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Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and transnational communities. The essays examine how varieties of love, including sentimental, sexual, and political, redefined meanings of family, community, and national belonging, altering ideas of gender and social formation. Framed by the works of scholars of emotion, gender, and migration, these articles illustrate the complicated ways that love shapes the intimate decisions to migrate, familial expectations surrounding separations, wider cultural and political perceptions of mobility, reconfiguring the meaning of love itself. The contributors investigate the changing meanings of intimacy in a world marked by urban, transnational migrations and expanding circulations of capital and goods, and the ways in which these new meanings altered gender norms. The book’s historical framework makes visible how the sentimental and material landscapes of mobility changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers new evidence culled from archives, interviews, letters, and surveys for the study of emotion and mobility in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and opens up new avenues for future research.

Interacting with Cold War ideology, individuals’ Christian Americanism supported the notion that Korean adoptees would enter “good homes” in a democratic society. Many children felt the brunt of this rhetoric as they were told adoption was in their “best interests” and that if not adoption, they would have fallen through the cracks of economic poverty and degradation in the land of their birth. In doing so, rhetorics of gratitude became cemented in international adoption discourse. This book exposes the growth of the transnational adoption industrial complex (TAIC)—the neo-colonial, multi-million dollar global industry that commodifies children’s bodies—in an examination of South Korean adoptions to the United States. The TAIC accounts for how the South Korean social welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration legislation facilitated the development of transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a rote process whereby government and non-governmental organizations and actors easily facilitated the exchange of children. Yet, the activism of adoptees and their allies expose the inherent messiness of adoption and reveal that adoption cannot be discussed in black and white terms. Using archival research, media texts, and oral histories, this monograph elucidates greater understanding concerning how the TAIC impacts the lived experiences of adoptees and their families. Notions of adoptees as perpetual children are disabused as I examine adoptees’ efforts to reshape adoption discourse to recognize the inherent rights of birth parents and adoptees. In adulthood, adoptees construct a new type of public personhood, one defined by their autonomy and agency. Cold War, Christian Americanism, Korean adoption, adoption, South Korea, gratitude, industrial complex, orphans, immigration, family, kinship

Peruvian Lives across Borders focuses on the transnational lives of middle and upper-class transnational Peruvians. Among the Peruvians whose migration trajectories this book examines, return as a possibility, impossibility, or reality looms large. The lens of return provides one way to understand what transnational Peruvians desire, reject, or feel ambivalent about in constructions of home and Peruvianness. Employing return as a critical lens and through an intersectional approach, the book presents an intentional departure from the more prevalent focus on international labor migrants from lower and working classes in migration scholarship, and particularly among anthropologists. It suggests that a critical examination of middle and upper-class Peruvians’ migration experiences reveals as much about individual trajectories and class dimensions of migration as about broader constructions of Peruvianness and home that inform the everyday lives of Peruvians across multiple differences and spaces. A close look at Peruvian individual lives across settings in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Peru, and affective and material attachments to and practices in those settings, exposes the lived realities of everyday negotiations surrounding return to a home that is fundamentally made up of processes of inclusion and exclusion based on social hierarchies of gender, location, language, race, sexual identity, and class.

Anchored in the experiences and lives of Filipina migrants and their families in the Philippines, the main objective of this book is to make visible all of the forms, roles and definitions of social reproductive labor and care work required in the maintenance of the transnational family; demonstrating just how many people are uniquely affected by migration and separation. A second aim is to critically explore current neoliberal moment under which families are forcibly separated and the reconfiguration of the functions, operations and definitions of family in and through the very neoliberal mechanisms that disperse them around the globe--labor migration and technology. Although a significant literature on transnational families exists, this book brings the scholarship up to date on the technological advances that enables intimacy for transnational family members. Additionally, the sociological analysis in this book delves into the emotionality that comes with care work in migration and separation. The transnational Filipino family, as the unit of analysis, shows that care work is shared between migrant and the family they left behind, albeit unevenly. Further, it considers the shifts in gendered work and expectations (for men and women) and it includes fictive kin and extended family to redefine the membership and function of a socially relative dynamic of “family”. Broadly, this book is about the labor of care engaged by families who are enduring and thriving in conditions of forced migration and separation.

This book examines the political, labor, and assimilation history of Mexican immigrants in metropolitan Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the mid-1920s and extending into the years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Cold War, Mexican immigrants engaged in a wide-range of political activism, and their political beliefs were shaped by the Mexican Revolution. Mexican immigrant political activists included men and women, middle-class businessmen and professionals, and blue-collar laborers from urban and rural backgrounds. Over time, Mexican immigrants formed distinct conservative, liberal, and radical transnational societies that competed with each other to mold the identities and influence the political beliefs of the broader Mexican, Mexican American, and Latino populations of Chicago and Northwest Indiana. Initially, Mexican conservatives, liberals, and radicals all defined themselves as patriots loyal to the Mexican state, but over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, profound political events in Mexico and in the United States led the conservatives to become the most critical of the Mexican state and the most amenable to U.S. naturalization. While the liberals and radicals tended to decline U.S. citizenship, conservative Mexican Catholics become U.S. citizens in great numbers, and they did so because they sought to protect themselves from both the anticlerical policies of Mexican government and from the deportation policies of the United States government.

