Setting The Stage: Why Migration

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean History and Culture, where we explore the histories and movements that shape the Caribbean and its global connections. Today's episode turns our attention to migration, one of the defining experiences of Caribbean life, but also one of the most maybe misunderstood when viewed through narrow geographic and political frameworks. Too often, migration in the Americas is discussed through a single lens that could be centered on the US border, south to north movements, or north to south movements. Caribbean and Latin American mobility has always been far more complex, marked by intra-regional migration, circular movement, east to west movements, layered histories of displacement shaped by colonialism, labor demands, environmental change, racial formation, and I could certainly keep going. In this episode, I'm joined by my co-editors of a book that I am very proud to have been part of and putting together. We are so glad to have back on Strictly Facts Dr. Lewis, who some of our earlier listeners might remember having joined us in the past, as well as Dr. Kristen Cullins to discuss our new book on bordering migration studies in the Caribbean and Latin America. Dr. Lewis is the research professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, whose work focuses on political science and history with an emphasis on Caribbean regionalism, development, regional trade, agreements, and international trade. And Dr. Collins is an assistant professor of international studies at Center College, whose research focuses on grassroots resistance to state violence with specific emphases on the potential of community practices through decolonial and transnational feminisms. Our volume brings together scholars and artists across disciplines and regions to rethink how we study migration by decentering the United States and foregrounding the diverse spaces, identities, and histories that have long been overlooked. Together, we'll reflect on the collaborative process of putting this book together, why new scholarship on Caribbean and Latin American migration is so important right now, and how reimagining borders can help us better understand movement, belonging, and identity across the Americas. So thank you both for joining me. Great to have you back, Dr. Lewis, and great to have you, Dr. Collins. I'll first allow each of you to maybe tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what brought you to this work on Caribbean migration studies and Latin American migration studies.

From Crisis Lens To Regional Reality

SPEAKER_02 3:02

Thank you, Alexandria. Yeah, my interest in migration studies really comes out of my interest with Caribbean development challenges. And in that context, I looked at the migration of skilled folk, primarily nurses and teachers, to North America and Britain. And I looked at it more from the perspective of development challenges, brain drain, and the proposal at the time. Encouraging the migration of nurses in particular was projected as a development strategy because it brought remittances. And basically, you know, being very critical of that approach to migration. So that is the context in which my own interest in migration developed. But in terms of this specific project, I would say that originated in a Mellon Foundation grant that we managed to secure when I was director of the Center for Latin American and Carbon Studies here at Brown. And I worked in collaboration with Professor Tony Books, who was director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, which is now the Ruud Simmons Center, and Professor Brian Meeks, who was chair of the African Studies Department at Brown. And the purpose of this project was to shift, not just shift the attention. I mean, the migration at that time had become highly publicized as crisis. You know, you had North African migrants coming to the Mediterranean, and you had caravans of people from Central America crossing the US-Mexico border, and everywhere it was projected as a crisis. So we wanted to shift the focus from migration as a crisis to thinking about migration outside of those, you know, highly politicized and publicized spaces to look more at what was happening within our region. And Latin America and the Caribbean had actually grown in significance as a place for the movement of people. I mean, historically, the region is founded on migration, right? And that hasn't changed. Migration is very much part of, you know, continued migration of the regional experience. In terms of looking at Latin America and the Caribbean, there's a lot of things happening. Increasingly more movement within the region, but um movement back from North America to the region. But also you had two really huge movements of people. First, Haitian migrants, particularly after the 2010 earthquake, and then as economic collapse and political instability and political collapse became more dominant, then you know, Haitian migration became a focus. And then that was surpassed by the migration of Venezuelans as the Venezuelan economy collapsed and parties collapsed under pressure from the US government. So that's where that came up. There's a lot happening outside of North America and Europe when it comes to thinking about migration.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Thanks, Alexandria, for having us. It's really fun to be back together. This was kind of a long road as these kinds of works always are, but it was a really cool opportunity to work with the two of you, especially because my work isn't focused on the Caribbean. Mine is focused on Central America and really in particular Guatemala and Central Americans in migration. So it was fun for me to kind of put myself a little bit outside my own, not just like disciplinary kind of comfort zone, but also regional comfort zone to think critically about how we can move the center of conversations about migration away from like especially kind of the US-Mexico border, border crossing, and to think about the really interesting histories and futures of migration that is intra-regional when we think about Latin America and the Caribbean. So, like you said, um, my work looks at kind of grassroots responses to state violence and what people are doing to talk back. And so my involvement in the seminar, like Patsy said earlier and in this project, was rooted in my work with art created by immigrants who are held inside Stewart Detention Center, which is an ICE facility in southwest Georgia. So I'm really excited to have my own chapter in the book that focuses on some of that work and the exhibit I was able to curate with the support of the Sawyer seminar during my time as a research associate at Brown. And I've continued to be able to work on that project and uh work on it with my students here in Kentucky. So it's been a really cool way to jumpstart this work and to now come back and celebrate kind of its origin in this really cool collaboration with scholars who focus on regions all over the hemisphere.

