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Available From UC Press
Holding On to Home
Over twenty million Americans live in cities that have passed sanctuary policies to protect the rights of immigrants and their families. However, contentious public conversations surrounding sanctuary obscure what these policies actually mean to the immigrants they purport to serve, making it hard to see what strengthens the power of sanctuary and what undermines its protections.
Holding On to Home, based on five years of fieldwork and over one hundred in-depth interviews, illuminates how immigrant women’s care work—in their families, schools, and communities—makes real the promise of sanctuary. Through their resistive care work, immigrant women weave together an enduring fabric of protection that transforms inclusive policies into meaningful practices that support immigrant mothers as they nurture their children and loved ones. Holding On to Home reveals how these women confront both overt threats to sanctuary—anti-immigrant policies and increasingly violent and arbitrary immigration enforcement—alongside a less obvious threat to sanctuary, but one that widens inequality in our urban landscapes: gentrification. Tracing the meaning of sanctuary across shifting political contexts, Sarah Bruhn powerfully demonstrates how immigrant women resist these forces of exclusion to lay claim to their right to create a home and to belong in our shared cities.
Sarah Bruhn is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies migration, families, gender, and education.
“Through eyes that are disciplined and discerning, attentive and insightful, and with a voice that is both analytic and artful, Sarah Bruhn offers wise witness to the caring and courageous work of immigrant women who seek to create home and find sanctuary in a rapidly gentrifying city facing the oppression and violence of federal anti-immigrant policies. Holding On to Home is a rich ethnographic portrait that captures the immigrant women’s fight for liberation and belonging, their collective advocacy and resistance, and their brave efforts to nurture their families and communities as they navigate the systemic forces of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and poverty. This timely and revelatory book is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand this moment of political, economic, and moral crisis when our cities and states have become sights of unlawful and dangerous attacks on immigrant families, women, and children.”—Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Emily Hargroves Fisher Research Professor of Education, Harvard University