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In this paper, we consider how news stories about one area of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, further propagate notions of a region filled with people characterized as dangerously noncompliant with American ideals of citizenship, prosperity, and security. Using Ethnographic Content Analysis, we conducted a systematic analysis of Valley, state and national mainstream news media stories from 2010-2016 about health or health care in the Rio Grande Valley. Ethnographic research with Valley leaders, residents, and journalists completed the media analysis. We argue that the Rio Grande Valley is framed as both an unruly internal colony as well as a racialized periphery, due to its proximity to Mexico. We detail how these news stories are received and acted upon by seasoned local journalists who use their trade to offer different scripts, rooted in actual lives and experiences of residents. We conclude with alternative versions of the U.S.-Mexico border region from borderlands scholars to reflect on how dominant media representations of places and people can be weathervanes for political discourse that shape state and national action about 'the border.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process of business and investment descending upon the city. In spite of this narrative, Detroit today remains a city of intense poverty and inequality. Between 2009 and 2013, an estimated 39 percent of Detroit residents were living below the Federal Poverty Line. This figure renders Detroit as statistically the poorest city in the country. In addition to a mythical narrative of rapid-fire investment, popular media representations of Detroit are peppered with racialized references to white business investment. These references position whiteness as 'saving' Detroit and center whiteness in the urban process. This racialized narrative is false and divisive in a city that is upwards of 83 percent African American. In this paper, we map the disparity between the racial politics of Detroit and the anti-black public discourse narrative currently surrounding the city. We demonstrate that the public discourse valorization of a profit-driven urban process results in an anti-black prioritization of whiteness in Detroit's post-bankruptcy redevelopment process. This narrative, if unchecked, will have serious consequences in the city's present and future. As such, we propose a re-centering of the blackness of the city and the racial politics of generations that have shaped current conditions, toward a more equitable recovery process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the controversy surrounding the proposed settlement of a group of Somali Bantu refugees in Cayce, South Carolina, in 2003. Focusing primarily on letters to the editor of a local newspaper, analysis emphasizes how community members debated and constructed issues of difference, race, culture, citizenship, and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the lack of systemic examination of the extent and manifestations of informal housing in Canadian cities, there is consistent evidence that it does occur and is tolerated by governments. This paper examines the persistence of illegal housing in Calgary to provide insights into processes that give rise to and motivate state toleration of illegal housing. It also explores the complex interactions between state agents, illegal housing operators, tenants, and communities to comment on how illegality is contested, reinforced, and even ignored by the various actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inequality that fueled the 1960s uprisings has grown worse, but where has the anger gone? This paper builds on the work of historian Michael Katz to suggest blending the political economy and ethnographic of a debt-based society, and to explore the ways in which over-investing in selling debt ravages poor communities, the coping strategies based in the informal economy, and the harsh incarceration of young men of color to explain why in the United States we have no justice but a semblance of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflection on doing anthropology in the United States, based on my research of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a 'protected area' in southern Utah. My research focuses on the meaning and practice of democracy in the United States by examining the impact of conservation policies on rural resource users. I question why social scientists who study conservation are able to see injustices in the protected area model when applied in 'the Global South,' but have not aimed critique at similar processes occurring in the U.S. Reflecting on the post fieldwork experiences of scholars Susan Harding, Faye Ginsburg, and James McCarthy, I suggest that, for American anthropologists, some 'repugnant others' in the U.S. represent a threatening 'enemy,' while in other settings, they may not be perceived in this way. I conclude by suggesting we 'write democratically' in order to overcome this limitation and realize the transformative potential of ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses anthropological research papers within the October 2011 issue of "North American Dialogue," including "BioMexico: Risk Reproduction and Sovereignty," and "Tracing Gitxaala History and Culture Through Archaeology and Anthropology."