Art, Detention, And Voice

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Definitely. Thank you both so much. Just to sort of give our listeners a little bit more context, because as Kristen said, this has definitely been a long time coming. Um, so after Dr. Lewis was able to secure the Melon Sawyer seminar grant, um, Kristen and I joined as part of this collaborative effort in 2021 to 2022, if I'm not mistaken, which seems wild that it was so long ago, but also doesn't feel that long ago. Dr. Collins joined Brown as our postdoc. Um, and I was the graduate assistant and was able to support our efforts from sort of a student perspective. The whole year culminated in terms of some of the work that we did. As Kristen mentioned, um, we had this exhibit that she put together given her work um with Student Detention Center, as well as um two conferences that we put on. And this is really where the crux of you know some of our work from this book comes together. So people from, you know, all over the world, we had two conferences. One was fully remote online, because as our listeners can imagine, this was COVID times. And then we also had one that was dually enabled both um virtually, and some of those joined us in person. Um, and I think, you know, from me as a grad student at the time, and I think still navigating what my interests are, of course, as our listeners are sure, I'm obviously interested in Caribbean history. Um, but I think being able to be part of this project um and overall the Sawyer seminar on a whole helped me to really push my considerations, I think, uh in terms of what my my interests are in Caribbean history. Migration, as Dr. Lewis mentioned, is of course a big part of who we are as a people, my own family's history um in general. But I think being able to see how when we put together various things like migration with economies, um, with women's history, and you know, the list can go on and on. We all come together in terms of different points of view, in terms of what we study. I think this conversation is really important and this book is really important because as we can perhaps allude to and talk a little bit more about, there are some gaps. I think certainly, as we also um alluded to in terms of studying migration. Um, I think, as we all said, the big one has been there's sort of this focus on US and Mexico in terms of migration studies. And there could be a lot of reasons for that. Um, we might not necessarily have time to get into all of those. But what do you all maybe see as some of these gaps and how do we intend to maybe make a change or, you know, create some leeway in terms of conversations in migration studies with the um premise of unbordering migration studies, our book?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

So like the the idea of addressing the disproportionate amount of attention on like certain issues related to migration, like you said, Alexandria, the border and the US-Mexico dynamics, like that was kind of like an impulse for us, I think. And like Patsy said earlier, we're like concerned with especially like media attention on the idea of crisis over defining the ways that people were moving across the hemisphere. And so the concept of unbordering that comes out of like a series of conversations about like how do we give this book a name, which I think is the hardest part of doing any project is titling it. Um, how do you boil it down into one concept? But I'm really kind of proud of having come to the idea of unbordering because it is a little bit artful, but it also I think emphasizes that we're trying to offer frameworks for thinking differently about really like any global issues, but in particular migration, because we've kind of prompted the authors to think about their work through the lens of how it like opens up a new pathway that takes us away from uh like centering, I think, the global north in particular and centering the ways that we think about humans and human mobility from the global north. For example, I'm thinking about um Lucy Leni Yamkis's essay, and the her chapter is about uh mobilities between Buenos Aires and like the kind of rural areas of Argentina and Paraguay. And so in her essay, like we're thinking about movement from the rural to the urban, and a lot of that movement is actually sort of like southward. Um, and then she's thinking about the ways that people kind of like bring their memories into the construction of their new homes in really difficult places. So her chapter, I think, is really emblematic of the ways that we try to think differently about what a border encloses, what a border means. And we are trying to urge the authors that we are in community with and now the readers of the anthology to, I would say, think about what migrants and immigrants construct, whether that's in a social context, whether it's thinking about the environment like uh Lucilla did in her chapter, or um, whether it's more focused on like us the social world or the legal world. The different chapters are touching on these different areas of human life through the lens of migration and what migrants produce, what migrants theorize outside of the context of just how are they getting to the US and how are they leaving the U.S.

