Review Essay Latino immigrants and community in the United States: Chal- lenges and opportunities A jumble of needs: Women’s activism and neoliberalism in the colonias of the Southwest, R. Dolhinow. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (2010). Operation Gatekeeper and beyond: The war of “illegals” and the remaking of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, J. Nevins, 2nd ed. Rout- ledge, New York (2010). Being brown in Dixie: Race, ethnicity, and Latino immigration in the New South, Edited C.D. Lippard, C.A. Gallagher (Eds.). First Forum Press, Boulder (2011). Western democracies have received incredible amounts of immigrants in the past decades in search of economic opportuni- ties, fleeing from political persecution or displaced due to war. The responses of receiving country governments and populations to these immigrants have varied, and newcomers have adapted in different ways and to different degrees. In the United States, scholars have paid much attention to various aspects of the immigrant experience since 1965, when changes in the law allowed significant numbers of entrants from Latin America and Asia. These studies, as others focused on previous waves of immigration, often intersect with topics of ethnicity and race; successive waves of immigrants over the centu- ries have played an important role in shaping the meaning and reality of race and ethnicity in the U.S., influencing the very meaning of what it means to be “American” (King, 2000). Recent work by some scholars (e.g., Paxton, 1999; Putnam, 2007; Skocpol, 2003; Uslaner & Conley, 2003) posits that the national social fabric has slowly become frayed, leaving a void of sociability, trust, and civic participation, and thus posing a threat to the func- tioning of American democracy. Some immigrant groups, especially Latin Americans, have been blamed by some (e.g., Huntington, 2004) as a major factor in this process of civic erosion. These argu- ments boil down to worry about the loss of community. For centuries, community has been celebrated as an ideal in the United States. Operationalizing community, however, can be a diffi- cult task. Who does it include? On what scale does it function? How is community established and maintained? One useful way to think of community is to return to Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1973 [1840]) work on civic life in the expanding United States, in which he posited high levels of trust and participation in civic organizations as essential to the social fabric in the country and the hallmark of the burgeoning American community. These aspects of community have been picked up by contemporary social scientists and used as the basis of social capital theory. Some argue that levels of social capital – in short, community – have declined. Americans socialize less, trust less, and participate less in civic organizations. One explanation for this perceived decline is the country’s increased ethnic and racial diversity. Immigration then is intricately linked to what we think we know about our deteriorating social fabric and loss of community. Politicians, pundits and ordinary citizens have been concerned over immigration since the founding of the nation, often resulting in nativist and restrictionist attitudes and policies. In the last decade, in fact, Americans have been asking themselves questions to this effect. Should we fear immigration? Should we further limit the entry of immigrants, especially those from poorer, less devel- oped countries? Are unauthorized immigrants criminals? How we answer these questions as individuals and a polity lies in part with the way that immigrants assimilate and become a part of communities on a variety of scales in the U.S. Though a controversial concept for many in social science, assimilation continues to be salient for many of us in academia, especially as we continue to re-tool it (Nagel, 2009). A useful way to conceptualize assimilation is in terms of belonging, e.g., the more adapted immigrants become to American norms, customs, and values, the greater their sense of belonging. Assimilation, therefore, does not require forsaking all traces of ethnic heritage. We know, in fact, that many (or most) Americans have never completely given up traces of the ethnic identities of their ances- tors; we see this, for example, through the use of hyphenated ethnicities such as Italian–American. For the Chicago School of Sociology, led by Robert Park, ethnicity was the lynchpin of understanding and explaining immigrant assimilation and the creation of community. Ethnic neighborhoods were populated by families that shared common cultural back- grounds and often relied on each other for mutual assistance; the assistance was given due to shared bonds and obligations based on ethnic ties. Thus we see the practice of community in both senti- ment and action. Ethnic neighborhoods were also the locus of a plethora of ethnic institutions that aided newcomers in under- standing and navigating the unfamiliar social, economic and polit- ical landscape in the U.S. A more recent formulation of urban ethnic residential concentration that has been shown to result in positive outcomes for immigrant incorporation is the ethnic enclave (e.g., Portes, 1987). Of late, however, immigrants are increasingly bypass- ing urban centers as initial ports of entry and settlement and instead opting for non-traditional destinations, including settling directly in suburban and rural areas. In Rebecca Dolhinow’s A Jumble of Needs, a number of the topics mentioned above crystallize in her study of colonias, unincorpo- rated settlements in the U.S. that lie within 150 miles of the border with Mexico and that lack one or more of the following: potable water, waste water, paved roads, or safe and sanitary housing. They are reminiscent, albeit in an odd and perverse way, of the ethnic neighborhoods just mentioned. Colonia residents share Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo Political Geography 31 (2012) 474–477 doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.003