100 Books Like Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

I was both educated and enraged by Danticat’s grief story about the extensive immigrant injustices in this country and the entrenched systemic rights abuses. But the intimate family story at its core made this memoir one of my favorites. I was profoundly moved by her exquisite portrayal of her relationships with the two cherished men at the center of this book and her life—her father, Mira, and her uncle Joseph, a second father figure.

Danticat’s dedication to unravel the tragic string of circumstances that led to her uncle’s death in detention after he immigrated from Haiti only months before her father died from Pulmonary Fibrosis left me in awe. She demonstrates how, in retracing these circumstances, her book has become another kind of grief site for her personally and for the community. One that I have been grateful to visit to find companionship in loss.  

This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never relinquished themselves to racist incarceration. 

Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.

The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.

Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism. 

This recently published collection brings together writings by the abolitionist organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has worked against the prison industrial complex with organizations and communities for decades. On its surface, it is not a book about immigration, and yet Gilmore offers crucial insights for understanding the shifting forces in the state and capitalism that have decimated communities both within and beyond the US. Those forces have abandoned working-class communities (largely of color; see Detroit), uprooted migrants, and criminalized both, targeting them for removal—to prisons, detention centers, and deportations to other countries. Her work also gives us concrete examples of the solidarity organizing that connects different groups, whose interests might not seem to align and whose locations might be spread across distances. If the previous books clarify the roots of the problems, Gilmore not only digs even deeper, but she also shows us examples of the work needed… show more.

I could not bear to put this book down. Each time I reached the end, I started again from the beginning. It lived on my bedside table for months. It was only after three readings that I could let it go.

Gregory Day had drawn me right into the places and times of early settler colonialism; his characters formed, against the odds, a way of life that was creative—poetic, musical, sensual, and, above all, ecological. They listened to the earth and found their place as part of it, belonging to it and belonging to the Earth. 

Cutcha Risling Baldy is shaking up the terms of engagement for Indigenous cultural reclamation in far Northern California. A Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk scholar and an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Risling Baldy describes both the why and the how of Indigenous cultural survival in this book. Through a detailed description of girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies, Risling Baldy’s commitment to resisting settler colonialism shows a path forward for Indigenous communities.

I love how this dazzling book reveals a deep truth that is known to so many women of color but obscured by the white feminist myth of individualism. There is no way we can be not related to each other, so the real question that matters for politics is not whether we will be related to each other; it is how we want to be.

Part excavation of settler colonialism—including its effects on Indigenous women—and part meditation on how to build solidarity without denying our complicity in oppressive structures, the book is visionary and even manages to be hopeful. It also draws attention to an issue that no 21st-century feminism can afford to ignore: our relationships with the land. I learned so much about what it means to show up for each other and about why we have to.

What would we do in a world lacking police, prisons, surveillance, borders, wars, nuclear weapons, and capitalism? Well, we might survive. We might sustain life on this little blue dot a little longer. That—in contrast to the status quo—ought to be sufficient. We might, in addition, do a lot more than sustain life. We might transform the lives of billions of people, including each person reading these words. We might have lives with less fear and worry, more joy and accomplishment, more control and cooperation.

But, of course, the question might be asked in the sense of “Wouldn’t the criminals get us, and the forces of law and order be imperiled, and evildoers take away our freedoms, and sloth and laziness deprive us of updated phone models every few months?” As a way to begin answering those concerns, I recommend this tremendous resource of a book which surveys seven candidates… show more.

I loved this book because it provided a geographic perspective that deepened my understanding of how Native people in the Lower Chaco of Paraguay are mobilizing to reclaim their land. Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the transition to ranching pushed these people off their homelands and made them dispensable peons.

Refusing to give up, the Enxet and Sanapaná employed international advocates to pressure neoliberal politicians to return their lands. I was so impressed by Correia’s years of participant observations and the insights he provides into the Native peoples’ changing world.

Our whole family loves this book about an Indigenous child’s smoking ceremony. As a white settler-colonial family in Australia we are keen to read and learn from Indigenous authors and the publisher, Magabala press, are outstanding in the quality of the books they publish. The simple yet effective computer-created artwork gives an intimate insight into the importance of the first lesson of law, connecting to Country, which leads to great conversations and reflection. The inclusion of Indigenous words within the story adds to the depth of sharing with the audience and allows the voices of the women to be heard beyond those who usually attend such an important rite of passage. A real treasure. I wish it came as a board book as our copy has had to be taped together many times!