Now the most populous minority group in the United States, Latino/as increasingly need guidance on the everyday issues that affect their economic livelihood, their freedom, and their equal rights to dignity and opportunity. This comprehensive guide is organized around the three flashpoints that contribute to the unique legal treatment of Latino/as-immigration status, language regulation, and racial/ethnic discrimination. These points are examined in the venues of everyday life for Latino/as-from discrimination in housing to discrimination and language regulation in the workplace and lack of protection for immigrant labor, to classrooms where the bilingual education debate rages, to the voting booth and the criminal justice system where Latino/as confront racial profiling and language barriers.

Now the most populous minority group in the United States, Latino/as increasingly need guidance on the everyday issues that affect their economic livelihood, their freedom, and their equal rights to dignity and opportunity. This comprehensive guide is organized around the three flashpoints that contribute to the unique legal treatment of Latino/as-immigration status, language regulation, and racial/ethnic discrimination. These points are examined in the venues of everyday life for Latino/as-from discrimination in housing to discrimination and language regulation in the workplace and lack of protection for immigrant labor, to classrooms where the bilingual education debate rages, to the voting booth and the criminal justice system where Latino/as confront racial profiling and language barriers.

As members of the fastest-growing demographic group in America, Latinos are increasingly represented in the professional class, but they continue to face significant racism. Everyday Injustice introduces readers to the challenges facing Latino professionals today. Despite considerable success in overcoming educational, economic, and class barriers, Latino professionals still experience marginalization. Everyday Injustice is a powerful illustration of racism and inequality in America.

As members of the fastest-growing demographic group in America, Latinos are increasingly represented in the professional class, but they continue to face significant racism. Everyday Injustice introduces readers to the challenges facing Latino professionals today. Despite considerable success in overcoming educational, economic, and class barriers, Latino professionals still experience marginalization. Everyday Injustice is a powerful illustration of racism and inequality in America.

This casebook contains an array of issues relating to this important and rapidly growing group: legal, social construction, language, education, immigration, stereotyping, workplace discrimination, rebellious lawyering, and the special issues of Latinos. Beginning with histories of the main subgroups, early sections discuss theoretical approaches such as post-colonialism, critical race theory, and the black-white binary of race that have proved useful in understanding the Latino condition. With a rich selection of cases, statutes, documents, notes, questions, and bibliographic references, this volume represents a welcome resource for teachers, scholars, and students.

National immigration debates have thrust both opponents of immigration and immigrant rights supporters into the news. But what happens once the rallies end and the banners come down? What is daily life like for Latinos who have been presented nationally as “terrorists, drug smugglers, alien gangs, and violent criminals”? Latino Heartland offers an ethnography of the Latino and non-Latino residents of a small Indiana town, showing how national debate pitted neighbor against neighbor—and the strategies some used to combat such animosity. It conveys the lived impact of divisive political rhetoric on immigration and how race, gender, class, and ethnicity inform community belonging in the twenty-first century. Latino Heartland illuminates how community membership was determined yet simultaneously re-made by those struggling to widen the scope of who was imagined as a legitimate resident citizen of this Midwestern space. The volume draws on interviews with Latinos—both new immigrants and long-standing U.S. citizens—and whites, as well as African Americans, to provide a sense of the racial dynamics in play as immigrants asserted their right to belong to the community. Latino Hoosiers asserted a right to redefine what belonging meant within their homes, at their spaces of worship, and in the public eye. Through daily acts of ethnic belonging, Spanish-speaking residents navigated their own sense of community that did not require that they abandon their difference just to be accepted. In Latino Heartland, Sujey Vega addresses the politics of immigration, showing us how increasingly diverse towns can work toward embracing their complexity.