Search results for ""Author Rebecca Berke Galemba""

Book SynopsisLaboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado. Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado—a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. With collaborators and community partners, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, this book shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance. Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, this book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.Trade Review"Laboring for Justice is public anthropology at its best! Galemba not only explores labor abuses through an engaged commitment to social justice and research, she also writes as a team player set on helping migrants deal with wage theft. Her community-based approach blurs the lines between activism, teaching, and anthropology and offers methodologically rich contributions to issues affecting migrant communities throughout the country."—Juan Thomas Ordóñez, author of Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA"Professor Galemba's book does a better job than any other of telling the real human story of wage theft, how it affects people and families, in particular immigrants and people of color, how it strains our bureaucracy, how it undermines our marketplace. Wage theft is more than just a statistic. This book tells the story."—David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice"The product of a decade-long commitment to politically engaged research, Laboring for Justice makes visible the complex systems of power that constrain the lives and livelihoods of undocumented laborers across the United States. Galemba and colleagues' deeply reflexive consideration of their methodology of convivir is a gift to all committed to the decolonization of ethnographic research and writing."—Angela Stuesse, author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South"Laboring for Justice is a powerful anthropological exploration of systemic inequality and the entrenched structural forces surrounding day laborers in Colorado.... Taken together, both the substantive and the methodological contributions of this work make it a seminal piece of research in the field. Highly recommended."—M. Gatta, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction: Stolen Wages on Stolen Land 1. Stealing Immigrant Work 2. Boomtown: Construction and Immigration in the Mile High City 3. "Dreaming for Friday": How Employers Steal Wages 4. "A Day Worked is a Day Paid": Preventing and Confronting Wage Theft 5. Failure to Pursue: The Legal Maze 6. God's Justice: Resignation and Reckoning 7. Authorship: Abbey Vogel, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Amy Czulada, Tamara Kuennen, Alexsis Sanchez, and Rebecca Galemba: The DAT: Justice and Direct Action 8. Conclusion: "Sí, se puede": Learning to Convivir Amidst Broader Indignities

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Book SynopsisLaboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado. Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado—a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. With collaborators and community partners, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, this book shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance. Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, this book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.Trade Review"Laboring for Justice is public anthropology at its best! Galemba not only explores labor abuses through an engaged commitment to social justice and research, she also writes as a team player set on helping migrants deal with wage theft. Her community-based approach blurs the lines between activism, teaching, and anthropology and offers methodologically rich contributions to issues affecting migrant communities throughout the country."—Juan Thomas Ordóñez, author of Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA"Professor Galemba's book does a better job than any other of telling the real human story of wage theft, how it affects people and families, in particular immigrants and people of color, how it strains our bureaucracy, how it undermines our marketplace. Wage theft is more than just a statistic. This book tells the story."—David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice"The product of a decade-long commitment to politically engaged research, Laboring for Justice makes visible the complex systems of power that constrain the lives and livelihoods of undocumented laborers across the United States. Galemba and colleagues' deeply reflexive consideration of their methodology of convivir is a gift to all committed to the decolonization of ethnographic research and writing."—Angela Stuesse, author of Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South"Laboring for Justice is a powerful anthropological exploration of systemic inequality and the entrenched structural forces surrounding day laborers in Colorado.... Taken together, both the substantive and the methodological contributions of this work make it a seminal piece of research in the field. Highly recommended."—M. Gatta, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction: Stolen Wages on Stolen Land 1. Stealing Immigrant Work 2. Boomtown: Construction and Immigration in the Mile High City 3. "Dreaming for Friday": How Employers Steal Wages 4. "A Day Worked is a Day Paid": Preventing and Confronting Wage Theft 5. Failure to Pursue: The Legal Maze 6. God's Justice: Resignation and Reckoning 7. Authorship: Abbey Vogel, Diego Bleifuss Prados, Amy Czulada, Tamara Kuennen, Alexsis Sanchez, and Rebecca Galemba: The DAT: Justice and Direct Action 8. Conclusion: "Sí, se puede": Learning to Convivir Amidst Broader Indignities

