Navigating Borders

Navigating Borders Synopsis

This book has won the 2014 Qualitative Book Award In the context of debates about U.S. immigration, this book gives a voice to undocumented Americans of Mexican origin – specifically, involuntary immigrants born in Mexico but brought to the United States by their parents as minors. They are indistinguishable from other Americans, yet in the media and their everyday lives they encounter racism, discrimination, ostracism, and castigation on a regular basis.

This book is about their stories and how, against the odds, they offer resistance as they navigate across ideological, historical, socio-economic, institutional and educational borders, in an effort to carve out a life in U.S. society. In constructing an evocative and powerful counter-narrative the authors show how they ultimately worked with artists of Mexican origin and community organizations to bring the undocumented issue to performative and political life.