@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1941},
      author = {Offidani-Bertrand, Carly},
      title = {Understanding Collective Interpretation and Response to  Cultural Change: A Case Study of a Mixed Status Immigrant  Community in Chicago},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {209},
      abstract = {Immigration enforcement has been a central point of  conflict within the political landscape for decades, but  recently the hardships associated with uncertain migratory  status have become dire. It is not just the structural  growth of the ‘deportation machine’ that is threatening to  migrants’ well-being; the recent surge in anti-immigrant  political rhetoric also facilitates discriminatory  treatment against anyone who looks like they might be a  migrant. This dissertation examines how political trends  towards harsher immigration enforcement do not only have  important effects on the lives of the undocumented, but  shape the embedded lives and identities of members of  mixed-status communities, with consequences for the  cultural frames they draw upon to understand their world. I  use ethnographic research as well as data from 85  semi-formal interviews with immigrants in Chicago to delve  into the complexity of the effects of the political  environment under the Trump administration. I demonstrate  how the election of an anti-immigrant President, combined  with an expanding system of internal immigration  enforcement, led to large-scale disruptive effects on  immigrant families, and communities. My participants  described the way that their understandings of the country  in which they lived, and their place within it, were shaken  as they were forced to face the fact that a strongly  anti-immigrant president had been chosen by the American  public to be the next leader of the United States. This  realization had real social, emotional, and behavioral  consequences for immigrant communities. While immigration  literature has emphasized the ways that the logistical  challenges posed by restrictive immigration policies  generate feelings of exclusion, my evidence also underlines  the importance of the symbolic messages that underlie legal  policies and political positions in fostering feelings of  exclusion, or belonging. My dissertation provides greater  understandings of the ways that cultural frames operate in  the social world- the way they are utilized as coping  mechanisms and as guidelines for allocating scarce  resources, the circumstances that motivate their  transformation, or abandonment, and ultimately their role  shaping the way that people act in the world. I also draw  attention to the importance of the mixed-status immigrant  community as a theoretical concept that is relevant to  understanding both undocumented and legally present,  multi-generational immigrant lives, as I demonstrate how  migratory policy has important impacts at the meso-level of  social life within immigrant communities- beyond individual  or family effects.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1941},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1941},
}