Building The Seminar And Conferences

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Absolutely. You know, in the title of the book, Caribbean and Latin America and migration, we wanted to have more conversations, you know, that included the Caribbean with part of that broader discussion about migration, because um, the regions tend to be treated separately as if there is no interconnectedness. And there are lots of points of connections which we were uh deliberately trying to bring out. And even if all the articles don't have that, you know, kind of trans Caribbean, Latin American, Central American migration, quality trade, by putting these different case studies almost together, you know, it gives you a more complex sense of what is happening in that broader region. And Kristin commented on different ways of thinking of migration and the experiences that migrants have. But I'm thinking about one of our chapters by Natalie Dietrich Jones that speaks about Venezuelans in Curaçao and you know the complexity of having a kind of relationship short of full independence, which brings up the question of who is responsible for borders, whether it's the dependent territory or the kingdom, but also speaking to longer movements of migration between Venezuelans and Curaçao and the communities that exist there that tend to get these longer histories, which also came up in Shilen Gomez's article, chapter on Trinidad and Trinidad's contemporary reaction to Venezuelan migrants, that suggests that there are longer histories of migrations that can get lost in this contemporary focus that is highly politicized. So I think that we really think that there's a lot more to looking at migration through historical lenses, looking at migration in terms of race, like who gets to move, like Mimi Shell's wonderful article, which looks at the question of mobility and immobility and um how Haitians experience migration and closure. So I think there's a lot. Those are just a few examples of some of the different kinds of ways. Um Monica De Hart has a really interesting article of Chinese migration in Central America and what happens when geopolitics comes into play and countries shape their formal diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China. And we see that that actually has an effect on the different Chinese associations and how they move forward. So a story that's not necessarily seen as part of a migration dynamic. So I just think that this is just a small suggestion of what is possible when we think about migration beyond these points of crisis and illegality and legality that you know dominates the media now.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

You guys both provided um a bit of a snapshot on a few of our chapters, but especially for me as a student, being able to be in sort of in the room in these conversations, right? Sort of the the majority of the narrative is always the quote-unquote developed world or developing world rather moving to the quote unquote developed world. And that's usually the story about migration and oftentimes the influx of um whatever needs are then put on the developed world for having taken in, or of course gets very complicated in terms of the politics around migration. But I think what for me was really a standalone from this collection, our ability to put this together, is that it not only decentered, of course, these quote-unquote more dominant countries or colonial, neocolonial developed countries, uh, but also I think really humanized migration in ways that I don't think is often at the center, right? Stories, especially today, are talking about taxes and, you know, how this inhibits, you know, the structures of certain countries and what are they going to do without also realizing that migrants are people, right? And I feel like that might be a simple statement to make, but it's really not when we actually understand the complexities of what we we've been able to put together in this work. And I think that sort of brings me to my next question because a lot of our contributors approached this topic of migration studies from various perspectives, right? We've got works that are certainly historical, we've got works that are artistic, we have works that are kind of um economic even, but also literature focused. There's a broad range, I think, beyond just the scope of um, you know, people focusing on different countries or different regions. And so, how do you feel like, you know, we sort of attempted to balance to create balance from these diverse voices while still maintaining um a cohesive intellectual framework for the value?

Decentering The U.S. Framework

SPEAKER_02 19:24

I I think um the lesson there is that you can just well, you can, but I think there's a lot of richness in listening to different ways in which people think about migration, different disciplinary perspectives, right? I mean, the idea that you can use literature as Esteban Lustenov's really, really fascinating chapter, looking at um return migration of MS-13 members, and looking at that through literary lens, looking at that question through lens of film, and coming up with some real insights about what motivates people. Um, you have that alongside Alyssa Trott's article that looks at something completely different, right? How governments, despite the idea that they are removing border restrictions, are actually policing how women move across borders, which you know gives you uh I think a richer perspective. And for me, it really opened me up to thinking about migration differently. Kristen's photo essay, right, and the personal ambitions and pain and you know desires that that that brings out and Tanya's you know documenting Coppleros as signs, symbols of hope and support as people transition across, you know, hostile terrain to move to new places. I think that bringing together that is just so rich. And how we organize the volume, we looked at the range of incredible papers over two conferences. Of course, we are constrained by the size. There are lots of you know really brilliant authors we couldn't invite because you know we had limitations on how much we can actually put in a volume. We tried, I think, initially, at least my feel was to get us wider geographical spread and range of issues. Um, I think that was what initially drove my eye, but then discovering, and of course, we would have discovered this through the conference itself, the different ways and different theoretical approaches and or disciplinary approaches that people took. And, you know, keeping an eye that these were also included, there were a couple of papers that we would have liked that ended up not, you know, making it into the volume. But um that just happens with every volume.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

