Author: UCI Team

[Abstract] Scholarship regarding those who are categorized as undocumented can put sanctuary principles into practice in research settings. To do so, scholars can conduct research in collaboration with immigrant communities, reject essentializing terminology, develop modes of sociality that challenge exclusion, and document the unofficial forms of sanctuary devised by members of immigrant communities. This research model is grounded in principles of accompaniment that were followed by 1980s activists who offered sanctuary to those fleeing wars in Central America. Examples of research initiatives and educational programs that follow such principles are presented.

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[Project Description] Mourning Our Losses is a crowd-sourced memorial to honor the lives of people who died in prisons, jails, and immigration detention facilities in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We remember the lives of people who died from exposure to abominable public health conditions, as residents and as employees.

Mourning Our Losses seeks to restore dignity to the faces and stories behind the statistics of death and illness from behind bars. We believe that a loss of any human life warrants mourning.

Mourning Our Losses was created in April 2020 by a volunteer group of educators, artists, students, and organizers—many of us formerly incarcerated—committed to the release of incarcerated people from prisons, jails, and immigration facilities across the United States.

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[Abstract] This evaluation examines the impact of a pretrial risk assessment and supervised release program on pretrial release rates, judicial bail determinations, and failure to appear (FTA) rates among non-violent felony defendants in Orange County, CA. The results indicate that program implementation was not associated with a significant increase in pretrial release rates. However, defendants who received supervised release under the program were significantly less likely to FTA than similarly situated defendants who were released on cash bail. The results therefore suggest that pending bail reform measures in California and elsewhere, which replace cash bail with risk assessment screening and non-monetary supervised release, can be implemented without sacrificing appearances in court.

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[Abstract] Places of concentrated poverty are typically described in terms of their deficit, not simply in financial terms, but in their social and cultural resources as well. This characterization extends to informal settlements that exist along the U.S.-Mexico border known as colonias, rural and peri-urban communities lacking basic infrastructure like electricity, running water, and paved roads. Drawing on one case study of a colonia in the state of Arizona, we renew attention to these communities showing how the lack of infrastructure and public services complicate everyday tasks for residents, compromising their wellbeing and life prospects. We also call attention to the allure of colonias in a context of rising inequality, highlighting their promise as viable communities where families can raise families and prosper or retire with dignity. By showing how kin and fictive kin ties propel the settlement process and provide the organizational and cultural structure to these communities, we challenge common depictions of colonias lacking a sense of community and social capital. We find social capital in colonias is best represented through “bonding ties” that provide essential forms of social support, the kind of help that allows the poor to “get by” or cope. We distinguish this from social capital that is garnered via “bridging ties,” to individuals with resources or in positions of influence that can create opportunities for social mobility. The tenacity of colonia residents and their practices of mutual support makes these communities resilient, but the absence of “social leverage ties,” those able and willing to broker complex bureaucratic and political processes, sustains ill conditions in colonias. Colonia residents have set root in these communities worthy of public policy concern and ought to be folded into the larger conversation of poverty concentration, segregation and housing needs in the United States. We call on urban planners, other street-level bureaucrats, and policymakers to work with these communities to bridge and broker grass root efforts.

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[Abstract] Physical activity patterns within the U.S. vary greatly across ethnicity, with data generally indicating lower rates among Hispanic/Latino adults. At the same time, Hispanic/Latino pedestrians face higher rates of injury and fatalities. Despite the importance of supportive physical activity environments on both health and safety outcomes, limited attention has been paid to ethnic or cultural differences in perceptions of supportive environments for walking. To fill this gap, we explore differences in physical and social environment contributors to perceived walkability between pedestrians in predominantly (>70%) Mexican American and predominantly non-Hispanic white areas in Tucson, Arizona.

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[Excerpt] What am I doing here? If I really care about social justice, shouldn’t I be out on the front lines? I have asked myself these questions almost every day since I have been in graduate school. I came to the academy from activism, and the tension between these two parts of myself is real, anxiety-inducing, and at times also quite productive. Ultimately, it keeps me honest. Grounded. I have come to adopt what Michael Katz professed is true; there are more ways of doing activ-ism than we often imagine.

The collection of organizations, individuals, and ideas that comprise the Housing Justice in Unequal Cities Network reflects similar dynamics at a larger scale: the need to negotiate scholarly endeavors with a tenacious pursuit of housing jus-tice. The academic-activist tensions necessarily present in this endeavor should not be diluted by pleas for cohesion. These tensions invite critical debate among divergent viewpoints that can be harnessed into creative approaches to complex social problems. This debate is necessary and critical to all involved. It fuels the potential for catharsis, identifying new, unpredictable unimagined solutions.

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[Abstract] Clothing, as has been shown in a growing body of anthropological research, not only reflects reality but also works to make it. This article uses the unique lens provided by fashion to focus on the populace in which popular courts stake their legitimacy. Much in the way that laws, processes, and procedures affect people’ s relationship to law, courthouse attire, too, subtly and perhaps more cunningly contributes to the creation of subjects that interact with and understand the law in specific ways. Specifically, the clothing worn in and required by a popular courthouse helps to make the very community in which that court claims its popularity. Ethnographic examples from fieldwork in a municipal tribunal in Cuba and in the Caribbean Court of Justice in Trinidad and Tobago show how fashion reflects the historical development of each court while it simultaneously works to transform populations into ideal legal subjects.

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[Excerpt] The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was a great relief, if only for some time.

It allowed 800,000 people like myself to live and work without fear of deportation.

DACA was an executive order issued by former President Barack Obama in 2012 that gave undocumented young people a two-year renewable work permit, provided they met certain criteria. On Sept. 5, 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded the program. While the program is set to expire on March 5, there is now a legal battle playing out in the courts to keep it intact.

As Congress and the White House debate how to move forward, they should be aware of one little known consequence of DACA. It forced many recipients to change their names, throwing many aspects of their lives into disarray.

I am an anthropologist who has been studying immigrant youth since 2010. In my most recent research, I interviewed DACA graduate students about the impacts of DACA’s forced name alteration. 

Here’s what they told me…

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[Excerpt from Article] In this Article, we examine the form and temporality of plenary power as applied to immigrants and indigenous peoples. To do so, we consider several of the founding cases through which plenary power was established, focusing on their annunciatory-yet-citational quality. Such cases are annunciatory in that, by proclaiming that the U.S. government has plenary power (i.e., full and complete power, free from judicial review, in certain substantive areas) the court in these cases enacts the very power that it announces. They are also citational in that the court does so in a manner that assumes such power always already exists. Moreover, the court announces this power through a denial of its own power, a denial that defers not only to the executive and legislative branches of U.S. government, but also to the future. This deference adopts the form of a citation to precedent, though the prior authority that is being cited to is nothing more than the “self-evidence” of plenary power as something inherent to sovereign nation- states more generally.

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