Trespass: A Reflection on Trans*border Research

Humanizing Acts is a series of essays and artworks that examines the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Each contributor writes about the ethical quandaries of conducting research at the border, living amidst the vulnerability and violence of pandemic times, and navigating complex interpersonal relationships and responsibilities. The scholars and artists share compassionate stories of people, including friends, loved ones, and neighbors alike, ultimately asking: How can academic research be a humanizing act?

“Trespassing against the spatiality of oppressions is also a redrawing of the map, of the relationality of space. Trespassing is very difficult to achieve, since there are a great many ways to entice one back to the road of collusion with power.” 

– María Lugones, Pilgrimages Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions

Introduction

In early 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic, I proposed to do research on trans and queer migrant activism in Tijuana. Just as I was in the process of planning a visit for field work, COVID-19 turned into a full-blown pandemic. The impact was profound. It was also disparate. For some, the most difficult aspect of the pandemic might have been the isolation of the quarantine. For others, it also meant the loss of livelihood or a place to live or being between countries in the process of im/migration. For many, community networks were a means of survival. Low-income communities of color, trans and queer communities, immigrant and migrant communities, precarious laborers, and disabled communities were (and continue to be) among those most impacted by the pandemic. How, then, was I to conduct research in a world in which the primary focus for so many—and particularly the communities I was researching—had become to stay alive and to pool resources even as those resources were bottoming out? What constitutes ethical research in such high-stakes conditions in an already violently unequal site such as the U.S.-Mexico border? Is ethical research even possible?

In this article, I think alongside decolonial Latin American feminist scholar María Lugones, who offers the term “trespass” as a way of moving through our complex and sometimes complicit relationships to power and oppression. For Lugones, a trespass is an ethical, freedom-facing orientation. It is a way of understanding the way one’s own positionality interfaces with the world around us. In this reflection, I apply Lugones’s trespass to the intellectual labor of community-oriented scholarship at the Mexico-US border during a global pandemic. I focus on my process as well as the ethical and methodological lesson that I learned from a migrant shelter called Casa Arcoíris in Tijuana. Then, I trace the theoretical framing of trans*border research, and finally, I discuss the relevance of my own positionality.

Vulnerability and Visibility

The shelter I had begun researching at the start of the pandemic is named Casa Arcoíris Albergue Temporal (Casa Arcoíris, or Casa, hereafter). Casa Arcoíris started in 2018 and officially emerged in 2019, shortly after the caravanas (migrant caravans) were making their way through Tijuana from Central America in 2018.¹ This was a historical moment when thousands of people arrived in Tijuana from what has become known as the “Northern Triangle” (a term that refers to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) with many people from the Caribbean joining. There were not enough shelters in Tijuana to receive the exodus at first. Many of the emergency shelters that popped up at that moment were run by religious organizations, making them sometimes unwelcoming to LGBTQ+ migrants. There were also a number of feminist spaces, like Enclave Caracol.² Enclave Caracol set up makeshift welcome spaces for migrants with pro bono legal counsel, access to medical and legal resources, volunteer doctors and nurses, and donations of clothes and shoes. Similar to Enclave Caracol, Casa Arcoíris set out to provide temporary shelter to LGBTQ+ migrants in Tijuana, providing access to medical, legal, educational, and recreational resources to its residents, preparing their cases and journeys to cross the Mexico-US border. In response to many trans exclusionary radical feminist spaces in Tijuana, Casa’s project was trans inclusive from the start.³

I first came across Casa Arcoíris online through their social media presence, which was boosted by ally organizations. As a trans Latinx media scholar, I was drawn to Casa’s posts, and in particular to their approach to visibility. I remember noticing how all of Casa’s posts had images that were often partially cropped or angled such that you couldn’t see the faces of residents. People’s faces were consistently covered with virtual stickers and their backs almost always faced the camera. And yet there was always something very queer, very trans in my read, about each post. Folx in the photos conveyed a gender non-conforming fabulosity without ever showing their faces.

