A compelling, rigorously researched legal argument against the demonization of deportees.
A former Los Angeles public defender offers a deeply informed appeal to create more humane practices for noncitizens facing criminal deportation.
As a criminal defense attorney who, from 2005 to 2009, represented noncitizens in their fight against deportation after criminal convictions, Caldwell (Legal Analysis, Writing, and Skills/Southwestern Law School) came away with the sense that the American legal process does not adequately address the challenges faced by these noncitizens. Subsequent research on a Fulbright Garcia-Robles grant in Mexico in 2009 allowed the author to interview many of the deported people who had grown up in America and who largely considered themselves American: They had been raised there as children and spoke non-accented English; they had sworn allegiance to the American flag in public school; they had assumed all the traditional American customs and holidays. As Caldwell writes, she was influenced in her research by her own “mixed-status family”; she is married to a Mexican man whose family has members struggling with various immigration issues. In this eloquent book, she shares the specific stories and examples of people for whom the sentence of deportation was a form of “violent dismemberment.” The American legal system has long embraced an “exclusionary framework” regarding “aliens,” from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1990, which “created an out-of-court administrative removal process for those convicted of aggravated felonies, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for many years.” This streamlined approach did not take into account the deep American roots of many immigrants as well as the dependence of their spouses and their children. Caldwell looks systematically at the effects of deportation to Mexico on the spouses and children especially (drug abuse, depression, suicide, attractions to gangs) and how this inhumane banishment should be amended.
A compelling, rigorously researched legal argument against the demonization of deportees.Pub Date: April 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4780-0390-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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