​Transnational Latinx Migrations
Geography 403 | 5 credits

SLN: 21725 

Winter Quarter 2019 | Tues/Thurs 10:30am - 12:20pm

Noe Reyes from the State of Puebla. Works as a delivery boy in Brooklyn New York. He sends home 500 dollars a week. -- The Real Story of the Superheroes, art series by Dulce Pinzón

This course explores the role of gender, racial formation, and language in transnational Latinx migrations. 

Course Themes

• Discourses of Belonging: We will interrogate the relationship between transnational Latinx migrations and a sense of belonging. This is particularly urgent as many Latinx immigrant advocacy organizations confront their own anti-Blackness for the first time, even as we are slow to acknowledge our complicity in "playing Indian" (Deloria 1998).
• Political Economy of Immigration Enforcement: In tracing transnational Latinx migrations through attempted border enforcement, detention and deportation from multiple countries, we will examine the political economy of immigrant enforcement. How can we analyze structures of racial capitalism without reducing all immigrants to "laborers"? In Washington state, this is most clear by the names of laws like "Keep Washington Working" that are about protecting immigrants from deportation, but only on the condition of their identity as workers. What does this do to refugees, crips, and others who are not legible in this identity? 
• Agency and Activism: Even when they are unrecognized refugees and asylum seekers, Latinx migrants make choices about whether they make themselves known to their communities and the state, what claims they make, and what to do about often uncertain immigration status.