Many non-profit shelters like Casa rely on institutional support and interface with different needs for in/visibility. They must make themselves visible to other institutions that might support them and to residents in need of their resources, but they must also protect the privacy and visibility of their residents. More than a trap to avoid, as Foucault might have it, visibility is a conundrum that many navigate out of necessity. In spaces of ongoing crises, like the US-Mexico border, visibility can be lethal. At the border, trans and queer migrants navigate a web of potentially dangerous situations, from the difficulty of crossing the border to just being at the border and facing xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Regardless of “how” they cross the border, doing so is dangerous: waiting for official asylum paperwork can be never-ending and place migrants in deep financial precarity, and choosing to cross with a coyote places migrants’ safety in the hands of those who claim to ensure their crossing and exposes them to the possibility of extortion, blackmail, theft, and rape. The balance between staying visible and strategically invisible is therefore crucial to the survival of both people and organizations at the border.

The pandemic brought new stakes to many migrant shelters’ visibility online.⁴ With new limitations and conditions for in-person social interactions, especially in the period before vaccinations were made available, shelters like Casa came up with creative ways to achieve enough visibility online to stay afloat, but without compromising the privacy of their residents. Casa’s media strategies, which combine word-of-mouth communication with social media presence, center the importance of a careful approach to visibility. When posting information about the shelter online (on their website or on social media), they omitted their physical addresses. While they posted images of residents, they never revealed their faces, names, or identities. Sometimes they hid the faces of their residents with rainbow colored heart stickers. Other times, they took pictures of activities hosted at the shelter, such that only the backs, arms, or hands of residents were in the picture—never their full face. Without showing the faces of their residents, their social media posts nonetheless communicated that their shelter was a humanizing and safe space for trans and queer migrants.

I debated for a while on the ethics of physically visiting the shelter during the pandemic. In addition to doing a site visit, I had also proposed to do a workshop there with a collaborator in Tijuana, Tania Maldonado. Even though my life had been mostly online since the beginning of the pandemic, the shelter needed to be present offline for people to access it. I worried about how my body might physically disrupt the space and protocols they might have set up there to ensure residents’ and staff’s safety, especially in the pre-vaccination period of the pandemic. In the end, I waited until April 2022 to visit the shelter, after having familiarized myself with it online for two years and after having only met organizers virtually.

How do I research a community organization without exposing the communities that make up that organization? What do I learn from their approach to visibility? Writing, research, or anything that documents comes with the risk of exposure. In other words, documenting a community might also expose that community. I initially wanted to write about the shelter as a site, as a place where the wounds of the border might be tended to, as a place where the community is built against national norms of belonging, and across multiple borders. However, upon visiting the site, I decided to shift the focus of my research to instead highlight Casa Arcoíris’s media strategies. I did this for two reasons. Firstly, I believe media studies can and should learn from activists’ use of media. Media is so central to debates on the connection between visibility and vulnerability. If one of the goals of media studies is to learn about power, then looking to activists’ resistive media praxis is helpful because they can tell us about power—and about how it can be resisted or redirected. The second reason I chose to focus on Casa’s media strategies has to do with the methodological lesson that I learned from them. I learned that their own approach to visibility is an intentional act of care. They found a way to make the shelter visible as an institution to allies, funders, and most of all, to trans and queer migrants, without exposing their residents to the harms that come with being visible or findable. In some ways, writing about Casa’s media strategies is not that different from writing about the space itself. After all, their media strategies are a representation of the space they’ve made for trans and queer migrant communities. Following their media strategies and arriving at a theory of intentional visibility allowed me to write about how they choose to represent their space.

