Love in an Open-Air Prison: Kinship and Connection among Haitian Transit Migration in Tapachula Mexico

In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology and the Undocumented Student Resource Center 

In this talk, Darlène Dubuisson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Pittsburgh centers bell hooks’s concept of love to discuss how Haitian and other black transit migrants formed alternative kinship structures to navigate immigration governmentality within a context of antiblackness in Latin America. Scholars of transit migration have emphasized the centrality of kinship and family to migrants’ well-being, some equating family separation to “slow death” (Lee 2019). In the case of Black transit migrants in Latin America, local media often jettisons the fact these migrants are embedded within families and communities bounded by love, choosing instead to depict such migrants “as creating problems and contributing to the chaos at the border” thus legitimating their subjugation and control (Fouratt and Castillo-Monterrosa 2021, 597). Such depictions go hand-and-hand with notions of “Black no futures,” that is, a “racialized temporality that conditions and shapes the way black spaces—the objects and people within them—are managed as places with no future on its own terms” (Solomon 2019: 85). Conversely, Dubuisson follows Black feminist anthropologists in showing how Black people mobilize and create kinship networks—animated through love—as a means of combating racism and laying claims to individual and collective futures