Who Will Speak For The Migrant? -- Migrant Struggle In The Age Of Illegality
10.17.2017 | 5:30 – 8:00 PM | Multicultural Community Center in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union
The Center for Race and Gender presents the Fall 2017 Distinguished Guest Lecture with Professor Alicia Schmidt Camacho
This talk will examine how migrants insert their voices into debates over border governance, in order to theorize migrancy itself as a vital social practice in the Americas. Across the span of their travels through Central America, Mexico, and the United States, unauthorized migrants have engaged in marches, human rights caravans, hunger strikes, and political campaigns to defend the most fundamental elements of personhood and the democratic social contract. I discuss the ways that migrants assert their rights in terms that contest the primacy of citizenship as the anchor for social belonging by insisting on access to safety, livelihood, family integrity, and cultural autonomy. I ask how human mobility –the right to move across borders and within civil society – might be defended.
Keynote Bio:
Alicia Schmidt Camacho is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University, and the Associate Head of Ezra Stiles College. Her scholarship concerns the feminicide in Ciudad Juárez, transnational migration, border governance, and social movements in the Americas. She is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the Mexico–U.S. Borderlands (NYU Press, 2008), and is currently at work on a second book project entitled, The Carceral Border. She contributes to regional and transnational projects for immigrant and human rights, including new initiatives focused on the intersections of criminal justice and immigration policing.
Event co-sponsored by the Multicultural Community Center, Division of Equity & Inclusion, Institute of Governmental Studies, Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society – Diversity and Democracy Cluster, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, Center for Latino Policy Research, and Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies.