María Lugones’s decolonial third world feminist theory gives this work momentum. Lugones proposes a spatial approach to thinking about gender, oppression, and resistance, asking that we think about how we negotiate, perpetuate, or contest power imbalances in our movements and in our encounters with one another. She offers what she calls a “callejera” spatial theory of gender and asks that we trespass or that we dare to think beyond our own experiences. A trespass, in my application of it, is an accountability tool that helps navigate the uneven spectrum of visibility. As a trans person, I understand the stakes of visibility. I understand fighting for agency over how one is seen and fighting against the ways that people are trained to see stereotypes of transness (deceit and hyper-sexualization being the most common) over actually seeing trans people. The organization I was writing about is clearly so intentional about how they make themselves visible and how they protect the visibility of their residents. My task was to bring attention to the ways in which they exert that intentional and agential visibility. 

The Border is Full of Images

After spending the day at the shelter in 2022, I waited in a long, slow-moving line to cross the pedestrian border at San Ysidro and back into the U.S. The line passed two very different encampments. The first encampment seemed to house mostly Haitian migrants. Many migrants have been stranded in Tijuana, particularly during the pandemic and under the implementation of Title 42, a Public Health Services Act that suspended entry to the U.S. under the auspice of protecting public (American) health, except for unaccompanied minors. Trump implemented Title 42 in March 2020 and the Biden administration recently rescinded it. Official reports from the CDC paired Mexican authorities’ presumed unresponsiveness to the COVID-19 pandemic with the high rates of migration into the U.S. as a way to cast Mexico (and anyone trying to cross into the U.S. through Mexico) as a threat to U.S. national health. Many asylum seekers had been waiting to be screened for asylum pre-Title 42.

Even among asylum seekers, there are borders. Tracing the U.S.’s unequal distributions of rights to asylum seekers, Naomi Paik shows the historic exclusions of Haitians and Central Americans from asylum access. These exclusions are ongoing. 2015 marked what U.S. and Mexican officials viewed as a “surge” of Haitian and Central American asylum applicants at the border in Tijuana. Immigration officials often deter asylum seekers with violent strategies that range from misinformation on ineligibility to physical abuse.

The next encampment I crossed was full of new tents (in contrast to the previous encampment’s worn tents) and Ukrainian flags. I noticed two children tossing an American football, surrounded by camera crews. I couldn’t help but imagine how the image the camera crew was capturing might circulate. I couldn’t help but think about the difference between the two encampments; who was brought into visibility, and who was forced out of it. What kinds of images would these two encampments produce? I was reminded of a notorious image that circulated widely in U.S. media of a border patrol agent on horseback whipping a Haitian migrant who was headed back to an encampment with supplies at Del Rio, Texas. The future image of these white children playing with an American football in front of new tents, as they waited for their asylum, would likely be so sharply distinct from the image of border patrol exerting gratuitous anti-Black violence onto Black bodies at the border.

As Haitian American activist, scholar, and artist Ella Turenne astutely pointed out in response to border patrol’s treatment of Haitian migrants, the use of force and whips specifically on Haitian migrants reinscribes a familiar colonial anti-Black racism. Turenne says, “they are whipped as if they were slaves at the border.” Though border patrol officials denied that their agents held whips and claimed that what appeared to be whips were the reins of the horse, the image inarguably documented the terror agents produced at the border. This image is what Patricia Hill Collins calls a “controlling image” insofar as it shapes and maintains the violent anti-Black perception of Black bodies in social, cultural, and legal discourses. Controlling images are violent, as Collins makes plain, because they make anti-Black racism seem “natural” and even “inevitable.” This image recycles many tropes of anti-Black racism that have been built into policies and practices across the Americas and the Caribbean and across different historical periods—from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to periods of blanqueamiento, to the ongoing subjugation of Black people.

Seeing the camera crew around the new tents of Ukrainian kids tossing an American football prompted me to imagine not only the image that would circulate but the impact it would have when compared to images of Black migrant bodies at the border being abused by border patrol. This controlling image conjures a hierarchy of vulnerabilities, whereby some migrants are considered more “worthy” of expedited asylum than others.

