Caught among restrictive immigration legal regimes in the US, Europe and Latin America, increasing numbers of West African, Caribbean and Central -American asylum seekers find themselves displaced to Mexico and entangled in shifting racial and class politics. Based on engaged ethnographic research among asylum seekers, activists, and attorneys in Baja California, this talk will provide an overview of the ways transatlantic border deterrent policies and new waves of migration tied to Black and Indigenous diasporas are altering racial dynamics and class politics in this settler colonial frontier. Valles will examine how Mexican and international public discourse casting los haitianos as model migrants is a rhetorical strategy that both minimizes anti-blackness while recycling historical, local and national anti-Central American racism. He will also open discussion on the ways socio-linguistic and engaged methods offers insight into how Mexicans imagine themselves as the country takes further prominence as a migrant receiving state, and how asylum is constructed as a transnational, socio-legal category.
Speaker:
Darío Valles, ACLS Teaching Fellow – Columbia University, Dept. of Anthropology & Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality (IRWGS)
An ACLS Teaching Fellow at Columbia University’s Dept. of Anthropology & IRWGS, Darío Valles research and digital storytelling work lies at the intersection of gender/sexuality, race, transnational migration and technology in Mexico and the US. He has taught at UCLA and Brown University and received his PhD from Northwestern University, and is also a part of the Ford Fellows network. Valles’ interdisciplinary research has been and is being published in Latin American studies and anthropology journals, as well as gained recognition from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. He is also developing a feature-length, participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the asylum crisis in Mexico and has been featured in numerous local and global media, including as a regular correspondent for the feminist online radio program Tejiendo Centróamerica.
Register HERE