I just want to recognize that I think the way that this book was able to come together, it really reflects Patsy's vision for the Sawyer seminar as a whole. And I like want to take a minute to just like celebrate what it takes for um a scholar to displace their own expertise and um show such generosity in inviting uh new people to think alongside her. And um, I think Patsy for me has become like a really important like mentor in my professional career because of that. Like you can hear just in our the way that we're talking about the book and our own work, how different our perspectives are. Um, and Patsy hired me to work on this project um out of a lot of applicants and sure because it was a great job. It sounded like a lot of fun. And at first, I think we we sort of like struggled to find our common ground because we don't have a ton of common ground in terms of our disciplinary focus, our regional focus. But I think that what we both found, and maybe what Patsy was able to see when she was putting all of this work together, was that we have a shared vision of wanting to think critically but differently broadly, but really seriously and specifically at the same time, um, about how we can kind of like come together around these serious issues that are shaping our world and to and to do something that matters from academic spaces. And for me, Patsy has become a model of humility and of generosity in creating a space where we can't control it because we don't talk about those places or those issues or those disciplines or those methods. And this book is, I think expresses what's possible when scholars are willing to kind of step aside and be a part of a conversation that doesn't center them. And I that's a really important message, I think, for any field of study, but especially migration studies right now, when all we hear every day is about how like terrible and violent things are. Um, what we need is like fresh, open, generous, and humble perspectives to think through how things can change for us in the world.

Case Studies: Curaçao, Trinidad, Haiti

SPEAKER_02 24:28

I just want to say that we always knew that we wanted to have artistic expression, right? And the whole project, the whole Sawyer seminar, um, we we brought film, we talked about film and literature, but Kristin really brought some very concrete connections to the arts, right? And also an insistence that this has to be part. I mean, we were open, so it wasn't like it was a lot, but Kristen brought um uh a well-known Guatemalan feminist performer, Rebecca Lane, to the project, and she was in person. The first event we had in person after a year of you know meeting online, she also mobilized um groups in Mexico and other parts of Latin America to do a Zoom performance when we couldn't unmeet. And so it became very important to be able to express some of that in the book. And the book opened to the poem by Danger Ake, right? Which again, we have to tell he was one of the people who performed on Zoom, and we were really grateful that Kristin followed up um with his agent so that we can get um that important quotation from one of his songs, the open our book.

SPEAKER_01 26:01

And I think like Alexandria's role in the seminar too had a lot to do with that because I'm not like a music person. I think I like I study music and I care about music politically. Um but I think that like Alexandria's like focus on culture and the importance of culture was like a huge part of keeping us centered on I think like some of the joyful aspects of what that means and not just some of the like politically important aspects of what that means. It was really a cool collaboration between the three of us, and I'm glad to have had this at the beginning of my career because it it really has reminded me of like what this is even for.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

I agree, and I think the scope of what we were able to put together conference-wise maybe doesn't fully translate. Um, because as Dr. Lewis mentioned, you can't capture everything in in the book. But um, we also had Jirlene Joseph, who is the founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, um, who was also part of our conferences.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

We kind of captured her representation as part of the conference in the introduction to the book. And we worked really hard to figure out how we could bring her into like onto the pages because her presentation, her way of talking about Haitians inside these migration systems is so powerful. Um, and she's a real superstar when it comes to doing this work day in and day out.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Certainly, I think, you know, for me, being able to put these events and then eventually the collection together brought to me this idea that, you know, and it I think is maybe something that I've tried to capture both in strictly facts, but also just broadly in my career as a scholar, um, that, you know, the work that we're doing should not really live in a bubble, right? The fact that, as we've been discussing, right, bring together scholars, artists, creatives, um, nonprofits, student groups, because there were certainly student organizations on campus who were part of um of the work that we were doing, bring all of these people together, I think, not only for the sake of, you know, historicizing and documenting um what we're calling migration studies, of course, for the for the book, but also more generally to really humanize the study, um, that it's not just, again, I feel like a kind of broken record at this point, but I think it was a major takeaway for me, right? That these violences are very important, very critical to the lives that people lead. Um, and if we continue to talk about things in frameworks of numbers and, you know, the worries of the state and all these sort of capitalist ways of framing things, we negate these very lived and real experiences that are certainly part of and very much integral to not only, you know, people's intentions or reasons for moving, but you know, why we have this thing called migration studies on a whole.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Kristen and Alexandre, you guys just maybe realize that we have one major omission from the book. Now that we're going back to thinking about why didn't we have an article on food? Because we had this wonderful podcast that Kristin did with five migrant restaurant in Rhode Island. And, you know, what food meant to them. Community was a very important aspect of that. And we even had at the launch of the exhibition, we had food brought by these different restaurants. And food is such a crucial part of the migration story, right? It's so central. And just thinking it would have been so easy, but maybe with the space would have been a limitation to have just brought those interviews.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Well, maybe we just save it for book two, Dr. Lewis. You know, there's always that possibility.

