Rebecca Maria Torres

La migración determina e incluye procesos desafiantes para quienes, por las razones que sean, optan por salir de sus lugares de origen en busca de un mejor futuro. Si bien es cierto que la experiencia migrante es subjetiva, los múltiples testimonios de personas migrantes de sur a norte reflejan las complejidades de los procesos de movilidad que encierran aprendizajes sobre los encuentros, los logros, las pérdidas, las afrentas cotidianas y las violencias. En el caso de las mujeres en migración forzada, las vulnerabilidades marcadas por las condiciones de multiseccionalidad plantean dilemas y problemáticas complejas que van desde las salidas de sus comunidades hasta sus destinos de acogida. El cuidado de las necesidades básicas propias y ajenas durante los recorridos y estancias es un proceso vivido por ellas de maneras muy peculiares, ya sea que el destino final sea una ciudad fronteriza o un campo jornalero. En un momento en el cual los cuidados están en el debate público como temática central de género, aquí se presentan casos de estudios y ensayos sobre mujeres, infancias y cuidados en escenarios de movilidad, con la intención de delinear ejes para las mejoras y creación de políticas públicas que apunten al respeto por la dignidad humana.

This Methods article details a survey used to create spatial maps of perceived violence and danger, key indicators of criminal governance, across three Mexican states. This method adds to traditional mapping techniques, which typically only visualize areal data at the municipal level. Criminal governance has been defined as the process by which organized crime groups impose control over territory, population, and resources, often through violence, threats, and bribery. The ability to inflict violence, whether real or imagined, allows groups to establish a persuasive form of communication, solidifying their legitimacy in enforcing rules and claims over territory. The methodology presented here involves conducting surveys to gauge the perceived level of danger in different areas, followed by Geographic Information System (GIS) empirical Bayesian kriging interpolation to generate maps. The study focuses on three Mexican states: Michoacán, Jalisco, and Colima, providing a valuable tool for understanding the relationship between perceived criminal violence reputation and various socio-economic and legal outcomes, especially in the Mexican context. The paper also discusses potential improvements and adaptations of the methodology for broader applicability and acknowledges its limitations.

In 1970s Chile, Pinochet’s military dictatorship co-opted the rural cueca campesina for national symbology, culminating in its 1979 induction as the country’s institutionally ordained music and dance. Escorting the appropriation of this rural musical form was an attempted erasure of its urban folkloric counterpart–cueca brava. Cueca brava remained largely hidden from Chilean public life during the cultural repression that accompanied Pinochet’s regime between 1973 and 1990. Today, however, there is a revival of cueca brava that traces back to Chile’s return to democracy in the 1990s. Using a place-based lens, we examine the resurgence of cueca brava in Santiago to demonstrate how musical traditions of the past offer raw material for the construction of contemporary Chilean identities. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in Santiago, as well as lyrical analysis, we seek to characterize the current cueca brava movement. We ground our work in (social) identity theory, Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, and Jan Assmann’s notion of cultural memory. By examining how cuequeros engage memory, history, and place, we propose that the socio-spatial constructions of the contemporary cueca brava resurgence engender new individual and collective identities fortified by a dialogical relationship between past and present. En Chile, durante los 1970, la dictadura militar de Pinochet cooptó la cueca Campesina como símbolo nacional, lo que culminó en 1979 al ser declarada oficialmente como la música y danza nacional. En paralelo a ello, se intentó borrar su contraparte folclórica urbana: la cueca brava. La cueca brava permaneció en gran medida oculta de la vida pública chilena durante la represión cultural que acompañó al régimen de Pinochet entre 1973 y 1990. A pesar de lo anterior, hoy en día observamos un resurgimiento de la cueca brava, el cual está asociado al regreso a la democracia en Chile en la década de 1990. Utilizando una visión informada por la geografía y el sentido de lugar, examinamos el resurgimiento de la cueca brava en Santiago con la finalidad de comprender cómo las tradiciones musicales del pasado ofrecen sustento para la construcción de identidades chilenas contemporáneas. Para ello intentamos caracterizar el movimiento de cueca brava actual empleando observación participante, análisis lírico y entrevistas semiestructuradas aplicadas a cuequeros en Santiago de Chile. Desde un punto de vista teórico, nuestro trabajo está basado en el concepto de comunidades imaginadas de Benedict Anderson, la teoría de la identidad (social) y la noción de memoria cultural de Jan Assmann. Luego de examinar cómo los cuequeros interactúan con la memoria, la historia, y el lugar, proponemos que las construcciones socio-espaciales del resurgimiento contemporáneo de la cueca brava generan nuevas identidades individuales y colectivas fortalecidas por una relación dialógica entre el pasado y el presente. cueca, Chile, imagined communities, place-based identities, music cueca, Chile, comunidades imaginadas, identidades basadas en lugar, música

Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of diversion and delay, producing a false sense of certainty while using indefinite waiting times as soft and surreptitious mechanisms to block displaced people’s legal claims for asylum. This imposed distinctly gendered burdens on women and youth. However, we also identify how the lists, where appropriated by migrants themselves, became tools to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work extends established political geographic analyses of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.

In this article we engage and extend work on race and border politics via an analysis of unaccompanied Mexican migrant youth. Historically, until recently, Mexican youth have formed the largest group of unaccompanied minors attempting to move across the US-Mexico border. However, a set of structural political, socio-legal, and everyday institutional violences lead to their neglect, disregard and exclusion from rights to protections in both the US and Mexico. We use Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of “racio-colonial governance” (2020), in connection with antiracist and feminist US-Mexico border studies and feminist border geopolitics, to understand how these complex and interwoven systems are spatialised and racialised: shaped both by long histories of racism and colonialism, and entrenched by contemporary, geographically-specific racialised beliefs and practices. In particular, we show how place-specific processes of racialisation construct Mexican youth as dehumanised criminals, contaminants, and security threats in border crossing sites, shelters and detention centres, and in border cities. We draw upon research carried out along the Tamaulipas-Texas border by the co-authors between 2015–2020. In particular, we focus on 26 key informant interviews and 25 in-depth migration histories with repatriated Mexican youth. Many of these individuals were identified through a survey of 204 deported Mexican unaccompanied children conducted in three government shelters. We show how systemic racism across these linked border spaces and systems powerfully devalue Mexican youth migrants, normalising extensive institutional neglect, violence, and denying their internationally determined asylum rights and other forms of relief. Our youth-centred focus extends important existing work on migration and race by demonstrating how historically-produced racist stereotyping around criminality, worthiness, security, lost innocence, and childhoods-denied are shaped by place and institutionalised in the US-Mexico border-complex.

Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.

Despite decades of recognition and worry about diversity, our discipline remains persistently white. That is, it is dominated by white bodies and it continues to conform to norms, practices, and ideologies of whiteness. This is a loss. At best, it limits the possibilities and impact of our work as geographers. At worst, it perpetuates harmful exclusions in our discipline: its working environments, its institutions, and its knowledge production. This remains deeply concerning for many geographers, and there has been important research, commentary, and institutional activity over the years. Yet, research shows us that little meaningful progress has been made. We know that mentoring is one vital part of the journey toward change. As such, we reflect here on our experience developing a research collective built on a transformative mentoring practice. We outline the key challenges, strategies, and tentative successes of the collective in supporting women of color undergraduate, graduate, and faculty geographers, arguing that such feminist formations are a vital part of the path to intellectual racial justice in our field. Key Words: diversity, feminist geography, higher education, mentoring, race.

In light of the grave challenges ahead under the Trump administration and the rise of right-wing populism in the West, it is critical that geographers across subdisciplines embrace activist and engaged scholarship. Opportunities for such engagement often emerge organically in our everyday lives at the intersection between personal interests, ethics and commitments, and nascent research agendas. In this article, I share two experiences with community-engaged and activist research: (1) establishing the Los Puentes Spanish–English dual-language immersion program in partnership with a low-income rural North Carolina public school system and (2) collaborating on the Building Austin, Building Injustice participatory action research project with a community-based workers center to document and lobby for improvements to construction workers’ conditions in Austin, Texas. Through a situated and positioned personal account, I seek to not only provide two examples of activist research but also illustrate the diversity of encounters and how they can emerge in unlikely places and outside conventional “activist” arenas. In conclusion, I draw on lessons learned through these experiences to reflect on the various challenges and opportunities for activist scholarship within geography in the future.