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Latinx Belonging is an edited volume exploring the question: What does it mean to be Latinx?
The book is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement. This work positions Latinxs’ struggles for recognition and inclusion as squarely located within intersecting power structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class and as shaped by state-level and transnational forces such as U.S. immigration policies and histories of colonialism. From the case of Latinxs’ struggles for recognition in the arts, to queer Latinx community resilience during COVID-19 and in the wake of mass shootings, to Indigenous youth’s endurance and survival as unaccompanied minors in Los Angeles, the case studies featured in this collection present a rich and textured picture of the diversity of the U.S. Latinx experience in the twenty-first century.
Natalia Deeb-Sossa is Professor in Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis. She is an interdisciplinary and transnational Chicana feminist health scholar who has made significant contributions in the areas of gender, race/ethnicity and class, and how they influence reproductive justice and reproductive health, community politics, cultural citizenship, and social justice. She is author of Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South and editor of Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies. Her research focuses on Mexican immigrant farmworker families in Northern California.
Jennifer Bickham Mendez is professor and chair of sociology at William & Mary, where she has taught and conducted research for more than twenty years. Her research explores ways in which the lives of everyday people are caught up in cross-border forces, including economic globalization. She is the author of From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in Nicaragua, and co-editor, along with Nancy Naples, of Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identity, and Globalization.
Gilda L. Ochoa
Professor Chicana/o Latina/o Studies
Pomona College
Nolan Kline, PhD, MPH, CPH
Associate Professor
Department of Population Health Sciences
University of Central Florida
Yvette Flores
Distinguished Professor
Chicana/o Studies
UC Davis