Structural Violence and the Power of Migrant Imaginaries

Alina R. Mendez
History
UC San Diego

Natalia Molina
History
UC San Diego

This working group examined the individual and collective ways in which immigrants confront various forms of structural violence that generate pain and mourning in sending regions and/or receiving locations. It built on the recent and growing literature that utilizes violence and pain as an alternative paradigm to examine people’s lived experiences that neither overly romanticizes their agency and power, nor reduces them to powerless victims in a larger structure of oppression and subjugation. The group included eight graduate students studying immigration in the fields of history, sociology, Latin American, and Latina/o studies. Their individual research examines migrant networks, transnationalism, labor, the rise of neoliberalism in the Americas, the production of migrant spaces and places, migrant rights activism, and migrant detention.