Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.

Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb an extraordinarily rich set of data regarding recent immigrant rights activities, defining the cause as not just a local quest for citizenship rights, but a panethnic, transnational movement. The result is a timely volume likely to provoke debate and advance the national conversation about immigration in innovative ways.

Amalia Pallares is an associate professor of political science and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: The Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century.Nilda Flores-González is an associate professor of sociology and Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of School Kids, Street Kids: Identity Development in Latino Students.