Section
Borderlands
-
“Our Guns Make the Violence That People Are Fleeing”: Ieva Jusionyte on Guns & Violence in Mexico
“I was already there, and I was already an ethnographer. I was interested in borders as sites of state violence. I became very curious and I thought I would like to follow the guns south.”
-
A Tale of Two Families: Birthright Citizenship and Family Reunification for Chinese Migrants in 1925
-
Documenting Birthright Citizenship under Chinese Exclusion
-
The Right to Return: Chinese Merchants, the Scott Act, and Legal Knowledge in an Era of Exclusion
-
The Struggle for America’s Ballot Box and the Making of Wong Kim Ark
-
The Meaning of Alienage for Wong Kim Ark
The Fourteenth Amendment transformed American citizenship in the nineteenth century, but for Chinese immigrants and their American-born children, exclusion persisted.
-
The Historical Paths to and from Wong Kim Ark
“The decision in Wong Kim Ark’s case marked the culmination of a three-year legal battle and reflected two decades of sustained efforts to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants following the Fourteenth Amendment.”
-
Julián Delgado Lopera on “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You”
“I am inhabiting many different identities, sometimes multiple identities, constantly. I feel that I’m definitely building on a legacy of Latin American literature and Latino literature in the United States.”
-
“Dear Syria … ”
“Here I was, crossing from Lebanon into Syria and from the realm of other peoples’ stories into that of lived experience, including my own.”
-
Ada Ferrer on “Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter”
“People are buffeted byhistory sometimes in ways that they don’t realize. Ourfamily was buffeted by these forces that were much greater than us.”
-
Mary E. Mendoza on “Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border”
“Environmental history at its best really thinks about the ways in which various environments mediate and change dynamic, diverse human relationships.”
-
Solo el pueblo: Migrant Justice Against Fascism in the Americas
Thanks to the politics of sanctuary and abolition, the multiracial city is, perhaps, challenging authoritarian power, even as liberal democratic institutions have faltered utterly against the rise of right wing, white ethnonationalism.
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Secret Evidence
“Immigration law is a zone of exception where many American constitutional standards, the supposed safeguards against government abuse, simply do not extend.”
-
The Double Edge of Border Security: 30 Years of Expanding Executive Power through Immigration Law
In the 1990s, lawmakers—including Schumer, Biden, and Clinton—invoked civil rights ideals, even while they narrowed legal protections from detention, deportation, and policing.
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Criminalizing Black Migrants
“These two laws are inseparable. Together, they form a ‘prison-to-deportation pipeline’ that subjects Black migrants to a ‘double jeopardy’ of systemic racism.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Breaking Welfare
“Today, as the Minnesota case shows, the welfare state is being turned into an instrument of mass deportation … Meanwhile, the specter of welfare usage is being used to bar the door to citizenship.”
-
Republicans Debate Amnesty
“Being undocumented during my formative years … meant that I always lived with fear,” recalls Alberto Ledesma. “I thought that any misstep I took could endanger [my] entire family.” An artist and writer, Ledesma is one of the approximately 2.7 million formerly undocumented immigrants who were able to adjust their status because of the Immigration…
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Destroying Families
“Women—who disproportionately carry the burden of caregiving and are often left alone when partners are kidnapped—are pushed into deeper poverty and isolation.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: 100 Years of Murdering Migrant Workers
“The KKK’s terror campaign took a bloody toll. Between 1917 and 1920, 170 IWW union organizers were lynched or murdered in extra-judicial killings.”
-
Fascism’s Building Blocks: A US Infrastructure Decades in the Making
“Immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today, because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing ‘us’ and ‘them.’”
-
Jaquira Díaz on “This Is the Only Kingdom”
Our guest this week on Writing Latinos is Jaquira Díaz, discussing her new novel This Is the Only Kingdom, published by Algonquin Books. This Is the Only Kingdom was named one of the best books of 2025 by The New York Times and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A professor of writing at Columbia…
-
We Are the Authors of the Story of Citizenship: Daisy Hernández on America’s Myth
“I hope that readers will take it upon themselves to think and feel like they are also the authors of the story of citizenship.”
-
Álvaro Enrigue on “Now I Surrender”
“Books just grow like trees. You cannot control them. They become something different than what you thought it was.”
-
Jazmine Ulloa on “El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory”
“We tend to see El Paso as this very narrow space that divides Mexico and the United States, but it’s this much richer region where ideas and goods and people are constantly flowing back and forth.”
-
The Once and Future Deportation Flight?
78 years ago today, a US plane deporting 28 Mexican nationals crashed into California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard.
