Shadow Migration recounts Suzanne Ohlmann’s boomerang travels away from her Nebraska home, until a haunted basement forces her to confront the truth of her biological past.
With her feet firmly rooted on the plains of Nebraska, Suzanne Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes and to discover with her the pain she'd been avoiding through her boomerang travels away from her native home. Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. In the dark solitude of Ohlmann's basement the vision of a dead child presents her with a harrowing choice: she can go home to Nebraska and seek the truth of her biological past, or, like the boy, surrender to the depths of her own darkness. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.
Thanks to hundreds of interviews with Mexican deportees, this book puts a real face on discussions of immigration and border policies--Provided by publisher.
Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants—a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced. Using government correspondence, photographs, oral histories, and private documents, Jessica Ordaz reveals the rise and transformation of migrant detention through this groundbreaking history of one detention camp. The story shows how the U.S. detention system was built to extract labor, to discipline, and to control migration, and it helps us understand the long and shadowy history of how immigration officials went from detaining a few thousand unauthorized migrants during the 1940s to confining hundreds of thousands of people by the end of the twentieth century. Ordaz also uncovers how these detained migrants have worked together to create transnational solidarities and innovative forms of resistance.
Millions of people around the world live in and travel through the shadows. Compelled to leave home, they migrate irregularly without proper documentation to gain access to jobs, education, healthcare, food, and other essential services. Irregular migration exists because there are not enough opportunities for safety and prosperity at home and too few conventional means through which to remedy that lack of opportunity. Recognizing the critical, understudied, and often misunderstood nature of this global phenomenon, the CSIS Project on Prosperity and Development produced a research study on irregular migration involving field research in Mexico, Eritrea, and Ghana. This report, which builds on CSIS’s past work on the global forced migration crisis, aims to shine a light on irregular migration and contribute to an enormously consequential conversation.
This study explores the relationship between outmigration and gender roles in two villages in North Tapanuli, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. In a symbolic sense, land and women have always represented security to Toba Batak men as they travelled in search of a livelihood. The main purpose of this study is to throw light on the options open to the women staying behind and the adjustments they make, as well as their reasons for making them. The approach followed is an anthropological one. It combines an analysis of actor-oriented perceptions and strategies with an insight into the structural forces that formed the context of migration as it developed from the late nineteenth century through the colonial period until today.
A sophisticated and mystical tale that will definitely give you something to think about. Follow the evolution of two diverse beings as they struggle to inhabit one world. Your eyes will feast at the beautiful and imaginative illustrations as your mind wanders through this poetic tale
* INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Book of the Year in Fiction "Visceral and haunting" (New York Times Book Review) · "Hopeful" (Washington Post) · "Powerful" (Los Angeles Times) · "Thrilling" (TIME) · "Tantalizingly beautiful" (Elle) · "Suspenseful, atmospheric" (Vogue) · "Aching and poignant" (Guardian) · "Gripping" (The Economist) Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds.
"Doug Peacock, as ever, walks point for all of us. Not since Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature has a book of such import been presented to readers. Peacock’s intelligence defies measure. His is a beautiful, feral heart, always robust, relentless with its love and desire for the human race to survive, and be sculpted by the coming hard times: to learn a magnificent humility, even so late in the game. Doug Peacock’s mind is a marvel—there could be no more generous act than the writing of this book. It is a crowning achievement in a long career sent in service of beauty and the dignity of life."—Rick Bass, author of Why I Came West and The Lives of Rocks Our climate is changing fast. The future is uncertain, probably fiery, and likely terrifying. Yet shifting weather patterns have threatened humans before, right here in North America, when people first colonized this continent. About 15,000 years ago, the weather began to warm, melting the huge glaciers of the Late Pleistocene. In this brand new landscape, humans managed to adapt to unfamiliar habitats and dangerous creatures in the midst of a wildly fluctuating climate. What was it like to live with huge pack-hunting lions, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and gigantic short-faced bears, to hunt now extinct horses, camels, and mammoth? Are there lessons for modern people lingering along this ancient trail? The shifting weather patterns of today—what we call "global warming"—will far exceed anything our ancestors previously faced. Doug Peacock's latest narrative explores the full circle of climate change, from the death of the megafauna to the depletion of the ozone, in a deeply personal story that takes readers from Peacock's participation in an archeological dig for early Clovis remains in Livingston, MT, near his home, to the death of the local whitebark pine trees in the same region, as a result of changes in the migration pattern of pine beetles with the warming seasons. Writer and adventurer Doug Peacock has spent the past fifty years wandering the earth's wildest places, studying grizzly bears and advocating for the preservation of wilderness. He is the author of Grizzly Years; Baja; and Walking It Off and co-author of The Essential Grizzly. Peacock was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2011 Lannan Fellow.