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In the spring of 2006, the U.S. experienced a series of unprecedented immigrant rights marches involving hundreds of thousands of people across the country as they sought to shift the rising tide of anti-immigrant discourse in the media and among the public at large. In recent years, antiimmigrant sentiments, particularly those aimed at undocumented workers and families, have given rise to hundreds of local ordinances prohibiting access to housing, education, and jobs. Amid this climate, efforts to reform outdated immigration policies stalled at the federal level as the country became polarized by competing perspectives on the benefits and liabilities of immigrant workers to the U.S. economy and culture. That fall, I began developing plans for a year-long research sabbatical. Like many Chicana/o scholars, I want my research to be relevant to events affecting our community. Having moved to Minnesota in the summer of 2004, as one of only a handful of Chicana/o scholars on campus, I found myself constantly having to speak about migration and immigration to my students and the greater Minnesota community, which was experiencing a rapid influx of Latino immigrants. Though I came of age politically as an undergraduate student in Houston during the 1986 immigration reform era, living in Minnesota, one of the nation’s exemplars of the new geography of Latino immigration, was eye-opening. My position at the university provided me with a unique opportunity to be a resource of information and facilitator of people’s understanding of this “emerging” population. As I forged alliances and friendships with new immigrants and engaged with a broader public concerned about the impact of immigration on the state’s well-being, I gained new insight and appreciation for the complexities and harsh realities that influenced immigrants’ decisions to leave home and risk life in el norte. I also witnessed firsthand what it is like to be considered a problem, an unwelcome presence, even though workers and industries that depend introduction the latinoization of the u.s. and “our” national culture 2 conversations across our america on immigrant labor thrive in a mutually beneficial relationship. Further, despite the pervasive media portrayal of a strong anti-immigrant movement and the intensification of rhetoric by politicians, I have seen how immigrant families often forge strong intercultural community relationships at work and in their personal lives. As an educator I have been stunned to learn how little many Minnesotans know about Latin American and Latinos’ long history in their own backyard, despite the fact that a Chicano/Latino presence in the urban and rural communities of Minnesota is a century-long phenomenon, not something new at all. In fact, this dynamic environment, the coexistence of older and newer Mexican and Latino communities, had been one of the intriguing factors that led to my move from San Antonio to the Twin Cities. Determined to conceptualize a project on immigration and the shortand long-term impact of the emergence of Latinos as the nation’s largest ethnic minority, I was obliged to reckon with the role the media and its pundits play in shaping public perception of Latinos in the national imaginary. As an avid consumer of media, I often feel inundated by the negative coverage of Latinos and crime, our portrayal as “illegals,” as interlopers, as a cultural and economic threat to be regulated and micromanaged by laws writ large and small. All of these concerns strike many Latinos as absurd given that our existence in the Americas, either as indigenous people or settlers, predates the existence of the U.S., even as we also share status with most Americans as multigenerational immigrants. For better or worse, we embody the history of the Americas, including the U.S., which arrogantly proclaims itself America in a bold act of effacement of its intercontinental neighbors. The conflicts, conquests, commingling, and contradictions that comprise this identity form the core of our historical experience as transnational migrants. Moreover, what is lost on so many people is that the upsurge in immigration across the southern border since the 1960s, in fact throughout the twentieth century, is a direct result of U.S. policies that have actively recruited immigrant workers into the labor force and intervened repeatedly in the economic and political self-determination of Latin American countries—policies and practices that continue to this day. Wanting to get beyond the mostly superficial accounts of media coverage on conflict between newcomers...

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