Norma Fuentes-Mayorga’s From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders: Migrating Women, Class, and Color will be published next month (February 2023) by Rutgers University Press. This book traces the importance of women-led migration, with a focus on Dominican and Mexican communities.

Description: In From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders, Norma Fuentes-Mayorga compares the immigration and integration experiences of Dominican and Mexican women in New York City, a traditional destination for Dominicans but a relatively new one for Mexicans. Her book documents the significance of women-led migration within an increasingly racialized context and underscores the contributions women make to their communities of origin and of settlement.

Fuentes-Mayorga’s research is timely, especially against the backdrop of policy debates about the future of family reunification laws and the unprecedented immigration of women and minors from Latin America, many of whom seek human rights protection or to reunite with families in the US. From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders provides a compelling look at the suffering of migrant mothers and the mourning of family separation, but also at the agency and contributions that women make with their imported human capital and remittances to the receiving and sending community. Ultimately the book contributes further understanding to the heterogeneity of Latin American immigration and highlights the social mobility of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous migrant women in New York. 

NORMA FUENTES-MAYORGA is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Program at the City College of New York. Before joining City College, Fuentes was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Migration and Development (CMD) and an assistant professor of sociology at Fordham University.

For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/from-homemakers-to-breadwinners-to-community-leaders/9781978822122

Also see  https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/thematic/caribbean-studies/list