In the evening of August 13th, 2016, the Sherman Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin erupted into protest. Earlier that day, a Milwaukee police officer had shot and killed 23-year old neighborhood resident Sylville Smith, prompting hundreds of people to flood the streets of Milwaukee’s north side. For three days, protestors faced down police in riot gear and snipers situated atop nearby buildings.

In Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America, legal historian Martha Jones traveled back to antebellum Baltimore to uncover the citizenship debates that anticipated the birthright citizenship clause as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Latinx migrants[1] and refugees endure state violences before, at, and after crossing the US-Mexico territorial boundaries.[2] Indeed, the border is one of the central concerns of the state— encapsulated by Trump’s campaign promise to “Build the wall!” Discourses reducing borders to walls are also mobilized by both the left and right of the US political spectrum. Conservatives call for a Southern wall to protect and secure the nation. Migration activists and academics on the left denounce walls as sites of physical state violence and spatial representations of racialized exclusion.

In the spring of 2018 Los Angeles Times reporter Gustavo Arellano argued expansive gentrification threatened the future of working class Latinx barrios “from the Mission District in San Francisco to Barrio Logan in San Diego.” For Arellano, the survival of barrios depended on unlikely alliances between conventionally antagonistic groups within these communities.

The genesis of Latinx Geographies has diverse epistemological, disciplinary, and organizational origins. In what follows I examine the unfolding of conversations and events that have contributed to the establishment of Latinx Geographies as an emerging subfield, and as a Specialty Group in the American Association of Geographers (AAGs).

There would be no Latinx geographies without Black geographies. What I mean by this is that Latinx and Black geographies are inextricably linked, because Blackness and Latinidad are not mutually exclusive and because Black thought, experiences, history and politics, along with the legacy of transatlantic slavery, profoundly shape contemporary social and spatial arrangements in las Americas.

The focus on the “DREAMer” trope has become a mainstay for immigration justice agendas that often effaces the many violences—settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and femicide in the Americás—that shape migrants’ lives. While clashes about the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program remain persistent in US contemporary politics, the “DREAMer” narrative continues to inform activism and scholarship on migration.

This essay is an exploration of the concept of reflexivity. Specifically, it examines what reflexivity might look like for research grounded in a borderlands epistemology. I argue that reflexivity in the borderlands can be understood through Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the nahual, the shapeshifter. I suggest nahualismo as a way to think about identity and situated knowledge.

Sara Ahmed (2017) explains that a feminist killjoy is one who kills the joy of others by naming the inequality and violence that they have chosen to live in, to reproduce, and to ignore. To put a name to inequality is to kill the joy of others, especially those who benefit from it.

When I first approached the question, “What is infrastructure?” my mind trailed back to the rhythms and rhymes of ‘trains, planes and automobiles’ that I learned in childhood.

Jared Sexton's new book Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing moves beyond a traditional critique of respectability politics to interrogate how Hollywood films make invisible global structures of anti-blackness through narratives of black incorporation and authority.

I first became interested in the politicization of childcare after reading Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’ “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.” The 1972 pamphlet is about the necessity of including household and other reproductive labor in understandings of capitalist exploitation as well as the necessity of organizing that labor power to challenge capitalist social reproduction.

Recent feminist scholarship aims to understand the relationship between paid and unpaid work through the lens of social reproduction, that is, “the work required to maintain people as social, emotional, and intellectual beings on a daily and intergenerational basis” (Glenn, 2002, 2010).

Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

How did a New York real estate magnate mired in scandals, including a lawsuit for fraudulent advertising by his university, the refusal to reveal his tax returns on the pretext that “Americans don’t care at all” (it turns out many do), a federal investigation into anti-black bias on his properties, and the confessed misuse of funds by his charitable foundation—not to mention personal sexual misconduct—manage to make anti-corruption a centerpiece of his campaign?