Chinese Migration And Geopolitics

SPEAKER_01 29:56

Yeah, yeah, we kind of this is just a start, so that all the people Well, I think we also we did find a great way to capture the work that we did on that podcast. Um, Kennedy Jones, who was a grad student at the time in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, she worked with a photographer and a team to create like an in-person experience that accompanied what now exists as a audio series online. So folks are welcome to check that out. I actually use it um every time I teach my Latin America class, a kind of like intro to the region. I choose a couple of those podcasts for the end of class. And so my students get to keep listening to them. They're really cool stories, especially now that everybody's talking about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. You can listen to um the story of um Milena Palan and Little Sister, which like skyrocketed after um I talked to her for that interview. They are living online and um really, really cool work that Kennedy Jones did to make this podcast series um last and become a little bit more material.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Yeah, I also use that podcast in my undergraduate class on migration. And um I also use it with articles on food, and you know, one of which is looking at the ways in which foods then become gentrified. If we want to say food can become gentrified or modernized, you know, and we have some rich discussion about, you know, why is it that Mexican food needs to be improved, you know, to be so there's some interesting conversations that one can have around food when thinking about migration. There's something else we did. We also had exhibitions, Jasmine Golvan's brilliant exhibition of her art at Trinidadian artists, and her movement is from Jamaica, she's Jamaica. She studied and lived and worked in New York, then she went back to Jamaica and then eventually went to Trinidad and is based in Trinidad and has the most incredible. Started off as a jeweler and then ended up, you know, with most culture. I mean, really elaborate and exquisite, really exquisite work. There's just so much when we think about migration we can think about that goes beyond criminalizing people, othering people. I think that that is what drove the project, and I think we've managed to capture some of that in the book.

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Definitely. I did want us to hit on what I also find were a few key themes or major kind of um through lines across some of the chapters. And for me, that would be like race or the racialization of migrants, belonging, um, and diaspora, which I think we all kind of throw diaspora as a word now, and it it's true, you know, like there is, I would say, like, you know, Dr. Lewis, you and I are certainly part of the overarching Caribbean diaspora living in Rhode Island, for instance, right? But um, I think the way that we were able to sort of maybe complicate or tease out different definitions of those frameworks when it comes to migration. Um, how do you all think we were able to sort of complicate those terms in general?

Methods: History, Film, Literature

SPEAKER_02 33:33

Alexandria, thanks for raising that question because there are two really interesting um chapters in the book that, you know, handle that theme. And both of them are focused on diasporas in the US. And that's Donnet Francis's hegemonic whiteness and looking at how white Cubans in Miami have defined whiteness, what it means to be white, which is different from the kind of um the American norm of what it means to be white. And tells you a lot that migrants, especially if they are in large numbers and are very well placed in a particular milieu, are able to change. You know, this is not commenting on, you know, what is not included, right? In that definition of whiteness and and what it is pushing back against. Um, but it's just the poor of a diaspora to change very strong existing norms. Then you have um Lopez Oro, who looks at Gary Funa in New York and raises the question of what happens when you migrate and you're no longer visible as part of the place you come from, which is Central America. So when you're in the diaspora, Central Americans don't think of Gary Funa as being part of Central Americans when they think about Latin America. And then they're not visible as black to African Americans. And how do you navigate that kind of liminal positionality from migration? And again, give you some of the different ways in which migrants either find a way to redefine, you know, the places they end up at or struggle to find an identity, right? Both a connection to the place they left as well as to the new place that they've come to. Yeah, I think those are two really interesting ways of thinking about race that, you know, are kind of different from how we think about race or different examples of how race operate.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

Yeah, and those two chapters, they sit alongside the four other chapters in the first part of the book. We divided the book into two parts. In that first part, we also have the chapters that focus on intra-regional migrations and also Monica de Hart's chapter about um Chinese migration in Central America. I think that that set of six chapters helps us to really focus on like racializing movements, racial formations that are happening because of migration all over the world. I think that we're used to thinking, and as um Donette Francis' chapter tells us, like we're used to thinking about racial formations happening in the global north, in the Anglo North. And she displaces that by thinking about the those places as, especially Miami as a place of triangulation. I think that that framework also lets us look at these other places of triangulation throughout the hemisphere and how they're producing these ways of seeing bodies. So, like in Cecilia Rocha Carbuch's chapter, she's talking about migrant workers, especially from Peru and Chile. And while she's not using a lot of racial language in her chapter, I think that when we sit it next to Donna Francis' idea of triangulation, like we can really think about what's happening in these other points of convergence throughout the hemisphere and how people who like look different, who are eating differently, who are working differently, who are thinking about themselves differently, are producing these new theories of categorization for better or for worse uh throughout the hemisphere. And I think it's that's a really important um contribution of the book and something we really worked hard at doing is what happens when we think of these frameworks next to each other, not just in terms of like putting these regions in conversation with each other, but using theories interchangeably throughout the chapters to think really critically about what migrants produce.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

