Our panel seeks to build on the robust legacy of anthropological understandings about migration and immigrant communities worldwide. In light of the current era of “post-truth” where immigrant lives and practices are continuously declared to be criminal and dangerous to idealized homogenous societies (Dick 2019), this panel invites papers that explore the importance of studying immigrant experiences that challenge the stereotypic image of immigrants from a one dimensional perspective. Papers on this panel will address the following questions: How are Latinx (im)migrants part of the everyday interactions and institutions of societies? Also, how do Latinx (im)migrant experiences vary across historical, geographic, social, and political contexts? We are interested in papers which touch on a broad array of areas including for example the ways (im)migrants shape, reinforce, and challenge capitalist modernity, neoliberal individualism, heteronormativity, monolingualism, and ideals of citizenship. We aim to consider how ethnographic analyses of everyday life, transportation and mobility (Yeh 2017), bureaucratic access to documents (Coutin 2019), relationships (Rodriguez 2003), and intersectional storytelling (Escudero 2020) provide insight into the subjectivities of immigrants and their lived realities on their own terms.
Ethnographers have been central to expanding understandings of the immigrant experience, particularly the Latinx experience in the United States, and in the process have sought to challenge the xenophobic narratives that dehumanize (im)migrants and render nation-states as sovereign victims (Chavez 2013; Coutin 2005; De Genova 2005; Zavella 2011). By engaging with scholarship that challenges normative perceptions of (im)migrants, namely how they are perceived and racialized, this panel will convene a set of papers that critically engage with notions of how categories and stereotypes of human migration and (im)migrants are created, circulated, and entextualized (Dick 2011; Paz 2016). While much of this work has importantly focused on the plight of Latinx immigrants in the United States, a growing number of Latinx migrants are migrating to a variety of different locations within and outside U.S. borders. We find that a broader discussion of Latinx (im)migrant experiences on a local, national, and global level will assist in further refining and applying these frameworks across contexts in a comparative, relational way. Therefore, we encourage submissions that are critical of these social processes of fact-making and use ethnography to expand on current conceptions of migration and the immigrant narrative locally and globally.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words, together with your name, title, institutional affiliation, and email address to both Jessica López-Espino at jsl610@nyu.edu and Dr. Kevin Escudero at kevin_escudero@brown.edu no later than Friday May 1st.
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 