Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors: Photo-Voice and Community Dialogue Available to Purchase

In the public sphere, immigrants, particularly undocumented or irregular ones, are more often defined by others than speak for themselves, a situation often described as living in the "shadows" of society. The fragments of knowledge about their lives created by physical, social, and economic dislocation and marginalization are put back together by others in the form of stereotypes, misapprehensions, and fear. Massey and Sánchez (2010) observe that native-born residents have more power to influence socioeconomic outcomes of immigration and to frame the terms by which we understand group identities than do immigrants. They do this through interpretive discourses that give meaning to immigrants' presence and frame our expectations and encounters, as well as through the material realities of life. This predicament of marginalized populations is one that applied anthropologists often work against.