It certainly gets to our point on belonging, right? And how that functions differently depending on where you are. So for instance, in Donet Francis' chapter, the conversation of belonging is vastly different from, say, Dr. Paul Lopez Oro's because of the way that, as both of you uplifted for us, um, race and this triangulation of movement work differently in each locale. And so I think we're able to sort of tease out a different or maybe deeper understanding of, you know, I think too often the conversation of migration becomes you were not from here, right? You don't quote unquote belong here. Um, and these are the the sort of justifications of why the people who were quote unquote there originally feel this way or that way, right? We've been able to sort of change the scope of that um based off, you know, putting together these works to say that in certain places people have created, um, like Miami, right, an environment where that sort of instance of belonging looks drastically different um from what the quote unquote norm is. I think there are there are just a lot of ways and I think maybe entanglements that we were able to bring together throughout this book. Um, and that's why for me it was really a joy. And I think, you know, as we've been talking and reflecting on it, um, you know, having put this together 2021 to 2022, even now it I won't say some of the things feel old, but it's it's interesting to see how things have changed, you know, in the last what three to four years um since being able to have these conversations. And so I'll maybe turn that also to you. I think it's obviously a joy to see everything come together this way through our text, but how do you feel, you know, since having these conversations three years ago, some of the things that we talked about then and some were of the very critical discussions um that were going on at the time have maybe shifted or even deepened since I think we had that anxiety when we were working on the book and just like how long these processes take, that maybe that these conversations like wouldn't hold up in a few years.

Collaboration, Mentorship, And Scope

SPEAKER_01 40:02

I think our point is still the same emphases on immigrants as criminal, as going from less developed to more developed places, as crisis, as all of these things. I don't think that that has shifted significantly. And so our major point with this work remains that we have to think differently. We have to think creatively, and like especially through new collaboration, new synthesis, um, and like new perspectives. So I think like in that sense, unfortunately, this is like more relevant than ever. I think, especially because if we're thinking about the way that media is representing migration right now, it's it's really kind of abysmal. And I think even in the best cases, we're only focusing on violence. And what this work was asking is asking, is that we just focus on literally anything else. Through the same process of the seminar, I produced another article that isn't in this book, but that is about exactly that. If we only ever look at the violence of migration, like we'll never see anything else about it. And I think anybody who is from an immigrant community who lives any kind of migrant life will tell you that there's so much more to their life than violence, like so much more to their community than suffering. And um I don't think that anything about that conversation has been exhausted yet.

SPEAKER_02 41:26

I also think we shouldn't overestimate the time that, you know, and whether this is salient, because in 2023, which is really when the project ended, is when we invited authors to contribute, right? And they have not just given their conference presentations, people have done different things and had to make their chapters current. But even as we went along in the editorial process and coming to what's right at the end, we asked again if people had any updates. So, in terms of the specific cases that we present, I don't think that those are dated or there's anything dated there. But I think, Alexandra, what you're saying more is that the conversation around migration has intensified and has moved even more in the direction of crisis, you know. And now, again, you see what we're doing? We're centering North America. We are centering North America because it sucks up all the air. And one of the things that we didn't pick up, but which is in Lostano's um chapter, the whole issue of return migration, I think that that will become huge as the US keeps expelling people, and not just to territories of origin, but to places to which they have no connection, especially to the tiniest of places in the Caribbean and Latin America, to the English-speaking Caribbean, places with under 100,000 people, right? And one of the things uh we found, I think, in writing this, as much as we descend to the US, we couldn't exclude the US completely. Because the US is so very implicated in migration, the story of migration in the region, which is why, you know, we did manage to shift it from the border. But I think that increasingly it would be difficult to have any conversation about Latin America and the Caribbean without thinking of how the US, especially in the last few years, has upended migration systems across the region, has upended people's lives, how return migration would more than likely affect the places that um migrants who have no connections to a country have been forcibly sent to. So I think that there's a lot more and you know unfortunately again we would have to be careful not to be totally swamped with all the negative stories but to to look for stories of possibility and hope but also acknowledging um how the ground on which migration you know is occurring has shifted in such a dramatic and you know it's it's not unprecedented. Let's never say this is on what is happening or is unprecedented, right? But definitely for our times we can see a lot of the contradictions and the harms of these policies.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Wanna shift gears a little bit as Kristen said earlier in terms of me being the culture girl or a culture I'll say culture scholar in the in instead um because I think things just happen and I think in a way that are kismet and just make sense. But the the irony is certainly um present to me that the book is coming out like basically a month after Bad Bunny's performance at the Super Bowl um and how I haven't done a whole episode on it. That's also maybe something on the horizon to do. But um you know for me to to sit and watch it and also of course see the myriad of conversations that have transpired in its aftermath about culture, about Puerto Rico, about the unity and togetherness that was also displayed at the Super Bowl as he shouted out countries across Latin America and the Caribbean to show that you know we are together in more ways that we're different, right? And so I always ask this of our listeners, but what are some of the ways that I think, you know, and we've certainly talked about in terms of food in terms of the artists that have been a part of our conference and eventually the book but what are some of the ways that you think you know culturally we have displayed these instances of migration of belonging of community togetherness that don't always get taken up in sort of the the story about migration studies?

