It might have been a town plaza somewhere in Mexico. Hundreds of Latinos gathered in the shady park on an afternoon in late July, speaking Spanish, listening to Mexican music, eating tamales, dancing incumbiaandduranguensecontests. Children jumped in the bounce house, had their faces painted, watched a clown perform, and played games, vying for the prizes donated by local merchants. A large group of women demonstrated Zumba, the Colombian dance fitness program. Off to the side of the main stage, a man in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat performed lasso tricks.

Here and there, one could...

In a 1948 report titled “Racial and National Apartheid in the Bible,” South African politician E. P. Groenewald proclaimed that “the total separation of races or apartheid was the only just policy for South Africa because God had ordained the diversity of humanity. . . . God willed that different people groups should live apart and maintain their cultural purity” (quoted in Kuperus 88). Church and state, scripture and the law, worked together to deny the desires produced through everyday intimacies—indeed, to deny the possibility that these intimacies would occur. As the National Party rose to power, one of...

In the sanctuary of the Covenant Christian Reformed Church in Sioux Center, Pastor Gianni Gracia stands at the pulpit, looking out over the congregation of Anglos and Latinos and welcoming them in Spanish. Many of the nearly fifty Anglos in the pews are wearing earpieces and listening to him through the translation of Piet Koene, an elder in the church and one of its founders. The intimacy of spiritual worship, of bodies coming together in this small space, is mediated by language and liturgy. Whose language? Whose liturgy? Is there any longer an owner of either? The scripture and sermon...

When Martha Draayer’s father crossed the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, in 1991, he saw a sign that said “Workers needed in Iowa,” so he headed north and eventually ended up in Sibley, a small town in the northwest corner of the state. He got a job working with cattle and hogs, and three months later, Martha’s mother, baby sister, and Martha, who was four, joined him.

That’s how Martha found herself the only Latina in an all-white kindergarten that had no English as a second language program. According to Martha, “I remember sitting in the classroom and the teacher...

Maria G. faced a seemingly impossible predicament. The twenty-year-old Guatemalan woman had been arrested at her home in Sioux Center after the father of her baby, in the midst of a domestic dispute, called the police to report that Maria was working with false identity papers. Now, she was being held in an immigration detention center in Holdrege, Nebraska; the father was in jail; and her ten-month-old son, Bruce, was being cared for by relatives of her husband. She could sign her own deportation orders and likely be sent back to Guatemala in a month, but that would mean leaving...

Luis Ramirez came to the United States from Mexico in 2002 to look for work and ended up in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, a town of 5,500 located eighty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He made a home here and held two jobs—picking strawberries and working in a potato chip factory; he worked so hard that his nickname was “El Caballo,” “the horse.” He was engaged to a local woman and had two children with her. He also sent a large chunk of his earnings to his mother in Guanajuato.

Yet to some in this struggling coal town, Ramirez would never belong....