Event Date: Thursday, March 2, 2023
Time: 12:30 p.m – 2:00 p.m.
Location: University Center, San Saba Room
About the Speaker:
Dr. Xóchitl Bada (Pronounced Só-cheel) is an Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program of the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research has appeared in Population, Space, and Place; Latino Studies; and the Labor Studies Journal, among other academic outlets. She is author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement (Rutgers University Press, 2014) and coauthor with Shannon Gleeson of Scaling Migrant Worker Rights (University of California Press, 2023). Her areas of specialization include migrant access to political and social rights, migrant organizing strategies, violence and displacement, and transnational labor advocacy mobilization in Mexico and the United States. She is co-editor of the books New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2018), Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America (The University of Texas Press, 2019), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America (2021), and The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration (2023). She is currently a Public Voices Fellow at the Op-Ed Project and was a Fellow at the Berlin´s Institute for Advanced Study in 2019-2020.
About the Event:
As international migration continues to rise, sending states play an integral part in “managing” their diasporas, in some cases even stepping in to protect their citizens’ labor and human rights in receiving states. At the same time, meso-level institutions—including labor unions, legal aid groups, and immigrant advocates—are among the most visible actors holding governments of immigrant destinations accountable at the local level. The potential of a functional immigrant worker rights regime, therefore, depends on a universal system of justice and human rights, that leans simultaneously on local enforcement. Taking Mexico and the United States as entry points, Scaling Migrant Worker Rights analyzes how an array of organizations puts tactical pressure on government bureaucracies to holistically defend migrant rights. The result is a nuanced, multilayered picture of the impediments to and potential realization of migrant worker rights.