Lived Experience Over Abstract Numbers

SPEAKER_02 46:29

Alexandra can I just comment on Bad Bunny Sure one of the things that has really interested me and it speaks to the problem of having the Caribbean being seen as part of this region and the whole focus on Latin America Latin America that totally um elides the Caribbean's presence right is that to his credit Bad Bunny mentioned some Caribbean English speaking Caribbean countries when he was going up from the South all the way up to the north he mentioned Guyana he mentioned Antigua he mentioned Jamaica and all of the commentators I've heard and I can't say that I listen to a wide range of media right but both in terms of people commenting on Bad Bunny in a positive way as well as Latin American people here and I don't want to mischaracterize people who are commenting and being very positive about his mention in Latin America totally miss the point about the Caribbean. They jump over the Caribbean but of course Cuba is the Caribbean as far as a lot of people are concerned right maybe Haiti but hardly ever the English speaking Caribbean. So they jump they talk about South Central and North America and they totally and and I think that's one of the problems that I mean Caribbean scholars have been we we kind of anglicize the Caribbean so when we speak about the Caribbean we think of Caracom with Haiti and Suriname, right? When Latin Americans think about the Caribbean they think about Cuba and the Dominican public and the rest of the English speaking Caribbean is not really considered because Latin seems to be the thing. And I think that that's one of the things that our book really was trying to get around to really try to be inclusive. This is our region. We have so many problems in common and we're also very different. So it's not to homogenize us there is no beauty in that but just to recognize that sometimes you know we have common challenges and we might have different experiences within that common challenger experience. And I think we need more of that we need more bad bunny to have a more open view of what this this hemisphere is and where we can find solidarity.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

And I think maybe bridging your question and Bad Bunny and Patsy's insights um like I said the work that I do around immigration is based in Atlanta and one really really cool thing about working um in any movement in Atlanta is the the influence of civil rights struggle like historically and contemporarily and um one thing that has always been a part of the work that we're doing which could very easily focus on um like Spanish speaking immigrants because that is kind of the the skills that most of us that are involved with this work are bringing to the like the table that we can speak Spanish. And so that's that's kind of skewing what we're able to do. But we've always been in conversation with groups who are thinking about um the way that blackness and anti-blackness influence marginalization for immigrants. And so through being involved in these movements like uh for years I've been able to see the convergence of different sort of like interest-oriented groups coming together to talk about the ways that um immigration enforcement affects people across races. And so that has been a way for um like protest spaces for fundraising spaces to be very mixed between what we normally think about as like Latin American and Caribbean separately. And like as in most protest spaces there's dance and art and all these things. And I think we're gonna start to see more of that and I think in even like a global way when you know the administration starts to target certain groups those of us who have been organizing around other groups you know we're gonna show up and so that only makes our spaces of resistance richer.