Extensive literature on care work or domestic work - childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning - in the United States and internationally has highlighted how the sector's affective aspects, e.g., intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships, extract 'surplus emotional labor' (Hochschild 1983 from women workers, who, in turn, often justify their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation. In this article, I draw on three women's narrative framings of their domestic work jobs to argue that immigrant women in New York City emphasize structural, practical, and contextual elements of their domestic/caregiving labor, challenging constructions of care sector labor as evidence of innate caring aptitudes, womanly duty, or moral service. These characterizations have direct labor policy implications for paid care work - as evidenced in recent reforms. They also provide a theoretical basis for broader redistributive politics linking paid and unpaid caregiving labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do American Charismatic Evangelicals imagine human difference? Ethnographic fieldwork with the Vineyard, a Southern California originated but now nation-wide Charismatic Evangelical movement, suggests that for many lay American Charismatic Evangelicals, difference is conceptualized in three different modes, involving potentialities, relations, and boundedness. Much like a grammar shapes communication without imposing a single meaning, these forms of conceiving human difference mandate no single intrinsic political position, but do affect the way that American Charismatic evangelicals express and contest notions of human difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latina migrant women in California in the post 9/11 era experience structural vulnerability that extends beyond their undocumented status, residence in poor neighborhoods with gangs, employment in informal sector jobs to their reproductive bodies. Although unauthorized women may access prenatal health, often they are intimidated or are unaware, and face many barriers to accessing reproductive health related to language, transportation, or their low incomes and their ignorance about their bodies. Research on those migrants who do access reproductive health illustrates they experience subjectification in U.S. institutions and neglect and even obstetric violence in Mexican institutions. In this transnational context, the nonprofit organization, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, has organized an Instituto de Autonomía y Justicia with outreach to Spanish-speaking Latina migrants. I argue that through health literacy training within a reproductive justice framework that weaves intersectionality and human rights, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice engages in the 'feminist politics of translation.' They produce locally situated knowledge and pedagogies sensitive to the complexities of migrant Latinas' lives. The diverse Latina participants begin a consciousness raising process that leads them to explore their own health practice and participate in policy advocacy for their communities. My analysis is based on ethnographic research that includes participant observation and interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts with a question: what sociopolitical and/or sociocultural factors are flattened in prevention narratives? Focusing on the case of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder ( FASD) and drawing on narratives and practices that argue FASD is 100% preventable-this article argues these fictions of prevention strip the very context within which a particular medical phenomenon is occurring. Focusing on legislation in Alaska and proposed amendments to the Criminal Code in Canada that target FASD, layered with interview material, the article analyzes policy and practices that could impact women's reproductive health through troublesome frameworks of cost and responsibility. The article illustrates the potentially negative impact of policies and discourses that frame FASD as 100% preventable. The article argues that overly simplistic, or purposefully simplistic, understandings of the condition serve to mask the broader structural issues that demand attention including legacies of colonialism and structural inequality. In so doing, this article illustrates the ways in which prevention practices have implications in the areas of women's reproductive health, law and policy, social justice, and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of unauthorized migration have generally agreed that a lack of legal status can constrain undocumented workers' resistance to their marginalization and exploitative treatment. Yet in recent years, undocumented workers and youth have been at the forefront of immigrant rights mobilizations and have organized around their status as undocumented people. In this article, we explore how the conferral of a conditional immigration status has affected undocumented youth activism. In particular, we show that the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ( DACA) program in 2012 had varied and complicated consequences for youth activism in Chicago-at once stifling the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform and galvanizing efforts to expand and strengthen protections against deportation. More broadly, we consider how prolonged states of liminal legality (Menjivar 2006) bring people more tightly under the purview of state surveillance without removing their vulnerability to deportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of 21st-century language and identities in an era of global displacement and social media when increasing numbers of youth are growing up undocumented. Building on prior research on anti-immigrant rhetoric, it is based on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis conducted with Latin@ activists in California (1999-2001) and Illinois (2010-2014). Language has been central to the U.S. undocumented youth movement, as 1.5.-generation immigrant activists creatively use self-naming for empowerment. New, positive identities help young immigrants to challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and love themselves, locate and support each other, and advocate for assistance and rights. Activist identities have changed over time along with changing political contexts and strategies, moving from close alignment with legislative efforts to increasing recognition of intersectional, marginalized, and transnational social locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the recent development of an anti-deportation movement with distinct strategies and tactics that distinguish it from previous immigrant rights activism centered on immigration reform. We study the strategies and tactics of the anti-deportation movement, focusing on the strategies of non-staged civil disobediences and anti-deportation campaigns. We argue that the specific tactics used in these alternative strategies a) depart from normative activism and b) challenge dominant perceptions about undocumented immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of policing often utter the phrase 'to protect and serve,' in order to point out the gap between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. However, the present analysis asserts that a more appropriate representation of the policing function is 'to protect and serve whiteness.' Drawing ethnographic observations, the Ferguson Report and Officer Darren Wilson's Grand Jury Testimony, I shift the locus of critique away from the putative problems of 'police brutality,' 'excessive force,' and 'police militarization.' I argue that these critiques naturalize the forms of psychic violence, dehumanization and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black people. Instead, I argue that anti-blackness is imbricated in policing itself. Then, by examining the ways in which modern policing and 'order maintenance' approaches developed from southern slave patrols, I assert that policing in the United States is always already racialized policing. It plays a foundational role assigning of racial meanings, helping to produce whiteness as a subject of protection and blackness an object of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional racism is a concept that has gotten into a muddle. Ubiquitous in policing in the UK, but relegated to the margins of discussion in the US, this important and useful idea has been misunderstood on both sides of the Atlantic as a pervasive form of unconscious or cultural bias. This article argues that a clearer distinction is needed between cognitive bias and institutional racism especially with regard to the racial disparities in the enforcement outcomes in New York City. The numbers-driven management system, often called Compstat, paired with zero-tolerance enforcement of violations and misdemeanors, facilitates a pattern of institutional racism in which police motivation need not be bias, but, if anything, careerist: 'activity' in the form of stop-question-and-frisk reports, summonses, and arrests in higher crime neighborhoods is the measure of 'productivity' for officers and supervisors. Ultimately, this article argues that clarification of institutional racism is an important step bureaucratically and politically toward the positive reform of policing. The clarification of this distinction is also important in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the social condition of Bosnian Americans, Islam, and whiteness in post-9/11 U.S. It says that while some were mistreated for their Muslim ethnic-religious identities in Yugoslavia, once they resided in the safe haven of Chicago, Illinois, they continued to struggle with the probability of meeting anti-Muslim hostility from other European immigrants.

