UC Press ASA Award-Winning Authors

Laura Enriquez

Distinguished Book Award 2021, Co-winner
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section

William J. Goode Book Award 2021
American Sociological Association, Family Section

Laura E. Enriquez is Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. 

Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family

Of Love and Papers explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families. Drawing on two waves of interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain family formation. The imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency. Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, Enriquez illustrates the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families. A free open access ebook is available. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

Read a Q&A with Laura Enriquez

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Angela García 

Oliver Cromwell Cox Award
American Sociological Association, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section

Distinguished Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section

Angela S. García is a sociologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. 

Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as “legal,” masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

View a special video spotlight with Angela García 

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Rocío Rosales

Distinguished Book Award 2021, Co-winner
American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section

Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award 2021, Honorable Mention
American Sociological Association, International Migration Section

Rocío Rosales is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. 

Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles

This book examines the social worlds of young Latino street vendors as they navigate the complexities of local and federal laws prohibiting both their presence and their work on street corners. Known as fruteros, they sell fruit salads out of pushcarts throughout Los Angeles and are part of the urban landscape. Drawing on six years of fieldwork, Rocío Rosales offers a compelling portrait of their day-to-day struggles. In the process, she examines how their paisano (hometown compatriot) social networks both help and exploit them. Much of the work on newly arrived Latino immigrants focuses on the ways in which their social networks allow them to survive. Rosales argues that this understanding of ethnic community simplifies the complicated ways in which social networks and social capital work. Fruteros sheds light on those complexities and offers the concept of the “ethnic cage” to explain both the promise and pain of community.

View a special video spotlight with Rocío Rosales

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Jennifer Randles

William J. Goode Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Family Section

Jennifer M. Randles is Chair and Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at California State University, Fresno, and author of Proposing Prosperity? Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America.

Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering

In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one that carefully considers the social and economic factors shaping men’s abilities to be involved in their children’s lives and the ideologies that rationalize the necessity of that involvement.

View a special video spotlight with Jennifer Randles

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Julia Chuang

Distinguished Scholarly Book Award 2021
American Sociological Association, Labor and Labor Movements section

Sociology of Development Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Sociology of Development Section

Transnational Asia Book Award, Honorable Mention 2021
American Sociological Association, Asia and Asian America section

Julia Chuang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market

For nearly four decades, China’s manufacturing boom has been powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88 million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of China’s economic success, and the periodic crises—a rural fiscal crisis, a runaway urbanization—that it first created and now must resolve.

View Julia Chuang’s book talk at the Cornell East Asia Program

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Danielle Raudenbush

2020 C. Wright Mills Award
Society for the Study of Social Problems

Danielle T. Raudenbush is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America

Millions of low-income African Americans in the United States lack access to health care. How do they treat their health care problems? In Health Care Off the Books, Danielle T. Raudenbush provides an answer that challenges public perceptions and prior scholarly work. Informed by three and a half years of fieldwork in a public housing development, Raudenbush shows how residents who face obstacles to health care gain access to pharmaceutical drugs, medical equipment, physician reference manuals, and insurance cards by mobilizing social networks that include not only their neighbors but also local physicians. However, membership in these social networks is not universal, and some residents are forced to turn to a robust street market to obtain medicine. For others, health problems simply go untreated.

Read our Q&A with Danielle Raudenbush

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Garret Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and Edward Miguel

2021 Outstanding Publication Award
American Sociological Association, Section on Methodology

Garret Christensen is an Economist at the U.S. Census Bureau and was formerly a Research Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. His research focuses on the impacts of social safety-net programs. 

Jeremy Freese is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, and Co-Principal Investigator of the General Social Survey and Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences. His research focuses on topics that connect social inequality, health, and social change. 

Edward Miguel is Oxfam Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Effective Global Action. His research focus is on African economic development.

Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science

Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research is the first book to summarize and synthesize new approaches to combat false positives and non-reproducible findings in social science research, document the underlying problems in research practices, and teach a new generation of students and scholars how to overcome them. Understanding that social science research has real consequences for individuals when used by professionals in public policy, health, law enforcement, and other fields, the book crystallizes new insights, practices, and methods that help ensure greater research transparency, openness, and reproducibility. Readers are guided through well-known problems and are encouraged to work through new solutions and practices to improve the openness of their research. Created with both experienced and novice researchers in mind, Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research serves as an indispensable resource for the production of high quality social science research.

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