Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and Illegality in Mexican Chicago Book

Chi-town in the mid-90s. Mexican migrants. Mexican Americans. African Americas. White ethnics. Windy City corruption. Factory Work. Factory Work. Factory Work. Immigration Law. Law-in-the-Abstract. Neoliberal Capitalism. White Supremacy, then and now. U.S. Empire--from gunboat diplomacy to the present. Transnationalism.

An ethnographically and theoretically informed work of "anti-anthropological" critique, this book offers up nuanced, fiercely politcal arguments about some of the most central socio-political issues in the contemporary world, and in particular the unequal conjunctures between Latin America and the urban United States. Being an ethnography, this book isn't all just theory. --What makes it most special, perhaps, is its attempt to take the ways in which abstractions like NEOLIBERAL CAPITAL-NEGROPHOBIA-RACIALIZATION are lived by individual human beings as a point of departure to theorize about these things. --I don't know if it succeeds, then, in being anti-anthropological. But it's worth a read.