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This article reviews how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and underscores how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men. Building on Mae Ngai's (2004) concept of racial removal, we describe this recent mass deportation as a gendered racial removal program. Drawing from secondary sources, surveys conducted in Mexico, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security published statistics, and interviews with deportees conducted by the first author in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Jamaica, we argue that: (1) deportations have taken on a new course in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the wake of the global economic crisis -involving a shift towards interior enforcement; (2) deportation has become a gendered and racial removal project of the state; and (3) deportations will have lasting consequences with gendered and raced effects here in the United States. We begin by examining the mechanisms of the new deportation regime, showing how it functions, and then examine the legislation and administrative decisions that make it possible. Next, we show the concentration of deportations by nation and gender. Finally, we discuss the causes of this gendered racial removal program, which include the male joblessness crisis since the Great Recession, the War on Terror, and the continued criminalization of Black and Latino men by police authorities. This figure amounts to more than twice the sum total of every deportation before 1997 (1.9 million people). Nearly all of these recent deportees have been Latino men, creating a crisis in Latino families and communities. We suggest this constitutes a gendered racial removal program, and argue that changes in immigration law, the War on Terror, the law enforcement racial profiling and criminalization of Latino men, and the male joblessness crisis in the United States have produced this deportation crisis. We conclude by offering some questions, analyses and implications for both research and action. Many scholars working from diverse disciplines have analyzed the soaring number of deportations (Coutin, 2000;Hing, 2003;Ngai, 2004;Hernandez, 2008;Brotherton and Barrios, 2011; Golash-Boza, 2012;Kanstroom, 2012;King et al, 2012;Kretsedemas, 2012), and the increase in police/Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cooperation (Zilberg, 2004;Stumpf, 2006;Donato and Armenta, 2011;Armenta, 2012;Coleman, 2012), yet these studies have not explicitly considered the intersectionality of gender, class and race in these removals. In this article, we review how US deportations ballooned between 1997 and 2012, and we underscore how these deportations disproportionately targeted Latino working class men. Building on Mae Ngai's (2004) concept of racial removal, we refer to this recent mass deportation as a gendered racial removal program. We explain the legal and administrative mechanisms supporting this process, and we indicate how structural factors in the economy and the politics of race, criminalization and immigration have prompted these ...

Suburban maintenance gardening is one service sector that has grown in the United States, and in many parts of the country it has become a gendered occupational niche for Mexican immigrant men. What is the social organization of this occupation and to what extent are Mexican immigrant gardeners following in the footsteps of Japanese gardeners, achieving socioeconomic mobility through gardening? Based on interviews conducted with 47 Mexican immigrant maintenance gardeners in Los Angeles, this article examines the occupational structure of this informal sector job, the social context in which it has developed, the mix of informal and formal economic transactions involved, and the strategic challenges that gardeners negotiate. The data show that there is occupational differentiation and mobility within the gardening occupation, and that mobility in the job remains dependent on combining both ethnic entrepreneurship and subjugated service work. Gendered social and human capital, together with financial and legal capital are necessary for occupational mobility. Jardineria, or suburban maintenance gardening, is analogous to the longstanding labor incorporation of female immigrant domestic workers into affluent households, but it is also indicative of a new trend: the proliferation of hybrid forms of entrepreneurship and service work and the incorporation of masculine "dirty work" service jobs into affluent households.

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