Food, Exhibits, And Community Spaces

SPEAKER_02 50:52

For me it is food. I would say food Trinidad has this wonderful dish called pastels which is really Venezuelan origin. And of course it's meat but I have an aunt in law who makes a vegan who made a vegan version that was just out of this world. Also when I was growing up we had people in my community who used to play the quattro which is actually um and to play parang which is music right and I grew up with that on Christmas mornings because we also had Venezuelan migrants to um Grenada but parang is very much a musical form that you know is so typical of Trinidad and Christmas right a parang playing and you know so those are just two examples that come up you know when when you ask the question about what kind of influences I would say I would see from Latin American migration to the Caribbean.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

That's what I think about I thought about it I went the novel route this time which I usually go music but I went novels this time and I thought of I mean if if we were to sit here and name novels on Caribbean Latin American migration we'd be here all day but I think for me some of the ones that really stuck out were Andrea Levy's Small Island, um Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, um The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvett, I think, you know the list goes on and on and I will be sure to add all of those to our strictly fact syllabus for our listeners tuning in. But I think as we've all demonstrated right there are so many different avenues when it comes to culture that migration underscores and really uplifts and helps shape who these communities are that they are written about, that they are points of activism, that they are just who we become when we evolve and come in contact with each other as Dr. Lewis demonstrated through food. And so there are so many ways that I hope you know our conversation helps to also demonstrate that for our listeners who may not even realize how integral these things come to the fore just in terms of our own lives.

SPEAKER_02 53:16

Alexandra reggaeton that too reggaeton which started in Panama with the with Jamaican migrants and their offsprings who listen to Jamaican radio and bring it back with their own um influences and then export it back out and adopt it by Puerto Rico. So people think it's Puerto Rican right but then we all get enjoy it. So in a sense it's it's that whole movement that we're seeing you know from the Caribbean to Central America from Central America to Puerto Rico from Puerto Rico to the US to every you know that I think is is is a lovely story about migration.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

Having you know known both of you all and gotten to work with you all I know one of our definite interest and passions I think in putting this book together was that it'd be really accessible to a mass of people right regardless of their work their background their understanding of migration um and that it's you know accessible to not just scholars and students right but policymakers, community members.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

That was definitely an intention in the way that we crafted this and so you know with that intention in mind and you know who this book hopefully speaks to what do you hope that the variety of people walk away from this book with there are so many amazing stories there so many ways to understand people and their experiences that you will not get in the usual conversations that most of us have. And it's an insight into different lives different ways in which people think of themselves different challenges they have or different you know ways of of expressing themselves that that I'm hoping and that opens up us to understanding or at least being more open to understand difference and to appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 55:18

Absolutely that and I think that there's also a lot of potential for people to at the same time that they might see themselves in one of the stories that they read because maybe it connects to something they study or something that they've lived or somebody that they know I think that if they go on to read a second essay, they're going to learn something new. And that's how I felt when I was working on putting this volume together is that as much as I felt like I really was part of certain conversations that were starting, I've spent almost no time thinking about the Dutch Caribbean as somebody who focuses on Central American migration. So I had that experience as I worked on it and I think that's what I really hope, especially for students who are maybe reading this work as part of a class or people who are um like really immersed in one area of of migration studies that this will just like give a little window, a sort of welcome into thinking a little bit more broadly about their own work, their own interests and their own lives I think for me it was a few things.

Race, Triangulation, And Diaspora

SPEAKER_00 56:22

I think the the general being that despite the differences put against us, right, or the ways that there are certainly you know differences intra-regionally interregionally amongst us there are so many similarities and that's something that we draw out through this this text together that you know being able to understand migration studies from this perspective helps us to create a broader narrative where there are certainly so many more commonalities. I think some of those were in terms of of course the artistic celebration um we kind of also made a a very pertinent description of how gender plays a role in migration as well and you don't have to do this from an academic standpoint of course right but the work that needs to be done is multi-tiered multifold and when we are able to sort of come together in these sort of communities in these ways of understanding migration who is impacted how we are impacted um and what needs to be changed it sort of definitely creates a a movement for lack of a better way of framing for us to to have not only greater conversations but to create definitely international change that is certainly needed at a time as such as now thank you both so much for joining me for this episode of Strictly Facts. I'm certainly fangirling a little bit it's fun for me to to do this because I'm usually fangirling over other people's books but I was part of this one so this was a nice change for our listeners you know this was a tremendous experience for me and great for it to be coming out as I I am at the tail end of my graduate journey so we're almost there. But for all of our listeners tuning in unbordering migration studies in the Caribbean and Latin America is out now. And so be sure to grab your copy I will include a link to it on our show notes as always for you all to check out. And I think we also might have a promo code that's going out too so be sure to um use that to grab your copy and support the work that we are putting out. So thank you all for listening. Thank you Dr. Lewis and Dr. Collins for joining me for this episode thank you so much Legend for putting this together Alexandra appreciate it. Of course until next time looking in to StrictlyFacts visit strictlyfactspodcast dot com for more information from each episode follow us at strictly facts pod on Instagram and Facebook and at strictly facts PD on Twitter