Jamie Winders

Seeing Immigrants Institutional Visibility and Immigrant Incorporation in New Immigrant Destinations

Since the 1990s, immigrant settlement has expanded beyond gateway cities and transformed the social fabric of a growing number of American cities. In the process, it has raised new questions for urban and migration scholars. This article argues that immigration to new destinations provides an opportunity to sharpen understandings of the relationship between immigration and the urban by exploring it under new conditions. Through a discussion of immigrant settlement in Nashville, Tennessee, it identifies an overlooked precursor to immigrant incorporation—how cities see, or do not see, immigrants within the structure of local government. If immigrants are not institutionally visible to government or nongovernmental organizations, immigrant abilities to make claims to or on the city as urban residents are diminished. Through the combination of trends toward neighborhood-based urban governance and neoliberal streamlining across American cities, immigrants can become institutionally hard to find and, thus, plan for in the city.

White in all the wrong places: white rural poverty in the postbellum US South

Many examinations of whiteness have proceeded on an unacknowledged equation of whiteness with various forms of privilege. I suggest that when differences within whiteness are brought into consideration, a more nuanced engagement with such representations and constructions becomes possible. This argument I make through an analysis of post-Civil War travel accounts of the US South, to demonstrate how prising open the presumed links between a white identity and privilege allows movement beyond a whiteness-as-power framework. In this way, I show that a textual analysis which holds at arm’s length such assumptions facilitates a more engaged understanding of constructions of whiteness in the US South and elsewhere.

Making Gueras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the products representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts. Creando güeras: La venta de identidades blancas en la televisión Mexicana de media noche En este artículo, hacemos un análisis sobre los discursos de ‘blancura’ y de color con respecto a la población en México a través de una discusión sobre ‘White Secret’, un producto cosmético para aclarar la piel que es muy disponible en México. Por un análisis de un ‘info-nuncio’ que sale por la televisión anunciando el producto ‘White Secret’, exploramos los entretejemientos de la construcción de blancura en México y como este ‘info-nuncio’ manipula imágenes de los cuerpos de güeras (mujeres de piel clara) y tecnología cosmética avanzada. Reflexionamos acerca de las maneras que el producto ‘White Secret’ pueda hablar a concepciones más amplias sobre la construcción de identidad y blancura y además, discutimos que tal exploración indica la necesidad de interrogar los limites epistemológicos y geográficos de la comprensión actual de la construcción de blancura basados en los contextos Latino Americanos y Anglo Americanos.

Representing the Immigrant: Social Movements, Political Discourse, and Immigration in the U.S. South

This article examines the ways that the figure of the immigrant is understood and mobilized in political discourses and social movements surrounding immigration in the South. Drawing on both immigrant-related movements and scholarly discussions of immigration to the South, it interrogates how different political movements and discourses envision and act upon “the Latino immigrant” in and across southern locales. To make sense of these different representations, the article offers a typology that focuses on discourses of (1) shared humanity in immigrants-rights organizations, (2) shared racial discrimination in black-brown coalitions, (3) shared class oppression in worker-justice movements, and (4) immigrant difference in anti-immigration legislation. Analyzing how each approach represents “the immigrant,” the article reflects on the ways that these movements and discourses create sameness and difference between long-term residents and immigrants, and the implications of these relationships for a wider politics of immigrant inclusion across the U.S.

Re-Placing Southern Geographies: The Role of Latino Migration in Transforming the South, Its Identities, and Its Study

This manuscript argues that southern geographies are being re-placed materially, discursively, and institutionally through Latino migration. Drawing on ethnographic research in Nashville and scholarship on Latino migration to the South, it shows, first, how southern geographies are being re-placed materially, as southern neighborhoods are transformed by Latino residents. These changes, I suggest, locate new and old place-claims at the center of the South’s immigration politics. Second, the manuscript illustrates how southern geographies are being re-placed discursively, as the South is skipped in Latino and long-term residents’ narrations of community change. The South’s absence in these narratives may reconfigure what southern identity means and how it is formed and transformed. Finally, the manuscript notes that southern geographies are being re-placed institutionally, as other disciplines begin to study Latino migration to the South. Latino migration to southern locales touches nearly every theme southern geographers examine and, thus, merits increased attention from them.

