Captive Latina (Im)migrants and the Limits of the Politics of Respectability within the Immigrant Rights Movement

Captive Latina (Im)migrants and the Limits of the Politics of Respectability within the Immigrant Rights Movement

Presentation by

Martha D. Escobar, Ph.D.

Associate Profession in Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates.  The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a “fix” for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants.

Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are marked as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within this neoliberal era. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants’ everyday lives. Escobar places special focus on how some sectors of the immigrant rights movement engages a politics of respectability that seeks to expand inclusion to “good” (im)migrants and the limitations these strategies present for people marked as criminal.