BorderVisions – serie

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”Rafael A. MartÍnez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. MartÍnez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies.Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”Rafael A. MartÍnez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. MartÍnez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies.Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence. Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.

The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a home to artists, poets, emos, and punks. In the clandestine undergrounds of borderlands cultural production, there lies an impulse to live below and beyond border surveillance technologies. This book is about the utopic stories that narrate this impulse and the punk literary scenes that facilitate these fabulations.Using an innovative methodology of "scene-work"—a blend of literary analysis, queer theory, critical regionalism, and auto-ethnography—Borderpunk identifies, aggregates, and outlines the emergent genre of borderpunk cultural productions. Beginning with the post-1960s through the present, author Sophia Martínez Abbud examines how music, playlists, literature, art, and performance borderpunk narratives teach us to elide, undermine, and work against the border's presumed authority. Through these narratives, readers become attuned to the anarchic sense of abjection that permeates the border regions and the kinds of punk subjectivities emerging from these sites of re-mediation.Borderpunk offers scenes that refuse notions of respectability at different time periods, geographies, and scales. Following the mechanics of other narrative punk genres, such as cyberpunk or solarpunk, it sketches out the uses of "punk" as a way of being in border spaces—where abjection, relajo, and illegibility become useful tools that encourage us to divest from the norm, participate in horizontal community building, and imagine borders in radical new ways.