Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge
Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge
Building a Community Archive
The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.
In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.
A remarkable resource, guidebook, and history of humane digital engagement. Robert McKee Irwin and fellow contributors compellingly identify and unpack the urgency of recognizing, collecting, co-producing, and publishing hundreds of Central American and Mexican immigrant deportee digital stories into the public online archive known as Humanizing Deportation.
An extraordinary digital storytelling project, the Humanizing Deportation Project offers a rich and expanding trove of first-person accounts by migrants who have been deported from the United States to Mexico. By centering migrants’ voices, perspectives, and knowledge, this remarkable collaboration eloquently testifies to the lived consequences of forced migration.
Robert McKee Irwin is a professor of Spanish at UC Davis. He is the author of Mexican Masculinities and Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands, and he is the coordinator of the Humanizing Deportation digital storytelling project.
- Acknowledgments
- Sometimes (Sonia Guiñansaca)
- Part I. Problems, Approaches, Methods
- Chapter 1. The Humanizing Deportation Project: Building a Community Archive of Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge (Robert McKee Irwin)
- Chapter 2. Approaches and Methods: Migrant Epistemologies through Digital Storytelling (Robert McKee Irwin, Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez, and Yairamaren Román Maldonado)
- Part II. Issues
- Chapter 3. Motherhood, Spaces, and Care in the Digital Narratives of Humanizing Deportation (Maricruz Castro Ricalde)
- Chapter 4. Deported Childhood Arrivals “from the Famous Estados Unidos” DREAMing in Tijuana (Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana)
- Chapter 5. Deportation and Military Discipline on the Last Battlefield of Tijuana (Kyle Proehl and Guillermo Alonso Meneses)
- Part III. Migrant Epistemologies
- Chapter 6. Family Unity and Practices of Care: Deportation’s Effects on the Soul (María José Gutiérrez)
- Chapter 7. Infrapolitics and Deportation: Everyday Resistance from Digital Storytelling (Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez)
- Chapter 8. Beyond Social Death: New Migrant Ontologies (Brooke Kipling)
- Chapter 9. The Migrant Knowledge of a Caravanero (Robert McKee Irwin)
- Epilogue: Reclaiming Our Voices, Stories, and Knowledge (Nancy Landa)
- Works Cited
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
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