For three months in 2006, an estimated 3.7–5 million people took to the streets across the United States to protest passage of a restrictive immigration bill in the U.S. House of Representatives and to demand comprehensive immigration reform. Marchers carried signs and banners celebrating immigrants’ contributions, opposing the criminalization of undocumented immigrants, and calling for their legalization. As spectacular and historic as this manifestation of collective resistance was, the spring 2006 mass mobilizations de-escalated quickly, raising questions about the oscillation of immigrants’ political and social movement participation. In Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation, Greg Prieto offers an insightful ethnographic analysis of the periodicity of Mexican immigrants’ participation in social movements. Instead of placing meso-level organizations front and center, he focuses on the micro level of individual immigrants whose material needs of everyday life in the current era of mass deportation both constrain and enable their ability to organize, as well as determine the tenor and substance of their claims.

The book is clearly structured and has seven chapters. The introduction deploys the concept of “material moorings” to illuminate how the constraints and opportunities of Mexican immigrants’ social movement participation are rooted in the material conditions of their everyday life in a “deportation nation.” Chapter 1 offers a brief history of Mexican immigrant exclusion in the United States, while Chapter 2 analyzes the contemporary police practice of car impoundments as an informal feature of today's enforcement regime that routinely subjects Mexican immigrants to humiliation, economic hardship, and limited physical mobility. Chapter 3, drawing on ethnographic research in two cities on California's Central Coast, discusses how Mexican immigrants use strategies of avoidance and insulation—by forming a “shell” around themselves and their families—to protect themselves from deportation and the confiscation of their cars. While these strategies constrain political participation, Chapter 4 discusses how skillful community leaders from trusted social movement organizations can coax Mexican immigrants to come out of their shells and advocate instrumentally for concrete, mundane goals such as better work and educational opportunities for themselves and their children. Leveraging the comparative quality of fieldwork conducted in one pro-immigrant and one anti-immigrant California city, Chapter 5 analyzes how differences in local opportunity structures shape how Mexican immigrants and their institutional supporters choose to press their claims. The conclusion reviews key findings and discusses their relevance in the context of Latino politics more broadly.

Besides adding to the immigration and Latino politics literatures, the book's strength also lies in its valuable contribution to social movement research. Scholars theorizing the emergence and retreat of social movement organizing often seek explanations in organizations and meso-level institutional dynamics. Prieto convincingly points out the importance of also considering immigrants’ individual and collective expressions of agency as they face daily threats of deportation, legal violence, and material precarity. His concept of “material moorings” is key to understanding the challenges of engaging undocumented immigrants in social movement organizing and the periodicity of their activism. The Mexican immigrants, whose heart-wrenching experiences Prieto shares so effectively, mitigate the risk of repression, dispossession, and deportation in today's harsh immigration enforcement climate by turning inward and insulating themselves and their families from society. While this survival strategy helps to protect their hard-won material gains in the United States, it also forms a barrier to participation in social movement activity to fight the underlying causes of their hardships. The more anti-immigrant their environment, the more likely that undocumented immigrants will retreat in their shells, and the more challenging it will be for social movement organizations to engage them.

Another strength of the book is its use of extensive, multi-site ethnographic research, conducted between 2009 and 2012, of documented and undocumented Mexican immigrants in two California cities (the Appendix includes a detailed discussion of the book’s research methods). Prieto was deeply immersed with a small immigrant advocacy organization that was active in both cities, and he actively participated in their house meeting campaigns geared toward educating, engaging, and organizing Mexican immigrants. This, along with the semi-structured interviews he conducted with 61 respondents, gave him ample opportunities to observe the linkages between migrants’ everyday experiences and social movement organizing. The many field notes and interview quotes included in the book forcefully communicate that undocumented immigrants lead very difficult lives and have limited bandwidth to deal with the many injustices they face daily. Yet, they also put immigrants’ agency front and central in the book's narrative of the downs and ups of social movement building, from decisions to retreat into their shells, to decisions to engage in organizing to push back against policies, actors, and structures that have long immiserated them.

Given the book's attention to how local context shapes whether immigrants’ social movements opt for confrontational or collaborative tactics, especially vis-à-vis local police (see Chapter 5), more attention could have been given to the relevance of state context. California is an interesting case since it has undergone a two-decade long transformation, from being a hotbed of anti-immigrant sentiment in the mid-1990s, to enacting a slew of pro-immigrant laws in the early 2010s and beyond. Besides wanting a better sense of the extent to which local organizing also targeted state officials and state policies, I also wanted to know more about how the changing state context affected immigrants’ thinking about the need to turn inward for self-protection (or not). Are immigrants’ experiences with deportability, legal violence, and material precarity internalized forever, or can changes in state policy help encourage immigrants to reevaluate both the need and opportunity for social movement organizing at the local level?

All in all, this book is important and timely, rich in both empirics and theory. The book's vivid first-hand accounts and engaging narrative make it highly recommended reading for anyone interested in social movements, immigration, Latino politics, legal violence, and ethnographic methods.