New Books in Sociology New Books Network

“Wisconsin has always been my home. It’s not a place, however, where I’ve always felt at home,” (ix) declares Dr. Sergio M. González in the first two lines of his acknowledgments for his recently published book Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging & Faith in Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (University of Illinois Press, 2024). These two sentences are the essence of the manuscript as González guides the reader through a one-hundred-year history of Latino migration, settlement, and religious life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and surrounding rural regions. Many different nationalities that fall under the banner of the “Latino” identity have made home, work, and life in Wisconsin, but their presence was met with varying scales of hospitality – the act of welcoming “the stranger.” He writes in the Introduction, “Strangers No Longer demonstrates that relationships within hospitality interactions are in fact relations of power” (3). It is through a framework of hospitality that González structures his manuscript to show how clergy and laity accepted, to varying degrees, newly arrived Latinos in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin religious institutions have a long engagement with Latino populations. From the arrival of Mexican immigrant laborers in the 1920s who were recruited as strikebreakers, to post-war Tejano and Puerto Rican migrants who were encouraged to assimilate into eurocentric ideals of belonging, and finally to the 1980s Sanctuary Movement in which Central American asylees sought protection from state and federal immigration enforcement, each of these topics and more are covered in Strangers No Longer. González skillfully crafts a narrative where the reader witnesses the development of the relationship between Wisconsin religious institutions and various Latino communities as one moving from a relationship of paternalism in the early 20th century to one of self-determination by the late 20th century. “Wisconsin Latinos pushed churches to acknowledge that they were no longer guests in their communities, or, in the words of the organizers of a statewide conference held in Appleton in 1974, ‘strangers in our homeland’” (141). By the 21st century, González asserts, the church had become a site for Latino political consciousness and resistance for decades.
González’s methodological rigor, clear writing, and strong theoretical grounding allow the reader to understand the delicate political, racial, economic, and spiritual power relations at play for Latinos in the Midwest during the 20th century. Strangers No Longer is a valuable read for undergraduate courses in Latino history, religious history, and social movement history. Alongside his academic work, González is building out his public history projects that offer primers on the sanctuary movement, immigration history, and Latino religious life in the Midwest.
Links to Dr. Gonzalez’s publications and projects:

Strangers No Longer

Mexicans in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Latinx History Collective


PBS Wisconsin's The Look Back 

Wisconsin Historical Society's upcoming History Center


Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. 
In The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.
The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Dr. Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Eleanor Medhurst joins us today to talk about Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion (Hurst & Company, 2024). Clothes are integral to lesbian history. Lesbians, in turn, are integral to the history of fashion. The way that we dress can help us to present who we are to the world, or it can help us to hide ourselves. It can align us with a community or make us stand out from the crowd. For lesbians, fashion can have innumerable meanings - yet "lesbian fashion" is rarely considered, the main association between lesbians and their clothes being of un-fashionability. 
In Unsuitable, Eleanor Medhurst explores the history of lesbian fashion, a field that has been overwhelmingly ignored within both fashion and queer histories. Unsuitable uncovers the relationships between lesbians and their clothes as well as their fashionable details, from top hats to violet tiaras. It spans centuries and continents: Anne Lister of nineteenth century Yorkshire and "Paris Lesbos" of the 1920s, butch/femme bar culture of the 1950s and lesbian activists in the '80s. It celebrates Black lesbian histories, trans lesbian histories, and histories of gender-nonconformity. The lesbian past is slippery; it has often deliberately been hidden, altered or left unrecorded. This book lights it up and shares it with the world, adorned in all its finery.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks to Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech, about her work on the history and ethnography of mobility and infrastructure in Ghana. Hart’s newest book, Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, 2024), examines how technocrats enforced restrictions around public health, housing, mobility, and other domains in Ghana in the name of modernization. Vinsel and Hart also discuss how humanistic and technical inquiry can be brought together to improve outcomes around everyday human problems around the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. 
Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton UP, 2024) tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what happens when White creative professionals seek out racially diverse and working-class communities and revealing how gentrification is increasingly happening outside large city centers in places where it unfolds in new ways.
As New York City’s housing market becomes too expensive for even the middle class, many urbanites are bypassing the suburbs and moving to smaller cities like Newburgh, where housing is affordable and historic. Richard Ocejo takes readers into the lives of these newcomers, examining the different ways they navigate racial difference and inequality among Newburgh’s much less privileged local residents, and showing how stakeholders in the city’s revitalization reframe themselves and gentrification to cast the displacement they cause to minority groups in a positive light.
An intimate exploration of the moral dilemma at the heart of gentrification, Sixty Miles Upriver explains how progressive White gentrifiers justify controversial urban changes as morally good, and how their actions carry profound and lasting consequences for vulnerable residents of color.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Weh Yeoh's Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence (Koan Press, 2023) presents a transformative approach to charitable work. Drawing on his extensive experience in the non-profit sector, Yeoh argues that the ultimate goal of a charity should be to render itself unnecessary. He critiques the traditional charity model, which often perpetuates dependency and self-preservation, and instead advocates for organizations to implement clear exit strategies and focus on supporting local communities to solve their own problems.
Yeoh asserts that success in charity work is measured by the ability to address root causes and sustainably transfer skills and resources to local populations, ensuring they can continue the work independently. This approach is exemplified by his own work founding OIC Cambodia, where he aimed to establish a sustainable speech therapy profession in Cambodia, ultimately handing over the leadership to local practitioners.
The book is not just a critique but also offers practical guidance on how charities can shift towards this new model, challenging readers to rethink their strategies and align their missions with long-term, self-sustaining impact.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology