Gardens are immobile, literally rooted in the earth, but they are also shaped by migration and by the transnational movement of ideas, practices, plants, and seeds. In Paradise Transplanted, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals how successive conquests and diverse migrations have made Southern California gardens, and in turn how gardens influence social inequality, work, leisure, status, and our experiences of nature and community. Drawing on historical archival research, ethnography, and over one hundred interviews with a wide range of people including suburban homeowners, paid Mexican immigrant gardeners, professionals at the most elite botanical garden in the West, and immigrant community gardeners in the poorest neighborhoods of inner-city Los Angeles, this book offers insights into the ways that diverse global migrations and garden landscapes shape our social world.

In this timely and compelling account of the contribution to immigrant rights made by religious activists in post-1965 and post-9/11 America, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo provides a comprehensive, close-up view of how Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups are working to counter xenophobia. Against the hysteria prevalent in today's media, in which immigrants are often painted as a drain on the public coffers, inherently unassimilable, or an outright threat to national security, Hondagneu-Sotelo finds the intersection between migration and religion and calls attention to quieter voices, those dedicated to securing the human dignity of newcomers. Based on years of fieldwork conducted in California's major centers as well as in Chicago, this book considers Muslim Americans defending their civil liberties after 9/11, Christian activists responding to death and violence at the U.S-Mexico border, and Christian and Jewish clergy defending the labor rights of Latino immigrants. At a time when much attention has been given to religious fundamentalism and its capacity to incite violent conflict, God's Heart Has No Borders revises our understanding of the role of religion in social movements and demonstrates the nonviolent power of religious groups to address social injustices.

Product Description: Religion has jumped into the sphere of global and domestic politics in ways that few would have imagined a century ago. Some expected that religion would die as modernity flourished.  Instead, it now stares at us almost daily from the front pages of newspapers and television broadcasts...read more

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Product Description: Challenging Fronteras reflects an important new wave of research that moves beyond sweeping generalizations that treat Latinos as a monolithic cultural group. This anthology focuses on the diversity of Latino experiences by providing historical specificity and cutting-edge research that employs the conceptual and analytical tools of social science...read more

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Product Description: The momentous influx of Mexican undocumented workers into the United States over the last decades has spurred new ways of thinking about immigration. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's incisive book enlarges our understanding of these recently arrived Americans and uncovers the myriad ways that women and men recreate families and community institutions in a new land...read more