Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez: Fragile Families: Foster Care, Immigration, and Citizenship

Excerpt

Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez, in Fragile Families: Foster Care, Immigration, and Citizenship, explores the intersectionality between the child welfare system and the immigration system within the United States, and how these structures are facilitated by actors such as social workers, biological and foster parents, as well as local and federal governments. Working as an intern for the Esperanza Foster Family Agency in San Diego, Rodriguez focuses on the experiences of Latina/o families enmeshed within the San Diego-Tijuana welfare systems. She elaborates on the discretion exercised by individuals in the foster care system and the outcome of this discretion on involved parties, i.e. foster and biological parents, and children. Her book also encompasses an overarching theme of correlation between the child welfare system and immigration status, as detention and deportation paired with racializing processes and structural inequality position certain families as more likely to find themselves entangled in the system. With examples derived from her interviews as well as her observational data, Rodriguez (2017, p. 2) sheds light on the “families … made through the awkward, fumbling, haphazard intervention of the state.” …