New Immigrant Destinations in Global Context

This article calls for the study of new immigrant destinations in a global context. Although the term “new immigrant destinations” has been primarily associated with the U.S., migration scholars of other regions and countries are examining new or emerging immigrant destinations and the implications of immigrant settlement in places that heretofore have had no notable foreign-born populations. This article argues that expanding the frame of reference for the study of new immigrant destinations provides greater insight into the ways that new geographies of immigrant settlement around the world are re-shaping dominant understandings of contemporary migration processes.

Race and Diversity: What Have We Learned?

This article briefly examines geographic scholarship on race and diversity to enumerate how such work can contribute to the Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure and Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity (ALIGNED) projects goal of creating a more diverse discipline and more diverse departments. Our review presents two arguments. First, diversity, as an object of analysis and desired institutional characteristic, is dynamic, unstable, and, above all, historically and geographically contingent. Studies of diversity, and efforts to create it, must begin from this observation. Second, we argue for diverse methodological and epistemological approaches but ones that are linked through a shared commitment to examining race and racism, diversity and inequalities, simultaneously.

Teaching Orientalism in Introductory Human Geography

This article explores efforts to bring postcolonial theory into the undergraduate human geography classroom. Through a case study of teaching Edward Saids Orientalism in introductory human geography, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial theory to critical pedagogy in geography. We lay out how instructors can teach Orientalism in introductory courses, what happens when they do so, and where efforts to use postcolonial theory to help students analyze the “colonial present” can be improved. We suggest that postcolonial theory is particularly well suited pedagogically to show students the mechanisms and uneven power relations producing and sustaining past and present geographies of difference.

Finding a way into (feminist) economic geography

I was both excited, and a little nervous, to be invited to participate in this panel on feminist economic geography and difference. I am not seen as an economic geographer and do not usually describe myself as one. I sometimes pose as an economic geographer through my collaboration with Barbara Ellen Smith (Smith and Winders, 2008, 2016), but she brings the credentials in economic and labor theories to our writing. Many graduate students in my department have strong interests in economic geography, especially Marxism, and membership on their committees means that I have learned just enough to be dangerous in conversations about value, the labor process, and other topics. While such themes obviously impact my work on immigration, racial politics, and social belonging, economic geography per se is not the primary way I have understood my place within the discipline. The second part of this session title—What difference does difference make?—more closely approximates how I think about my trajectory into human geography and into feminist geography in particular. From my ‘‘beginnings’’ as a geography undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, thinking about difference—and about how axes of difference interlock, interact, and constitute one another—shaped how I came to understand where I fit in our field. Like many, I took a circuitous pathway into geography, one that began with interests in histories of black working-class neighborhoods and the gendered experiences of black residents in US southern cities. These interests in African-American urban history formed alongside and through exposure to feminist scholars like Judith Butler and bell hooks and to historians like Tera Hunter and Robin Kelley. This combination of feminist arguments about intersectionality and critical attention to race helped me grasp the ways that various forms of difference, especially race, class, and gender, were unthinkable in isolation because they were never experienced in isolation. This overdetermined and interlocking approach to difference, forged at the intersection of feminist theory and African-American history, laid the groundwork for how I thought about human geography. From this perspective, class and the economic were formative parts of human experiences and realities but not foundational in a way that other aspects of identity and daily life were not. It was when I began graduate school at the University of British Columbia in the late 1990s that I was formally introduced to economic geography. As I read recently published work in economic geography, topics like Thatcherism and post-Fordism—themes of great interest and clarity to other students, especially those from Britain—seemed ‘‘foreign’’ to me

From journals to classrooms: theory and teaching in cultural geography

Cultural geography has always involved multiple, sometimes conflicting, dialogues about what the subfield includes and should address, about how research within it should proceed, and about what theoretical approaches best capture the complicated relationship between something called “culture” and the production of space and place. This article examines the ways that these questions shape the work of cultural geographers in the classroom, especially the undergraduate classroom. As cultural geographers draw from an increasingly complex set of theories and frameworks, how do, or how can, these theoretical ideas inform pedagogy? What might recent debates about representational and nonrepresentational theories in cultural geography look like in the introductory classroom? Drawing on my own experience of teaching cultural geography, this article reflects on the relationship between theoretical debates over the doing of cultural geography and pedagogical practices in the undergraduate classroom. As it shows, the move from debating the doing of cultural geography in academic publications to teaching cultural geography in the undergraduate classroom requires a set of translations that, to date, are poorly developed in the subfield, as well as a potential reorientation of audience in cultural geographic writings.