Examines LatCrit’s emergence as a scholarly and activist community within and beyond the US legal academyEmerging from the US legal academy in 1995, LatCrit theory is a genre of critical outsider jurisprudence—a vital hub of contemporary scholarship that includes Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory, among other critical schools of legal knowledge. Its basic goals have been: (1) to develop a critical, activist, and inter-disciplinary discourse on law and ...

Deadly Voyages: Migrant Journeys across the Globe explores the burdens and impact of perilous migration, while considering which laws, policies, practices, and venues might establish empathy and protection for migrants. This interdisciplinary volume envisions and calls for a transformation in migration policy, motivated by the common goal of drastically reducing the peril migrants face when compelled to make their treacherous journeys. All contributors to this volume agree on the inadequac...

"Courageous." -Ilan Stavans, author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez came from opposite sides of the tracks of race and class that still divide Americans. Both optimists, Kennedy and Chavez shared a common vision of equality. They united in the 1960s to crusade for the rights of migrant farm workers. Farm workers faded from public consciousness following Kennedy's assassination and Chavez's early passing. Yet the work of Kennedy and Chavez...

In Mea Culpa, Steven W. Bender examines how the United States’ collective shame about its past has shaped the evolution of law and behavior. We regret slavery and segregationist Jim Crow laws. We eventually apologize, while ignoring other oppressions, and our legal response to regret often fails to be transformative for the affected groups. By examining policies and practices that have affected the lives ofgroups that have been historically marginalized and oppressed, Bender is able...

Now the most populous minority group in the United States, Latino/as increasingly need guidance on the everyday issues that affect their economic livelihood, their freedom, and their equal rights to dignity and opportunity. This comprehensive guide is organized around the three flashpoints that contribute to the unique legal treatment of Latino/as-immigration status, language regulation, and racial/ethnic discrimination. These points are examined in the venues of everyday life for Latino/a...

This book explores the contested notion of compassionate migration in its discourse and practice. In the context of today's migration patterns within the Americas, compassionate migration can play a fundamental role in responding to the hardships that many migrants suffer before, during, and after their journeys. This volume explores the boundaries of compassion from legal, political, philosophical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, and supplies examples where state and non-state actors ...

Although the origin of the term “greaser” is debated, its derogatory meaning never has been. From silent movies like The Greaser’s Revenge (1914) and The Girl and the Greaser (1913) with villainous title characters, to John Steinbeck's portrayals of Latinos as lazy, drunken, and shiftless in his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat, to the image of violent, criminal, drug-using gang members of East LA, negative stereotypes of Latinos/as have been plentiful in American popular culture far before Latino...

One of the quintessential goals of the American Dream is to own land and a home, a place to raise one’s family and prove one’s prosperity. Particularly for immigrant families, home ownership is a way to assimilate into American culture and community. However, Latinos, who make up the country’s largest minority population, have largely been unable to gain this level of inclusion. Instead, they are forced to cling to the fringes of property rights and ownership through overcrowded rentals, t...

Mexico andthe United States exist in a symbiotic relationship: Mexico frequently providesthe United States with cheap labor, illegal goods, and, for criminal offenders,a refuge from the law. In turn, the U.S. offers Mexican laborers the Americandream: the possibility of a better livelihood through hard work. To supply eachother’s demands, Americans and Mexicans have to cross their shared border fromboth sides. Despite this relationship, U.S. immigr...

Political awareness of the tensions in U.S.-Mexico relations is rising in the twenty-first century; the American history of its treatment of illegal immigrants represents a massive failure of the promises of the American dream. This is the untold history of the United States Border Patrol from its beginnings in 1924 as a small peripheral outfit to its emergence as a large professional police force that continuously draws intense scrutiny and denunciations from political activism groups. To...

A longtime immigration activist explores what it means to be an undocumented American in this “impassioned and well-reported case for change” (New York Times).In this illuminating work, immigrant rights activist Aviva Chomsky shows how “illegality” and “undocumentedness” are concepts that were created to exclude and exploit. With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to wha...

"I knew she'd be trouble."So quipped Antonin Scalia about Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court's annual end-of-term party in 2010. It's usually the sort of event one would expect from such a grand institution, with gentle parodies of the justices performed by their law clerks, but this year Sotomayor decided to shake it up—flooding the room with salsa music and coaxing her fellow justices to dance.It was little surprise in 2009 that President Barack Obama nominated a Hispanic...