Continuing our recap of the awards announced at this year's meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we focus today on those given by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. This post covers the Cromwell Dissertation Prize, "awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history."
On the recommendation of the subcommittee chaired by Anne Kornhauser, the Cromwell Dissertation Prize went to Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez (University of Illinois Chicago) for “Undocumented Youth: The Labor, Education, and Rights of Migrant Children in Twentieth Century America.” Padilla-Rodríguez received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. The citation:
In a highly original and resonant sociolegal history dissertation, “Undocumented Youth: The Labor, Education, and Rights of Migrant Children in Twentieth Century America,” Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez illuminates the multiple sites of repression of child migrants from Latin America. She does so by combining institutional and social history, charting the rise of legal and quasi-legal international and domestic border controls that disproportionately hurt child migrants, while viscerally conveying the everyday experiences of children trying to make their way to and through the United States. She details the exclusions, restrictions, and removals these young people faced as they and their families sought economic stability and social opportunities through work and education. But Padilla-Rodríguez also widens the lens to examine the complex legal and cultural valences of childhood innocence and “adultification.” As she delves into the child migrants’ experiences of economic privation, near-constant movement, and racialization, Padilla-Rodríguez herself crosses borders to draw on archival sources both in Mexico and the United States. Through elegantly written and accessible storytelling and impressive archival research, Padilla-Rodríguez shows us a “hybrid system of restriction and removal” that operated across both state and national borders, in farms and in schools, in public and in private. Padilla-Rodríguez details how local activists’ responses to increased child labor trafficking and detention led to national reform and new statutory rights in the 1960s. Yet by emphasizing the innocence and vulnerability of children, these well- meaning activists unwittingly handed the state yet more means of repression, including new points of conflict over rights, growing child imprisonment, and additional rationales for deportation. In confronting the paradoxes of reform, Padilla-Rodríguez adds to a burgeoning body of literature by historians that highlights the unintended consequences of socio-legal change.
Congratulations to Professor Padilla-Rodríguez, and thank you to the members of the dissertation prize subcommittee for their service!
-- Karen Tani
