The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working conditions. Looking at the present, then, he argues that the need for conferencing and the pressures that preclude extensive one-to-one work seem an amalgam of these earlier eras and continue to threaten the teaching-learning ideal that conferences represent.

Reviewed are: Teaching Literature. Elaine Showalter; Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, by Gerald Graff; and Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century, by Kurt Spellmeyer.

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

Discusses how both novels share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north. Notes that a focus on the authors' handling of material culture helps to point one with increased clarity and precision to the writerly method by which Attaway and Arnow convey particular themes effectively.