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Galemba has given us a rare glimpse into everyday life in the shadows along the Mexico–Guatemala border. Her grounded, 'bottom up' account draws much-needed attention to this too often overlooked border while carefully avoiding the alarmism and sensationalism found in popular depictions of cross-border smuggling."—Peter Andreas, Brown University"Contraband Corridor dares to humanize those involved with the trafficking of contraband. This unique ethnography offers an intimate approach to the lives of Mexico-Guatemala border inhabitants and their struggles to survive in neoliberal times. Galemba's landmark book helps readers understand a region where smuggling is conceived as free trade and borders are not walls that divide but pathways for encounters."—R. Aída Hernández Castillo, author of Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico"Taking a fascinating look at the middlemen, customs agents, and residents animating the shadowy world of border control, Contraband Corridor draws us into the Guatemala–Mexico frontier with riveting accounts of what matters to the inhabitants and why it matters, against a backdrop of rapidly shifting geopolitical considerations. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, this powerful book shifts commonly held notions of what it means to sustain border life."—Jennifer Burrell, University at Albany, SUNY"Contraband Corridor is an outstanding contribution to the literature on informal economics in Latin America. Its ethnographic approach humanizes everyday smugglers, challenges the stereotype of the backward and ignorant peasant, and highlights powerful forms of local organization and governance. Taken together [Galemba's] work defies the commonly held notion of the margins as lawless, chaotic, and dangerous. Rather, borders are transgressed, commodities flow, and life goes on sometimes with the unwanted intervention of the state."—James H. McDonald, New York Journal of Books"Contraband Corridor provides an ethnographically rich glimpse into how border communities navigate transnational power dynamics....We recommend Contraband Corridor as insightful reading for scholars, students, and advocates interested in trade, labour, informal and illicit economies, border securitization, and the broader impact of state violence on marginalized communities in the global economy."—Yvette Servin, Rosemary Giron, Diane Martinez, Yareli Pineda, and Katie Dingeman, Border Criminologies"Contraband Corridor is an extremely well-written, carefully observed ethnography that provides a real feel for the life of a border region that President Trump has unfairly characterized as anarchic and scary. Her discussion of the ad hoc methods of border control developed by non-state actors, as well as the different strata of local smugglers, is fascinating."—Howard Campbell, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice"Contraband Corridor is a rich and thoughtful analysis of community dynamics on a part of the Mexico-Guatemala border....Galemba has written an excellent ethnography, rich in detail and content, historically contextualizing each of her arguments."—Jorge Choy-Gómez, PoLARTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Paradise for Contraband? 1. Border Entry and Reentries 2. Documenting National Life 3. Corn Is Food, Not Contraband 4. Taxing the Border 5. Phantom Commerce 6. Inheriting the Border 7. Strike Oil Conclusion: The Illicit Trio: Drugs, Arms, and Migrants

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Book SynopsisThe Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.Trade Review"Galemba has given us a rare glimpse into everyday life in the shadows along the Mexico–Guatemala border. Her grounded, 'bottom up' account draws much-needed attention to this too often overlooked border while carefully avoiding the alarmism and sensationalism found in popular depictions of cross-border smuggling."—Peter Andreas, Brown University"Contraband Corridor dares to humanize those involved with the trafficking of contraband. This unique ethnography offers an intimate approach to the lives of Mexico-Guatemala border inhabitants and their struggles to survive in neoliberal times. Galemba's landmark book helps readers understand a region where smuggling is conceived as free trade and borders are not walls that divide but pathways for encounters."—R. Aída Hernández Castillo, author of Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico"Taking a fascinating look at the middlemen, customs agents, and residents animating the shadowy world of border control, Contraband Corridor draws us into the Guatemala–Mexico frontier with riveting accounts of what matters to the inhabitants and why it matters, against a backdrop of rapidly shifting geopolitical considerations. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, this powerful book shifts commonly held notions of what it means to sustain border life."—Jennifer Burrell, University at Albany, SUNY"Contraband Corridor is an outstanding contribution to the literature on informal economics in Latin America. Its ethnographic approach humanizes everyday smugglers, challenges the stereotype of the backward and ignorant peasant, and highlights powerful forms of local organization and governance. Taken together [Galemba's] work defies the commonly held notion of the margins as lawless, chaotic, and dangerous. Rather, borders are transgressed, commodities flow, and life goes on sometimes with the unwanted intervention of the state."—James H. McDonald, New York Journal of Books"Contraband Corridor provides an ethnographically rich glimpse into how border communities navigate transnational power dynamics....We recommend Contraband Corridor as insightful reading for scholars, students, and advocates interested in trade, labour, informal and illicit economies, border securitization, and the broader impact of state violence on marginalized communities in the global economy."—Yvette Servin, Rosemary Giron, Diane Martinez, Yareli Pineda, and Katie Dingeman, Border Criminologies"Contraband Corridor is an extremely well-written, carefully observed ethnography that provides a real feel for the life of a border region that President Trump has unfairly characterized as anarchic and scary. Her discussion of the ad hoc methods of border control developed by non-state actors, as well as the different strata of local smugglers, is fascinating."—Howard Campbell, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice"Contraband Corridor is a rich and thoughtful analysis of community dynamics on a part of the Mexico-Guatemala border....Galemba has written an excellent ethnography, rich in detail and content, historically contextualizing each of her arguments."—Jorge Choy-Gómez, PoLARTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Paradise for Contraband? 1. Border Entry and Reentries 2. Documenting National Life 3. Corn Is Food, Not Contraband 4. Taxing the Border 5. Phantom Commerce 6. Inheriting the Border 7. Strike Oil Conclusion: The Illicit Trio: Drugs, Arms, and Migrants

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