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En este trabajo analizo la circulación transnacional de videos entre migrantes peruanos que viven y trabajan en las ciudades estadounidenses de Silver Spring y Washington DC y sus familias y parientes en Lima y la sierra central de Perú. Basándome en investigaciones recientes acerca de los modos por los cuales las prácticas sociales que surgen del uso de nuevas tecnologías se producen, circulan, consumen y son apropiadas y reinscritas por diversas comunidades a través de distintos contextos sociales (Ginsburg et al., 2002; Askew & Wilk, 2002), examino cómo los diferentes géneros de video producidos por los miembros de esta particular colectividad migrante transnacional circulan, son vistos, discutidos y resignificados por sus productores y espectadores en sus respectivos contextos sociales y culturales

On March 24, 2020, a 31-year-old Mexican national in Bergen County Jail, New Jersey, became the first federal immigration detainee to test positive for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). By April 10, 2020, New Jersey had more confirmed COVID-19 cases among immigration detainees than any other state in the nation. This article examines the relationship between COVID-19 and processes of migrant detention and deportation through a case study of New Jersey — an early epicenter of the pandemic and part of the broader New York City metro area. Drawing on publicly available reports and in-depth interviews with wardens, immigration lawyers, advocates, and former detainees, we describe the initial COVID-19 response in four detention facilities in New Jersey. Our findings suggest that migrant detention and deportation present distinct challenges that undermine attempts to contain the spread of COVID-19. We provide testimonies from migrant detainees who speak to these challenges in unsettling personal terms. Our interviews highlight the insufficient actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to contain the spread of the pandemic and a troubling lack of due process in immigration court proceedings. Based on these findings, we argue that reducing the number of migrants detained in the United States is needed not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic but also as a preventative measure for future health crises. Reductions can be achieved, in part, by reforming federal immigration laws on “mandatory detention.”

Migrant smuggling has in recent decades become more prominent globally as a consequence of increasingly restrictive border and migration control policies. Whereas popular media discourses and official policy typically depict migrant smugglers as organized criminals who prey on vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers, migration scholars have instead argued that migrant smuggling is a complex marketplace involving both licit and illicit transactions and a grounded social and cultural practice through which aspiring migrants confront their lack of legal options for migration. Despite efforts to empirically situate migrant smuggling as something other than just ruthless criminal activity towards innocent victims, less attention has been given to migrants’ own understanding of their travel options and regulation of associated risks. This chapter focuses on coyoterismo -or migrant smuggling – as a community-based activity embedded in the social fabric of migrant-sending communities in Southern Ecuador. We examine the limits of the contractual relationships established between smugglers (coyoteros), money-lenders (chulqueros), and migrants and their families who rely on these services to sustain their mobile livelihoods. Specifically, we focus on how indigenous migrants from Cañar make use of multiple legal systems to assert their agency and establish accountability vis-a-vis the coyotes who facilitate their migration between Ecuador and the United States.

This essay reflects on teaching college students to use the medium of film/video to explore contemporary issues that affect the everyday lives of Latinx populations in the United States. Drawing on experiences with (mostly Latinx) students in a documentary filmmaking class at Rutgers University, as well as on my own visual, documentary, and ethnographic practice at the intersection of Latinx studies and visual anthropology, I discuss the distinct representational techniques, dilemmas and possibilities that different storytelling strategies in ethnographic and documentary films hold for representing and knowing Latinx social experiences, as well as some of the steps to follow when contemplating the use of film and video in the context of ethnographic projects in Latinx communities. In doing so, I address some key issues that have shaped past and current debates about the visual representation and circulation of Latinx communities, both in Latinx studies and in visual anthropology.

Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I. Cosmopolitan Desires 1. Salir Adelante: Migration, Travel, and Aspirational Economies in the Central Andes 43 2. Paper Fixes: The Making of Mobile Subjects in Peru's Migration Industry 73 Part II. Transnational Socialities 3. Remote Sensing: Structures of Feeling in Long-Distance Communication 105 4. Unfortunate Visibilities: The Transnational Circulation of Image-Objects 141 Part III. Discrepant Publics 5. Enframing Peruvianness: Folkloric Citizenship and Immigrant Personhood 177 6. Phantom Citizens in El Quinto Suyo 209 Conclusion 231 Notes 247 Bibliography 263 Index 293 About the Author 304

Each year the United States government detains and deports hundreds of thousands of people who prior to their removal are held in confinement for an average of 55 days. The short and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on migrant detention and deportation continue to be evaluated in real time, including how we can best study it. This paper provides a timely analysis on the relationship between immigration enforcement and confinement, public health emergencies, and ethnographic methods. It makes two contributions. The first is methodological and focuses on the challenges and opportunities of ethnographic methods in carceral settings when pandemic-related protocols have raised additional challenges to conventional in-person prison ethnography. The second contribution is empirical and documents how we adapted ethnographic methods to an interdisciplinary research design and to the exigencies of the pandemic to study the spread of the coronavirus in four immigrant detention facilities in New Jersey, USA.

Despite the recent boom in scholarly works on affect from a range of disciplines, scant attention has been paid to the intersection of affect and racialization processes, either historically or in contemporary contexts. This paper situates the diachronic articulation of race and affect�particularly in terms of the historical everyday lives and the political, economic, and material contexts of populations from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds�in anthropological studies of �racialization� and the �affective turn.� Drawing on a broad reading of both scientific and popular constructions of affect among Latin American and US Latino populations, we propose the concept of �racialized affect� to account for the contradictions embedded in the study of race and affect, both separately and at their intersections. We highlight what we see as the two cornerstones of our theoretical intervention: on the one hand, a conception of �liable affect� results in a simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other, and, on the other hand, a conception of �empowering affect� perpetuates the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled �whitened� elites in Latin America.

En noviembre de 2016, el 26% del padron electoral de Estados Unidos voto por el entonces candidato a la Presidencia Donald Trump, quien dirigio una campana electoral con base en la retorica anti-inmigrante que prometia deportar a 11 millones de indocumentados y construir un enorme muro a lo largo de la frontera sur, para lo cual obligaria al Gobierno mexicano a pagar por la construccion del mismo. Al llegar a la Casa Blanca, Trump no perdio tiempo: el 27 de enero de 2017 firmo una orden ejecutiva titulada “Mejorar la seguridad publica en el interior de Estados Unidos”. Esta orden amplia significativamente la categoria de “extranjeros removibles” (Removable Aliens) y senala que los no ciudadanos que han entrado a Estados Unidos cruzando la frontera sin documentos o que han entrado con visas que luego expiraron representan una “amenaza significativa” para la seguridad nacional y la seguridad publica. La orden ejecutiva de Trump y la guia adjunta del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS, por sus siglas en ingles) eliminan las prioridades establecidas por el expresidente Barack Obama y ordenan a las agencias federales que empleen “todos los medios legales” contra “todos los extranjeros removibles”, incluyendo a aquellos acusados que no han sido condenados (MPI 2017).

A variety of phenomena including mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have since the 1970s produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. This special issue builds upon, but also extends, prior discussions on transnational citizenship, by situating new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them in a broader political–economic context and accounts for how new forms of neoliberal governance shape such practices. The essays included here draw from a range of disciplines and inter-disciplinary perspectives that focus on migration between the United States and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean which in recent years have been transformed into ‘emigrant states.’

Since the 1980s, political instability and national and global economic crisis have increasingly undermined the ability of the Peruvian state to maintain a viable national economy and sustain its population. The past decade has seen efforts by the state to reclaim emigrant citizens and facilitate their incorporation into a redefined Peruvian nation that extends beyond the country’s borders. Examination of two instances of the struggle over extraterritorial membership and the processes of inclusion and exclusion emerging from this struggle suggests that by extending both symbolic and material membership to the emigrant population the Peruvian state is restructuring and reconceptualizing itself in the context of a changing global economy.

This article takes its point of departure in an incident of communal violence in the rural Peruvian community of Urcumarca to discuss the transnational political engagements of a group of Andean migrants from this community based in Maryland and Washington DC. As inhabitants of rural Peru, only a few Urcumarquinos have historically exercised full citizenship in their country of origin prior to migration. It is argued that, while the particular incidence of economically supporting the legal process following the violent incident in Urcumarca may be taken as evidence of the development of ‘diasporic citizenship’ among US-based migrants, it is important to understand such political practices as a continuation of local struggles against economic and juridical marginalisation within Peru.