Rarely do images of trans migrants circulate unless it is via trans activists and community leaders. When images of trans migrants do circulate in a mainstream way, it is often connected to anti-trans violence or death. I think of the lives of two Central American transwomen who were killed by ICE, Roxsana Hernandez and Johanna Medina Leon in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Trans advocates and communities circulated images and news of their deaths as a form of vigil and as a way to honor them. Advocates’ images counter the controlling images of mainstream media. When transwomen are named outside of trans and queer networks, they face erasure. They are often deadnamed by the state or by journalists. When deadnamed, trans migrants are referred to by their legal name instead of the name they live by, which is a way of misgendering the person and erasing their transness.

Visibility has stakes at the border. The border produces violent images and their circulation produces more violence. Because trans and queer communities know how deeply linked visibility and violence are, it makes sense that trans and queer activists at the border find ways to mitigate the harms that uneven visibilities can produce. Casa does not produce controlling images of migrants who are abused by the state, nor does it produce images of those who are most likely to be selected for the American dream. Instead, Casa engages visibility as a form of care that does not commodify or exploit the vulnerability of its residents.

Trans as in Trans*border

The violence of the border is at once colonial, geographic, national, and linguistic. On the difference between a border and a borderland, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional state of transition.” If the borderland is in that emotional state of transition, it comes as no surprise that borderlands theory has sometimes also maintained the wounds of the border, even if unintentionally. Elizabeth Ellis reminds us that prior to Anglo or Mexican rule, what we now refer to as the “borderlands” was and continues to be Native land. The Southwest has been the homelands of Apaches, Caddos, Comanches, among other peoples. Borders and borderland theories have also solidified hegemonies by erasing Blackness. Tatiana Flores aptly points out that North American literature on the African diaspora tends to seal itself off from the rest of the continent, which impacts how stories are learned and ultimately limits the bandwidth of liberatory imaginations. She points out that Anglo North American narratives of slavery occlude the fact that most slavery came in through the Caribbean and Latin America a century before Jamestown, even though North American English narratives always cite Jamestown as the first place to which enslaved people from Africa were taken.

Given how migrants who are Black, Central American, trans, and queer are hypervisible at the border yet erased in borderlands theory, it is even more important for temporary shelters like Casa Arcoíris to exist and be visible. Shelters like Casa reduce the harm at the border by turning community into a politics. They activate what Cole Rizki calls a “politics of compañerismx,” which is a trans politics of friendship in response to anti-trans state violence. Drawing from South American travesti activists Lohana Berkins and Diana Sacayan, Rizki suggests we orient ourselves towards the radical friendships and compañerismx that guide resisting communities. This next section thinks through the politics of compañerismx and the coalitional possibilities of my own trans*border research. 

I offer the term “trans*border” to refer to media and networks that move in ways that trans migrant people themselves may not. I add a * to the term “transborder” to visualize a junction and to distinguish a space in which trans people are always present in transborder narratives, even if written out of the public imaginary. Trans*border moves intentionally across geographic borders and activates the liberatory and coalitional possibilities of transness in the context of border activism. Trans*border invokes trans as in transgender, translation, transfeminist, and transnational. The trans in trans*border is a politics. In their iconic essay on the liberatory possibilities of trans terminology, Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore ask that we think of “trans-” as a space of connection, a mode of analysis that points to interconnected structures of power, of which gender is one vector among many.  Trans, in this way, becomes a direction, a goal, a politics, and a move towards a liberation larger than gender.

Trans*border requires translation, even an impossible one. How do concepts like trans travel across geographic and cultural contexts? When doing trans*border research, how do I account for the local and cultural context for words that migrants may or may not use, including the word trans itself? How do solidarities translate across communities?

