“Emphasizing a processual ethnographic approach that historicizes subjectivity, Working the Boundaries analyzes transnational migration, racialization, class struggle, and state repression expressed through ‘illegality’ toward Mexicans in late-twentieth-century Chicago. Nicholas De Genova vividly renders ‘Mexican Chicago,’ where social relations are simultaneously imbricated in the U.S. political project of regulating labor and immigration and Mexican workers’ immersion in regional economies and politics in Mexico. His at times provocative assessments of current scholarship will engender further clarity in research and policy discussions about Mexican migration, contributing to American studies, Chicana/o studies, and the ethnography of North America.”-Patricia Zavella, coeditor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader
“In this stunning ethnographic achievement, the Mexican workers of Chicago reinvent the city, the labor process, the United States, and ‘our America’ as a whole: a region that knows no borders. But at the same time the nation-state, the systems of law and politics, and their working lives confine and encumber them. Working the Boundaries shows how much agency and insight are built into the realities of immigration, how limited and self-defeating are the core politics of U.S. nationalism and racism, and how powerful a weapon ethnography can be in the fight for freedom and justice. Nicholas De Genova has produced a book of great insight and beauty. Highly recommended!”-Howard Winant, author of The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice
