CGMS | Book Launch: "Everyday Activists: Undocumented Immigrants’ Quest for Justice and Well-Being" | Christina Getrich
CGMS | Book Launch: "Everyday Activists: Undocumented Immigrants’ Quest for Justice and Well-Being" | Christina Getrich
Please join CGMS, ANTH, and HIST for a book launch event with Christina Getrich (Anthropology) for her new book Everyday Activists: Undocumented Immigrants’ Quest for Justice and Well-Being! Dr. Getrich will be joined by her long-term research collaborators (and UMD Anthropology & US Latina/o Studies alumni) Alaska Burdette, Ana Ortez-Rivera, and Delmis Umanzor, and Dr. Perla Guerrero (American Studies & Director of the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program), who will provide comments and facilitate discussion.
Everyday Activists chronicles how Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients living in the DMV have negotiated their temporary and hotly contested immigration status across different Presidential administrations. While many DACA recipients actively participate in the large-scale, high visibility social movement to fight for policy change and immigrant justice, often overlooked are the thousands more who have never participated or are no longer active in organized immigration-related activism. Yet these DACA recipients are also fighting for immigrant well-being and justice in less publicly visible ways by strategically deploying navigational capital and engaging in everyday activism in solidarity with other immigrants. Everyday Activists illuminates how DACA recipients wrest control over uncertainty by channeling their energies into actions taken in everyday, adult life where they are making a deep and meaningful impact in their families and communities. These alternative forms of political engagement are instructive for us all in thinking creatively about how to show up for immigrants and others systematically subjected to social exclusion in our everyday lives.