This article examines media representations of immigration in Williamsburg, Virginia, a 'new immigrant destination' in the USA. Through a content analysis of coverage in Williamsburg's local newspaper, we explore how reporters, columnists and readers draw on nationally and internationally circulating discourses to produce public interpretations of immigration issues and construct symbolic boundaries between and among in-groups and 'others' in the community. 'National boundaries drawn locally' captures how media actors use nationally recognizable frames to interpret local issues and define the parameters of community and national belonging. 'Localized symbolic boundaries' take their meanings from place-based, cultural understandings, specific economic conditions and demographics in the local setting. Newspaper discussions in Williamsburg distinguish between 'deserving' foreign student workers (primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia) and 'undeserving', racialized, Latino 'others'. Our analysis advances theories of boundary construction and holds implications for the politics of belonging more generally in other immigrant-receiving contexts.

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Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina andWilliamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of "borderlands" to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in "el Nuevo South." Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions-the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services-combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving "others." We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception.The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.

We explore puzzling outcomes in a Virginia school district: in 2018, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board voted to redraw attendance boundaries to achieve greater racial and socio-economic integration among its middle schools, yet abandoned similar efforts for high schools. Drawing on Critical Race perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of archival materials, including school board meeting transcripts, to analyze the conditions under which school decision-makers mobilize to enact equity-oriented policy reforms. We found that school board members abandoned high school rezoning in the face of fierce opposition from white, affluent residents who saw school reassignments as a threat to their entitlements to a highly rated school and to their property values. For the middle schools, board members avoided white families’ entitlements, which neutralized opposition, at the same time as strong community advocacy in favor of equity and integration shifted the political landscape. This activated ‘interest convergence’ among school board members supportive of equity and resulted in the approval of middle-school attendance boundaries that produced greater racial and socioeconomic integration. This case underscores the importance of community advocacy for equity-based reforms; however, the scope of these efforts may be limited to changes that do not substantively threaten white parents’ perceived entitlements.

This paper focuses on our four years of involvement with a feminist organization within academia that brought `Third World' women activists from a variety of fields as visitors to our US university campus. Based on our experiences as white, US-born feminist sociologists committed to political change, we analyze the challenges and contradictions that we confronted in the daily processes and activities of this organization. By exemplifying complex power dynamics, which often are unacknowledged and unarticulated, our case highlights the need for new theoretical perspectives that take into account power differences that exist along various axes - including axes of domination among women. Transnational processes, we argue, further complicate such power differentials. Serious analyses of the processes and outcomes that are recreated in transnational, international and local feminist development organizations constitute an important political step towards bridging existing gaps between feminist theory and practice.

This article compares women workers' movements in Nicaragua and Northern Mexico that have mobilized in opposition to the abuses occurring within export-processing zones (EPZs). We examine the opportunities and obstacles that such movements have faced as they seek social change via national and transnational coalitions. Our focus on gender tensions within transnational labor movements illustrates how power relations fracture the space of transnational civil society and constrain opposition to neoliberalism. Women's labor movements in both contexts confront highly gendered national and transnational political spaces, stemming in part from the hegemonic association of women with private space and men with public space. Significant differences in the opportunities for resistance emerging from local and national dynamics in Nicaragua and Mexico demonstrate that the realm of the so-called global cannot be understood as abstracted from historically situated localities.

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