Immigration reform and the various costs associated with undocumented immigration have been in national headlines in the past few years. The growth of Latinos as the US’ largest ethno-racial minority has sparked debates about the ‘‘browning’’ of the United States and led to an increase in anti-immigrant discrimination. While some researchers have documented the effects of racial discrimination on the mental health of ethno-racial minorities in the United States, less has explored how antiimmigrant discrimination and undocumented status influence the mental and psychological well-being of Latino immigrants, more specifically Brazilian immigrants, in the United States. Relying on data from in-depth interviews conducted with 49 Brazilian return migrants who immigrated to the United States and subsequently returned to Brazil, this paper will examine how their experiences living as racialized and primarily undocumented immigrants in the United States influenced their mental health. Specifically, I demonstrate that respondents experienced ethno-racial and anti-immigrant discrimination and endured various challenges that had negative implications for their mental health. This paper will also discuss additional factors that researchers should take into account when examining immigrants’ mental health and the challenges immigrants encounter in a racialized society with increasing anti-immigrant sentiment.

In 1994, Amado Padilla used the phrase ‘cultural taxation’ to describe the extra burden of service responsibilities placed upon minority faculty members because of their racial or ethnic background. In this paper, we expand upon Padilla’s work and introduce the concept of ‘identity taxation’ to encompass how other marginalised social identities (such as gender, race and gender, and sexual orientation) may result in additional non-academic service commitments for certain faculty. Using qualitative interviews with faculty members at a large, public university in the Midwest, we examine identity taxation involving gender and the intersection of gender and race to demonstrate how women faculty (in general) and women of colour (specifically) feel their gender and racial group memberships influence their experiences in academia.

There has been a marginal increase in the number of racial minorities among college and university faculty, yet current attacks on affirmative action and prevailing attitudes about the inferiority of non-white faculty place an extra burden on these individuals in academia. Amado Padilla (1994) introduced the concept of ‘cultural taxation’ to describe this burden where additional responsibilities are placed upon non-white faculty because of their ethno-racial backgrounds. These responsibilities include serving on numerous committees, advising larger numbers of students and serving as ‘departmental experts’ for their particular ethnoracial group. These expectations of non-white faculty are not placed as heavily upon white faculty, can impede career progress and affect job satisfaction. In this paper, we explore how cultural taxation affects faculty of colour in a research university. Additionally, we expand the analysis of cultural taxation to include issues of legitimacy that challenge non-white faculty’s sense of ‘belonging’ within their respective departments.