I also use trans*border in the sense of transfeminist. Transfeminism is a coalitional practice that is both trans-centered and feminist. I first heard of transfeminism in Emi Koyama’s “The Transfeminist Manifesto.” Koyama articulates a trans-centered rhetoric that addresses issues at the intersection between feminist and trans movements: reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, gender-based violence, etc. She defines transfeminism as being led by and for trans people who understand their liberation as part of the movement of “women and beyond.” In more recent scholarship, transfeminism has been taken up to address the intersecting impact of patriarchal violence. This is most notable in Sayak Valencia’s work on the impact of femicides at the US-Mexico border on trans and cis women alike. The trans in transfeminist moves us away from identitarian categories and towards coalition-based liberation.

Trans*border comes out of transnational work, support, and activism. Transnational support networks have a long and powerful history of working across multiple borders, particularly in the context of the US-Mexico border. For example, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is a temporary immigration status granted to select individuals came out of transnational Central American activism in the 1980s.⁵ Many early recipients of TPS were from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Transnational activism for TPS provided a model for student activist work that led to DACA in 2012.

At the same time, transnational activism isn’t limited to policy change. It also takes form through the language we use, the ways we relate to one another, and the networks we are part of. Maritza Cárdenas writes about a particularly inspiring model for thinking about transnational coalitions. Looking to a mostly queer Central American-American poetry collective in Los Angeles called “EpiCentroAmerica,” Cárdenas locates community building through poetic resistance to fixed identity categories. Rather than build community through panethnic Latinx/o/a identity or through national identification (like one’s country of origin), the collective approaches identity through fault lines, in which Los Angeles becomes the epicenter of a tectonic plate that moves across national borders (US-Mexico, Mexico-Guatemala, Guatemala-El Salvador). This geosocial reimagining of borders through a pan-tectonic and geographic continuum is not limited to Central America. As it turns out, a tectonic plate also connects parts of Central America (Panama, Costa Rica) to parts of the Caribbean. This presents a very concrete possibility for thinking about migration, community, and the politics of compañerismx across national borders. I share this theoretical interlude to trace the trans Latinx thinking that informs my research and process. The trans in trans*border draws from transgender, translation, transfeminist, and transnational, to mobilize solidarities across multiple national and social borders that deeply impact trans and queer im/migrant communities. Researching trans*border work is ultimately about making visible the kinds of coalitional possibilities and thinking that occur in and across communities.

Positionality of a Trespass: “(Mis)documented” Yet Mobile

I come to this research with my own experience of migration and borders. I am from Miami, which people often affectionately refer to as a Latin American city. Scholars sometimes include it in the Caribbean archipelago because of its geographical and cultural entanglement with the Caribbean. These extended Caribbean borderlands that form in the context of the Gulf Coast, Caribbean islands, and Central America are also marked by uneven borders. My experience of immigration as someone who was born in Miami in a Cuban-American family was routed through the unequal benefits that Cubans have received in the US. This is not to say that Cuban immigration is easy—far from it. Folx can face prison charges if they are caught attempting to leave the island. If folx make their way by water, there are the tremendous dangers of being at sea with makeshift boats or rafts and with little food or water. If they make their way by land, there are countless perils in the long journey that many undertake when entering through South America and crossing what has become known as “la frontera vertical Mexicana” to arrive at the final border in the US. Nonetheless, upon arrival to the US, Cubans have historically received preferential immigration treatment. Thinking with that sense of privilege, not only because I am documented, but because my family has benefited from immigration privileges extended to Cubans, informs my approach to thinking about the very different experiences that characterize migration. State privileges, however, are conditional and contextual: aid can also be a form of control.