The article focuses on neoliberalism and the shaping of home among service workers in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee which is a tourist attraction. Topics discussed include the practice of living in weekly rental residences among low-wage, tourist industry workers in the city, the impact of neoliberalism on tourism-based economy of the city, and lack of permanent housing for Gatlinburg's low-income contingent workers.

The article discusses the ways in which Muslim organizations in the U.S. have responded to anti-Muslim sentiment to fight against racism and xenophobia of the post 9/11 attack. Topics include interfaith talk between Muslims and other religious communities, Islamic Representative Organizations' concern on Islamophobia, and the concept of cultural citizenship for Muslims in the West.

The article offers information on the role of media, ideology and myths cultural difference and their effect on the U.S. people. As mentioned, the constructions of contemporary myths about Russia evolve from a history of the successful application of anticommunism in the consolidation of neoliberalism as an American ideal during the Cold War.

The article informs about the closing of Prison in New York which marks the end of an infusion of state capital constructed as a project of economic development. It informs that there are 60 prisons in New York State of which 15 are "supermax" all-solitary confinement prisons. It states that as the number of people incarcerated in New York's prisons are reduced so nine prisons have been closed but there has been increase in the use of solitary confinement in New York.

The article discusses the migration of Mexican peasants including language speakers from villages to city. It informs that ratio of farmers has declined due to the employment of farmers in informal economy. It mentions that the differentiation of peasantry started after the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and distribution of land was given to ejidos. It further mentions that from 1940 the Nahuatl-speaking artisans and resellers started vending their wares in Mexican interior and coastal cities.

The author reflects on assuming the editorship of the "North American Dialogue" journal and acknowledges the contributions of outgoing editor Catherine Kingfisher to the publication of the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA).

