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Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. Fútbol in the Park takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the US becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of immigrants. It traces the history and organization of the midday pickup soccer games and examines how the affluent white neighbors react to the presence of the working-class Latino players. It then goes beyond the park to follow fourteen men who did “off-the-books” construction, painting, and gardening jobs in private homes to explore how informal arrangements and social relations organize immigrant labor in this burgeoning, often precarious sector of the economy. The park’s significance for the men’s work proved all the more striking given the hostility they sometimes faced there from local residents, who nevertheless often depend on immigrant labor. Against this backdrop, Fútbol in the Park argues for the importance of in-depth, multilayered accounts of the people and processes we study and outlines policy implications regarding the use of public space.

What happens when a number of middle-aged, educated women – most of them mothers or grandmothers – see the last remnants of their previous professional and family lives destroyed by the umpteenth sudden geopolitical crisis? When they migrate alone – outside of any official recruitment program, without relying on any network of already settled relatives – to an area with no previous history of immigration from their lands? When the only job open to them – live-in care work for elderly people – is one they feel is deeply degrading? While migration studies represent a vast field, we know little about the ways in which migrant pioneers, especially women pioneers, experience the contingencies that shape their emigration lives. This book tackles this under-researched area through the ethnographic story of a group of women pioneers emigrating from Eastern Europe to take jobs as care workers in northern Italy. Offering a contribution to the long-neglected field of the social psychology of migration, it deals with geographical mobility as lived experience, and it investigates how migration triggers changes in the ways migrants perceive themselves and others and the ways in which they learn to practice a new moral grammar that allows them to locate themselves in new contexts. Nearly two decades of intensive field work reveals the complex set of interactional encounters through which these women pioneers fashion new selves and construct a new meaningful social world out of the new conditions.