From the Editor

Dear Readers:

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color. Despite its debut, this new publication is the culmination of a longer history. From 2006 to 2012, I had the opportunity to found and serve as editor of Black Women, Gender, and Families, published twice a year by the University of Illinois Press.¹ At its founding, it was the only peer-reviewed scholarly journal that centered black women's studies paradigms within the critical discourses of history, the social sciences, and the humanities, with an especial focus on policy-related issues within the interdisciplinary fields of black studies and women's studies. The journal was an editorial success. It published the work of new and established scholars, was invited to Project MUSE in its youthful third year, and received thousands of monthly online views; and just recently, one of its esteemed contributors, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, won the Association of Black Women Historians' 2011-2012 Letitia Woods Brown Best Article Prize for her leading-edge work "Migration, Trans-Racial/National Identity Re-Formation: Becoming African Diaspora Women," (Black Women, Gender, and Families, Fall 2011). This remarkable record of accomplishment is the basis upon which Women, Gender, and Families of Color is founded. Published, as well, by the University of Illinois Press and hosted by the University of Kansas, this new journal broadens the mission of the earlier journal and explicitly emphasizes the diverse and similar experiences of black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and Asian American women and families, with gender serving as a central analytical frame. Simultaneously, the journal maintains a strong interest in examining social and economic policies and practices, and encourages transnational comparative analyses.

Women, Gender, and Families of Color provides a necessary and welcoming venue for this critical scholarship. As many of you know, an increasing number of diverse scholars are focusing on dramatically changing demographics, domestically and abroad. These twenty-first-century transformations demand new historical and social science research on U.S. racialized women, gender, and families. Indeed, scholars are engaging in multidisciplinary, transnational, and comparative work on these populations. Certainly, our editorial board membership reflects the substantial diversity and expertise brought to this subject matter.

Let me be clear. The work of this journal is critical at this moment for reasons beyond the academic. Women, Gender, and Families of Color begins at a time when rapid population shifts and economic crises are creating new and troubling challenges for domestic and global places, peoples, and institutions. Nowhere are these new circumstances felt more acutely in the U.S. than among black, Latino/a, Indigenous, and Asian American women, men, and families. Many within these populations consistently maintain institutions and lead cultural, social, work-related, and political change. They are a growing number of political leaders, university faculty and administrators, corporate managers, schoolteachers, health care providers, and social service team members.

Simultaneously, racialized women, children, and families in the U.S. and abroad have historically weathered the brunt of local, state, and national austerity measures, crumbling infrastructures, rising education, wealth inequality, and persistent inequities of gender, sexuality, and class. Issues of race and ethnicity permeate social environments in the U.S. When Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American, was killed by George Zimmerman in February 2012, he was not in a poor, inner-city neighborhood riddled by criminal activity, but in Sanford, Florida, a middle-class, small city in a state that encourages residents to "stand your ground" against those you perceive will cause you harm. These laws justify acts of violence against marginalized children and youth, especially, and make it clear that the need to protect children transcends space and place.

The troubles that confront parents are many. In my new home state of Kansas, for example, one-third of black, one-third of Latino/a, and one-quarter of Indigenous children live below poverty. As disturbing as these figures are, they barely compare to the 40-50 percent rate of childhood poverty for Latino/a children in Georgia and South Carolina or for black children in Alabama, Oregon, Iowa, and Missouri. Childhood poverty is about families. According to Columbia...