Dr. Greg Prieto Book: Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in the Deportation Nation

Greg Prieto, PhD, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of San Diego, published a book, Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in the Deportation Nation, in June 2018.

According to New York University Press, Dr. Prieto’s book publisher, the book is “a portrait of two Mexican immigrant communities confronting threats of deportation, detention, and dispossession.”

“It’s (my) most comprehensive work to date that showcases what I want to say about immigration,” Prieto said in a recent on-campus interview. “It invites the popular reader to think of immigrants as subjects, and not just objects of history. Both as an academic audience and a broader audience, we’ve focused a lot on what happens to immigrants. What laws make their lives more difficult? What changes in policy and practice have imperiled their life chances? What this book tries to do is to join an increasingly growing group of academics in trying to understand, in a more systematic way, how they resist that and what they do in response to those marginalizing social forces. And then, under what conditions do they come together as a collective to contest that marginalization in traditional social movement activities, like protests, rallies, strikes, et cetera.”

According to the NYUPress: “From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements.”

Using ethnographic research from two Mexican immigrant communities on California’s Central Coast — Prieto describes this type of research as “the process of living with or working alongside with or in some other way emerging yourself with the lives of the subject you want to study and couple that with interviews and any other methods that make sense for the project,”— he argues immigrant communities that turn inward to insulate themselves from the perceived risks of authorities and a hostile public. These barriers are overcome through the face-to-face work of social-movement organizing that transforms individual grievances into collective demands.” 

More Insight into Prieto's Book

Prieto wrote a blog entry earlier this year for Mobilizing Ideas to delve more into research for Immigrants Under Threat.

— Compiled by USD News Center