assistance whereas race-/ethnic-minority and Democratic respondents were more likely to support more generous forms of disaster assistance. These findings have important implications for the allocation of disaster funds as climate change intensifies and the frequency of billion-dollar disaster events increases. This is exacerbated by political polarization and heightened social vulnerability due to changing population demographics.

With contributions from a wide array of scholars and activists, including leading Chicana feminists from the period, this groundbreaking anthology is the first collection of scholarly essays and testimonios that focuses on Chicana organizing, activism, and leadership in the movement years. The essays in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era demonstrate how Chicanas enacted a new kind of politica at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and developed innovative concepts, tactics, and methodologies that in turn generated new theories, art forms, organizational spaces, and strategies of alliance. These are the technologies of resistance documented in Chicana Movidas, a volume that brings together critical biographies of Chicana activists and their bodies of work; essays that focus on understudied organizations, mobilizations, regions, and subjects; examinations of emergent Chicana archives and the politics of collection; and scholarly approaches that challenge the temporal, political, heteronormative, and spatial limits of established Chicano movement narratives. Charting the rise of a field of knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Chicano studies, feminist theory, and queer theory, Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activisim and Feminism in the Movement Era offers a transgenerational perspective on the intellectual and political legacies of early Chicana feminism.

This dissertation explores the racial politics of welfare reform and its implications for Latino citizenship in the contemporary United States. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) dramatically transformed the nation's welfare system, as it devolved federal authority to state and local government, imposed time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients, and severely restricted the eligibility of noncitizens for public assistance. Not simply an attempt to rework social welfare policy, the PRWORA fundamentally engaged the questions of what is America and who is an American. Its response to these questions signals a profound shift in American ideas of citizenship and a new intertwining of race, gender, and immigration in late twentieth-century U.S. society. This dissertation interweaves multiple disciplinary fields, including history, political economy, sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, and ethnography, into a critical analysis of the material and discursive forces that have shaped the design and evaluation of welfare reform. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant-observation research that I conducted with Mexican immigrant welfare recipients in Long Beach, California, as part of a large nationwide study of welfare reform, I analyze the ways that Latina immigrants navigate and narrate the micro-politics of the new “welfare-to-work” regime, as well as their reformulations of citizenship, race, and rights in the contemporary moment. Three central themes run throughout this work: the political-economic imperatives of post-Fordism and globalization, particularly the growing demand for flexible, feminized immigrant labor in the U.S. economy, that undergird the “work-first” approach of the post-1996 welfare state; the critical role played by social science research in shaping public policy and popular understandings of poverty and poor people; and, finally, the post-civil rights paradigm that constructs impoverished African Americans and Latino immigrants as undeserving cultural outsiders at the same time that it underplays the centrality of race and racism in the reproduction of social and economic inequality in post-1960's America.