I also come to this work as a trans person whose gender markers differ across documents. On some, it is marked as ‘F’ and on others, it is marked as ‘M.’ This makes me, as Dora Silva Santana puts it, “(mis)documented.” Documentation is not just about managing people and identities but about making sure that identities are fixed so that they can be verified and congruent across databases. Yet, many of us defy the need for fixed identity categories because identities are not fixed. They are fluid. They change. They are dynamic and they are produced in context. Transness is an identity of social relation. At the same time, having incongruent gender markers across documents, even when a person is documented, has material implications. It can make access to basic healthcare difficult or it can be the reason an insurance claim is denied. As Dean Spade makes clear in his work, gender is administrated through systems, policies, and institutions (prisons, shelters, foster care, jails, public benefits, immigration documentation, health insurance, social security, etc.,) and with these administrations, survival opportunities are unevenly distributed. The effects of being (mis)documented span a wide and lethal spectrum and mark people for state-sanctioned death, as is the case for many trans im/migrant siblings, who risk being thrown into solitary confinement.

Even though I am (mis)documented, I am still documented and therefore mobile. There are many anxieties around the border but my gender does not seem to be one of them. At San Ysidro, I didn’t walk through a body scanner. No one patted me down. The only looks I got were from people inside the bathroom, which I entered once I passed security and before I exited to the street. There is a fundamental difference in the types of impact and harm that being (mis)documented and being undocumented produce. I can move in ways that undocumented people cannot or do not, across national borders and within the US.

I share these positionalities because they offer me an embodied knowledge, a politics, and an orientation. I greatly lean on this knowledge in my research at the border. At the same time, I must also remain open to trespass beyond my own experience so that those I write about can tell me how to write about them. If strategic or partial visibility is so clearly intentional to Casa Arcoíris, then my task as a scholar is to learn from the ways that Casa counters the power imbalances that come with visibility through a media praxis of care. Casa taught me that the precarity that comes with visibility does not have to be the burden of trans migrants alone. It is navigated strategically and with intention by organizations or communities who use media as a tool to articulate a safe and caring version of visibility for trans and queer migrants.

Conclusion

Transness already invokes a trespass—across gendered worlds that attempt to render us simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. Transness orients my approach to an intentional trespass, and towards what Achille Mbembe calls the “ethics of the passerby,” which is a way of moving across difference in solidarity. Mbembe writes that

passing from one place to another also means weaving with each one of them a twofold relation of solidarity and detachment. This experience of presence and distance, of solidarity and detachment, but never indifference—let us call it the ethics of the passerby.

Casa Arcoíris showed me how to see the ways in which they exert agency over community visibility. They also taught me how to write about their work without undoing the intentional visibility they have been so careful to craft. The care Casa imbues into their media strategies guided my trespass through trans*border research, particularly as I pivoted from my own positionality to think with trans and queer communities’ activism in Tijuana and navigate the unevenness of the scholar-subject relationship. Trespass in trans*border research functioned not only as an accountability tool but also as an invitation to be changed by the work.

This essay is part of the series Humanizing Acts: Resisting the Historical Erasures of the COVID-19 Pandemic across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, funded by UCHRI’s Recasting the Humanities: Foundry Guest Editorship grant. Listen to the collaborative podcast, in which series contributors discuss the gifts of resisting the historical erasure of the COVID-19 pandemic with community and research.

This publication was partially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

1. The caravanas from Central America arrived in Tijuana on April 29, 2018. See Jennifer Mogannam and Leslie Quintanilla, “Borders Are Obsolete Part II: Reflections on Central American Caravans and Mediterranean Crossings.”
2. Interview by author with Cristina Franco, then director of Casa Arcoíris, via Zoom, Dec 13, 2021.
3. Interview by author with one of the co-founders, Andrea Gaspar, via Zoom, August 22, 2022.
4. Interview by author with Cristina Saucedo [Cris Sau], former head of media communications at Casa Arcoíris, via Zoom, August 31, 2022.
5. Temporary Protected Status is a temporary immigration status granted to selected individuals who reside in the United States and are nationals of specific countries, such as ones that are enduring civil war, environmental catastrophes, or conditions considered extraordinary. Recipients of TPS receive protection from deportation and employment authorization. TPS was implemented in the Immigration Act of 1990. For more on the current status of TPS, see the State Department web page.