This book has been a labor of love that has required a lot of both. We have shared equally in the editorial task and in developing the interdisciplinary framework for this volume. A work of this breadth and scope—years in the making against an ever-shifting backdrop of political, legal, and cultural changes—also inevitably demands help from many sources. We have been extremely fortunate to have had such help from too many people to name, especially all those who attended the interdisciplinary conference at Boston College in 2010 that first spawned the idea for such a work. Still, we wish to thank a few stalwarts, even as we apologize to others for not naming them specifically. We hope that they know how much we have appreciated their help and support. For collegiality, logistical support, and various types of assistance and inspiration, we particularly wish to thank David Hollenbach, SJ, Donald Hafner, Anjani Datla, Timothy Karcz, Jessica Chicco, and Rachel Rosenbloom, as well as our Guatemala-based colleagues: Ana Maria Alvarez López, Ricardo Falla, SJ, José Daniel Chich González, Luisa Hernández Simaj, and Megan Thomas. We thank the Boston College graduate and undergraduate students who contributed to this volume in multiple ways, including especially Erzulie Coquillon, Kristin Gordon, Rachel Hershberg, and Jacqueline Sims. We also thank Deans George Brown, Vincent Rougeau, and Maureen Kenny for financial and other forms of support.
We are very grateful to Ediberto Román and Debbie Gershenowitz for early support, guidance, and ideas. We also very much appreciate the assistance of Clara Platter, our current editor at NYU Press, for staying with the project and seeing it through to completion with us. Our reviewers were particularly helpful and thorough in bringing various complexities to our attention. Their careful reading improved the book tremendously. Special thanks, too, to Constance Grady for helping with uncountable details.
Finally, we are deeply grateful to all of the contributors to this volume for their patience, thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, generosity of spirit, and willingness to take the leap into interdisciplinary collaboration. We hope they agree that their efforts have been synergistic and have improved our collective understanding of the nature of the deportation system. As the book goes to press we (along with millions of noncitizens) seek to decipher President Obama’s executive action while the U.S. Congress remains unable—or unwilling—to compromise on long-overdue comprehensive immigration reform. We hope that this volume helps policymakers to envision more imaginative and more humane responses to the excesses and unnecessary cruelties that have been visited upon millions of people during what we believe history will view as a tragically flawed deportation experiment.