Drawing from research in clinical mental health settings in the United States and Romania, this article considers 'inactivity' as an object of study. While the 'recovery movement' in the United States has attempted to combat inactivity among people with mental illnesses, many clinicians remain ambivalent, seeing inactivity both as problematic and as therapeutic. In Romanian psychiatric hospitals, inactivity is viewed as both the treatment for and the ultimate fate of people with mental illnesses. While anthropologists often study people who could be characterized as 'inactive,' anthropologists have rarely addressed the experience of inactivity, emphasizing instead 'productivity.' This Foucauldian impulse, I argue, obfuscates the lived realities of inactivity among many people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes meanings of money in America. It is based on an ethnography carried out in the United States by a Brazilian anthropologist who studied financial institutions, health insurance, service clubs, compulsive spenders, restaurants, shops, scholarly, and non-scholarly articles and books on personal finance, proverbs, expressions, etc. He is currently contrasting Brazilian and North American popular music of the first half of the 20th century. The author compares attitudes toward money in the United States with those existing in Brazil and argues that money in North American society, which can be seen as a total social fact, is considered less polluting than in Brazil, where it is represented as something potentially dirty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the fiscal crisis worsens, local governments are cutting basic services or converting to fee-based and privatized approaches that penalize the poor. Even city parks and community centers, the heart of recreational social activity for children and families of the inner city, are being drained of community life by neoliberal policies and budgetary austerity. This article reports on a community-based participatory action research project that investigated a fee increase policy enacted by the City of Tampa Parks and Recreation Department and the negative impacts this policy had on children living in Sulphur Springs, one of Tampa's poorest neighborhoods. [public policy, participatory action research, children and youth] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzing the United States as a settler society has the potential to bring together insights from the anthropology of Native North America and the anthropology of the United States. This article suggests several justifications for and implications of doing so, with focus on citizenship, sovereignty, economy, and nature. [settler colonialism, indigenous peoples, state of the field] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The April 5, 2010 Upper Big Branch explosion in West Virginia was the worst coal mine disaster in the United States in 40 years. Given the importance of the coal industry to the United States, coal mine safety regulations do not effectively prevent such disasters from occurring, and a culture of impunity protects both coal companies and government agencies from being held accountable for contributing to disasters. The United Mine Workers of America's diminished strength in West Virginia leaves most miners with little recourse against growing corporations. An examination of the history of disasters in West Virginia coal mines provides insight into how the factors leading to the Upper Big Branch explosion developed and can potentially be prevented. [West Virginia, coal mining, mine disasters, labor unions, corporate impunity, Massey Energy, legislation and enforcement] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More North Americanists must consider the implications of combining paid work with research since funding for our projects is not keeping up with the rising number of anthropologists conducting research in North America. In this article, I reflect on my own paid work and dissertation research in a divided 'mixed income' neighborhood in Tampa, Florida. I negotiated multiple roles conducting research with both middle-class homeowners and low-income renters while working as an employee in one of the neighborhood's low-income apartment complexes. Paid work has advantages beyond making research financially possible. For instance, it enables greater access and insight into particular issues. It can also complicate a researcher's role/s in numerous ways, including how she is perceived by different members of the communities in which she works, and the practical and ethical issues that result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses academic and social costs experienced by anthropologists studying their own ethnic group. It explores how one 'native' anthropologist navigates her roles as ethnographer and insider while researching curanderismo, a religiously inflected form of ethnomedicine within increasingly secular and commercialized Mexican American urban spheres. Is academic credibility weakened because the anthropologist shares the cultural history of her/his informants? When your community entrusts you with their spiritual, emotional and social woes, do they see you as ethnographer, insider, or both? To be privy to the ritual knowledge and practices of healers and the individual struggles of clients to find respite from pain is a great responsibility as curanderismo has often been pathologized by anthropology as a 'primitive' tradition used only by the ignorant and backward. Given this history, the native anthropologist must find a way to manage allegiance to her cultural as well as academic community. I suggest that doing 'native' research is its own form of 'exorcism,' casting out demons in a field that often silences native voices and holds native anthropology in lower esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author provides a vivid account of her most recent trip to Colombia where she has been conducting research on the impact of political and economic violence on efforts by Coca-Cola workers to organize with SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian labor union. On July 22, 2006, SINALTRAINAL (the National Food and Beverage Workers Union) organized demonstrations in several Colombian cities for the third annual 'International Day of Protest Against Coca-Cola.' Gill describes events of the day in Barrancabermeja, an oil town in the country's conflicted Magdalena Medio region. In 1998, the city fell under paramilitary domination by means of murder and massacre. Eight years later, the paramilitary vise is clamped tight by selective assassination of unionists, social movement leaders and other 'disposable people.' Despite death threats against them, workers from the local Coca-Cola plant organized a peaceful demonstration against' the crimes of Coca-Cola'- crimes that include human rights violations and collusion with paramilitary groups. After the successful protest in Barrancabermeja, exhilaration was replaced by despair as word of another assassination spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Something has been happening in the indigenous communities of Chiapas. From the remote jungles of the Lacandona Forest, word has been issued that reiterates Zapatista solidarity with indigenous struggles. This essay reports on the goings-on leading up to the Red Alert by the Zapatistas in the summer of 2005. The authors find resistance and resiliency on the milpas of Chiapas where small farmers and ejido members join the growing chorus of those saying 'no' to state and international development plans. The resistance is inspired by an understanding that these 'development' plans (including the building of a dam) will flood homesteads, lead to privatization, and ultimately displace the people of Chiapas from their ancestral land and way of life. The authors offer ethnographic vignettes that give voice to the concerns and activities of both rural campesinos and urban vendors of San Cristóbal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]