Analyzes how border and immigration enforcement culminated in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.

Honorable Mention for the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize

On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States.

Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration-and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers.

Borders, as sites of crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how the Trump administration amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by frequent and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides-and with more humane immigration policies, it could become that once again.

Analyzes how border and immigration enforcement culminated in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.

About the Author

Gilberto Rosas (CHAMPAIGN, IL) is an associate professor of anthropology and Latina/o studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier.

Reviews
Rosas unpacks 30 years of divisive border rhetoric, ever-punishing immigration enforcement, and inhumane treatment at the border
-The Border Chronicle
Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest disturbing consequence of our border crisis and the currents of a deeply rooted white nationalism that is embedded in the United States.
-Midwest Book Review


Awards
Short-listed for Senior Book Prize (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781421446165
Author Gilberto Rosas
Format Hardback
Page Count 296
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 24mm