Author note: Andrés Torres is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Labor Research at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, University of Groningen, language: English, abstract: The paper is about Canadian and American immigration policies. It discusses differences, commonalities and such. Which country has the better immigration system? Over the last decade, the Canadian mosaic and the American melting pot have emerged in North American as concepts to explain Canada’s and America’s angle towards immigration and cultural pluralism. While many Canadians view the American melting pot as the total opposite of the mosaic, the two ideologies have much in common while examining the everyday realities of cultural pluralism in North America. In the following my intension is to illustrate on which concepts both immigration policies are based on, under which circumstances immigrants are allowed to move to the US and Canada by comparing the two immigration procedures, what the distinctive features between them are and in how far they are able to keep their promises towards new immigrants by looking at critics.

This book tells the stories of South Asian Americans in K-12 schools, through a look at their perceptions, experiences, and support needs in school, especially in context of teacher cultural proficiency and belief in “the model minority myth” (the perception of Asians as the perfect minority). This book mixes stories, quotes, and anecdotes with quantitative research in order to paint a multifaceted picture of the varied and complex experiences of Asian Americans in schools. The book examines existing scholarly and popular literature to offer deeper context, and to provide guidance for how educators, policymakers, and the community might improve experiences for South Asian American, and all students, in increasingly diverse schools.

First Published in 2004. This book provides a novel understanding of current thought and enquiry in the study of popular culture and communications media. The populist sentiments and impulses underlying cultural studies and its postmodernist variants are explored and criticized sympathetically. An exclusively consumptionist trend of analysis is identified and shown to be an unsatisfactory means of accounting for the complex material conditions and mediations that shape ordinary people’s pleasures and opportunities for personal and political expression. Through detailed consideration of the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and ‘the Birmingham School’, John Fiske, youth subcultural analysis, popular television study, and issues generally concerned with public communication (including advertising, arts and broadcasting policies, children’s television, tabloid journalism, feminism and pornography, the Rushdie affair, and the collapse of communism), Jim McGuigan sets out a distinctive case for recovering critical analysis of popular culture in a rapidly changing, conflict-ridden world. The book is an accessible introduction to past and present debates for undergraduate students, and it poses some challenging theses for postgraduate students, researchers and lecturers.

For the first time told in its entirety, the social and cultural experience of New York's Lower East Side comes vividly to life in this book as that of a huge and complex laboratory ever swelled and fed by migrant flows and ever animated by a high-voltage tension of daily research and resistance - the fascinating history of the historical immigrant quarter that, in Manhattan, stretches between East 14th Street, East River, the access to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Lafayette Street. Irish and Germans at first, then Chinese and Italians and East European Jews, and finally Puerto Ricans gave birth, in its streets and sweatshops, cafés and tenements, to a lively multi-ethnic and cross-cultural community, which was at the basis of several modern artistic expressions, from literature to cinema, from painting to theatre. The book, based upon a rich wealth of historical materials (settlement reports, autobiographies, novels, newspaper articles) and on first-hand experience, explores the many different aspects of this long history from the late 19th century years to nowadays: the way in which immigrants reacted to the new environment and entered a fruitful dialectics with America, the way in which they reorganized their lives and expectations and struggled to defend a collective identity against all disintegrating factors, the way in which they created and disseminated cultural products, the way in which they functioned as a gigantic magnet attracting several outside artists and intellectuals. The book thus has a long introduction detailing the present situation and mainly depicting the realities within the Chinese and Puerto Rican communities and the fight against gentrification, six chapters on the Lower East Side's past history (its social and cultural geography, the relationship among the several different communities, the labor situation, the literary output, the development of an ethnic theatre, the neighborhood's influences upon turn-of-the-century American culture in the fields of sociology, photography, art, literature and cinema), and a conclusion summing up past and present and discussing the main aspects of a Lower East Side aesthetics.