Migrant Marketplaces explores how connections between Italian people and foods in Italy, the United States, and Argentina influenced migrants’ consumer experiences and identities in New York and Buenos Aires during the age of mass migration. The book analyzes discussion about and representations of foodstuffs in the migrant press to characterize New York and Buenos Aires as “migrant marketplaces,” urban spaces defined by transnational linkages between mobile people and goods. As migrant marketplaces, New York and Buenos Aires were global and gendered sites where Italians interacted with foods from their home and host countries in ways that shaped migrants’ consumer identities and practices, the consumer cultures in which they were enmeshed, and wider transatlantic commodity networks. Over the course of the twentieth century, migrant marketplaces feminized, as World War I, tariffs, immigration restriction, and U.S. business interests in Latin America shifted ties between food consumption and notions of Italianness from single male laborers to female consumers and families. Using a comparative perspective, the book also examines race making and the evolution of tipo italiano, or Italian-style, foods in New York and Buenos Aires to identify nation-specific networks of meanings and experiences associated with Italian trade goods. Migrant Marketplaces of the Americas argues that Italians constructed changing and competing links between gender, nationalism, race, and ethnicity through the global foods they sold and consumed.

This second volume of New Italian Migrations to the United States continues the critical conversation with its predecessor by exploring Italian immigration to the United States from 1945 to the present, focusing on cultural expressivity, artistic productions, community engagement, and media representations. The book challenges our understanding of art and culture created by and about Italian Americans in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by considering ongoing Italian migratory flows. Each new group of Italian migrants and their descendants creates fresh models of Italian American culture, impacts preexisting ones, and continually reboot Italian America. The essays herein focus on such topics as transnational intimacy aided by an Italian-language radio program that broadcast messages from family members in Italy, the exoticized actors like Sophia Loren and Pier Angeli who helped shape a glamorous Italian style out of images of desperate postwar poverty, the constellation of cement figures crafted by a self-taught artist outside of Detroit, a folk-revival performer who infuses tarantella with New Age and feminist tonalities, the role of immigrant cookbook writers like Marcella Hazan and Lidia Bastianich in crafting a fashionable Italian food culture, and a review of current literature on the Italian “brain drain” and its impact on university Italian Studies. The afterword discusses the nomenclature ascribed to Italian American creative writers living in Italy and the United States.

The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora argues for a strict relationship between the world-historical situation of the Philippines under empire, nationalism, and globalization and the phenomenon of overseas domestic labor, drawing on the contours that inform the latter but arguing that it is part of a much larger framework of nurture, care, and service structuring the relationship between the postcolonial Philippines and the world. It analyzes maternal figures in novels by Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Brian Ascalon Roley; short stories by Nick Joaquin and Mia Alvar; poems by Luisa Igloria; and a film by Kidlat Tahimik. By developing incisive readings of subtle, passing moments in these texts, The Work of Mothering opens up narratives within which the cultural, political, and economic logics of overseas Filipina/o migration, especially but not only domestic labor, emerges. It does so by advancing an archipelagic reading practice that addresses diasporic literatures and cultures without reinscribing them either within nationalist or global paradigms. In doing so, it draws crucially on debates within the sociology of globalization and cultural studies, offering a critical and innovative vantage point that identifies alternative practices of the maternal, pushing up against the historical and political conditions that manage Filipina/o identity for nationalism and globalization.

This book challenges the conventional Italian immigrant narrative through a re-evaluation of the political, social, and cultural significance of Italian emigration to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Interdisciplinarity and transnationalism serve as the book’s operating approaches to documenting and evaluating aspects of this underexplored history and analyzing how on-going Italian immigration to the United States relates to community development, politics, group identity, and consumerism. The essays in this collection focus on such topics as immigration reform during the Cold War on the part of the Italian government and Italian Americans organized by the American Committee on Italian Migration (ACIM), women’s struggles for family reunification in light of the McCarran-Walter Act, a micro-analysis of immigrant replenishment in Boston’s North End, the emergence of a new-second generation Guido youth culture in Brooklyn, and ethnic-political brokers’ mobilization of dual citizens to vote in both U.S. and Italian elections. The afterword discusses the book’s articles on working-class immigrants and elite immigrants in relationship to migration history and periodization. At its most basic, this collection contributes to a larger conversation about the complex understanding of U.S. white ethnicity as multivalent, unstable, and at times contradictory, rather than as a fixed category following a universal historical process that leads to white privilege and ethnic assimilation.

Women filing gender-based asylum claims have long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the U.S. immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. This book exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in U.S. asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, the book analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. The book's focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. The book reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to U.S. national and global interests. It also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality.