In this Issue of Voices of Mexico
Content

Our Voice

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Human Mobilities

Myths and Realities about Migrations to the United States
Mobility and Migrants in Contexts of Criminalization
Guillermo Castillo Ramírez

According to the latest International Organization for Migration reports (2020-2024), international movements grew in the early 2020s and after the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. They have mainly been made up of people with irregular situations from the center and southern parts of the hemisphere who were heading to the United States, passing through Mexico.

 

Mobilities in Shadow: Bodies, Technologies, And Memories
Of the Mexico-U.S. Crossing
The Border at Night: An Illuminated Landscape
Yolanda Macías

The border between the Mexico and the United States knows no darkness. At nightfall, the floodlights come on and the drones patrol the desert in circles, following the shadow. The motion sensors blink at intervals, and the thermal towers register any change in temperature on the ground. The border remains lit up from end to end, turning into a literal and symbolic line that contrasts the surveillance lights and the ground shadows. In many areas of the desert the only light comes exclusively from the watchtowers or Border Patrol vehicle headlights. In this controlled landscape, darkness has stopped offering refuge to any being incorporated into the complex surveillance system.

 

Forced Mobility: Eugenics And the Present Past of Migrant Deportations in the United States
I
Alexis Bedolla Velázquez

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 (also known as the Immigration Act of 1924 or National Origins Act) was one of the most restrictive and explicitly racist immigration laws in U.S. history. This law was the first to establish a system of national quotas based on ethnic origin, drastically limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs, Greeks). The quotas were initially calculated at 2 percent of each nationality present in the 1890 census, a date strategically chosen to favor Scandinavian and Northern European immigrants. The law also completely banned immigration from any Asian country, codifying and extending at the federal level the initial exclusion that had already existed since 1882, although only for people from China.

 

The Eternal Return of Uncle Sam
Anti-immigrant Propaganda, Nostalgia, And Exclusion in ICE’s Visual Discourse
Gerardo Vélez Argueta

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence.” The idea of the eternal return has been present in human thought for centuries. From Vico’s cycles of history to Schumpeter’s economic cycles, we have been offered this notion that, sooner or later, everything returns. This perspective undeniably possesses a certain determinism. But, as Marx would say, history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In other words, this repetition is never exactly the same; there are historical similarities or similar structures, but also many differences. In this sense, History must serve to understand the present and move ahead toward the future. In what follows, I will briefly review the history of Uncle Sam’s “eternal return,” particularly emphasizing the propaganda images used by the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security to recruit more agents for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out Trump’s ambitious policy of expelling the largest number of irregular immigrants possible.

 

From Securitization to Technofascism: Hemispheric Migration Governance Under Trump
The Hemispheric Shift
Elisa Ortega Velázquez

In less than a decade, migration governance in the Americas has gone from emergency to experiment. What began as a “war on migration” during Donald Trump’s first term has expanded into a hemispheric regime that merges law, technology, and authoritarian politics. Mexico—constitutionally obligated to protect human rights but economically dependent on Washington—has become the ideal laboratory for this transformation.

 

Migration Governance and Paradiplomacy in Mexico-United States Relations
Roberto Zepeda

This article analyzes migration governance in North America from a collaborative and multilevel perspective. It examines the concept of global governance as applied to migration, highlighting the growing importance of subnational, international, and civil society actors.

 

Capital Mobility and the North American Trade Agreement
Claudia E. Maya

Commercial integration of North America has been based on a relationship among unequal states and economic agents. Although conventional theory dictates that trade agreements involve an exchange among equals based on free market laws, not everyone ends up the winner. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now the United States-Mexico-Canadian Agreement (USMCA), does not include three nations with equal economic and legal conditions that exchange goods or services with comparative advantages. To the contrary, they are profoundly asymmetrical countries with differing degrees of development and historical conditions.

 

Border Technology and the Infringement of Migrant Rights
María de los Ángeles Blandón Salinas

For centuries, borders have defined the limits between countries, cultures, and ways of life. They have been lines that separate, but also spaces where encounters, exchanges, and new ways of coexisting emerge. For a long time, these borders were tangible: mountains, rivers, walls, fences, or watchtowers. However, in recent decades, they have changed, become more complex, and, above all, more difficult to perceive. Today, they are not only delineated on terrain, but also on data, bodies, and digital networks.

 

Education and Language Premiums As a Means of Social Mobility:
Experiences of U.S. Dreamers
Camelia Tigau and Isabel Medina

There are 3.4 million young people known as Dreamers living in the United States, some of whom were brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, and others whose visas expired and were unable to renew them. Their name comes from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (also known as the DREAM Act), proposed in 2001, that would grant permanent residency to migrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors if they studied or worked. The act was unsuccessful in becoming law. In 2012, President Obama promoted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary protection from deportation of the same population, but it must be renewed every two years. Dreamers were able to apply for DACA to access basic needs such as a Social Security number, college education, and work permits.

 

Mexican Mobility in Boston: Skilled Mexicans, Innovation, And Students Abroad
Karime Barrón

The Mexican population in the United States consists of two very different realities that require equally different public policies. On one side, there is the migrant population—those who contribute to both the U.S. and Mexican economies by working, sending remittances home, and paying taxes. On the other hand, there are mobile Mexicans—those who travel, study, and have the privilege of crossing borders freely and returning to Mexico whenever they wish. During my work at the Innovation Department of the Consulate of Mexico in Boston on an A2 visa, I clearly observed and analyzed this difference. In Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and across New England, these two groups of Mexicans coexist, yet public policy rarely distinguishes between them. This gap affects what Mexico can offer to its citizens abroad.

 

Samuel Kisitu: Five Years in Canada
A Rumination On Baseball, Diversity, and the Futility of Exclusion
María Cristina Hall

I sat at the edge of my seat, itching for a Blue-Jays win as I watched the final game of the World Series on November 1st. Why? Because, for San Diegans (if I might be considered one), the whole point is to “beat L. A.” But also because Canada needed a win. I have a soft spot for underdogs. Since Trump’s second term, the United States decided to play hardball with its second-largest trade partner after Mexico. Accusing Canada of allowing fentanyl and immigrants to flood the United States, the United States has slapped Canada with tariffs, leading a Stellantis factory to abandon Ontario for Illinois and costing the province 3,000 jobs. Plus, aluminum and steel tariffs have surged to 50 percent, and all trade negotiations were cut off after Ontario Premier Doug Ford aired an ad—during the World Series—in which Ronald Reagan explained why tariffs are harmful to Americans.

 

Moving Territories: Dancing as a Mechanism of Migrant Resistance in New York and Ontario
Édgar Manuel Baltazar Amigón
Aaraón Díaz Mendiburo

Dancing is movement with rhythm; it is a form of exercise and therapy to cope with the impacts of stress. Judith Lynne Hanna notes that this physical activity, in addition to providing distraction, is capable of reducing stress and muscle tension, while altering moods and improving overall mental health. She points out that dance is also a means of communication through which emotions and ideas distanced in time and space can be expressed, and through which dancers become social commentators. In this way, dancing not only activates us physically and energetically, but practicing it in group creates relational dynamics that provide new meanings. Sharing dance space generates dialogue between dancers and ways of interpreting music and movement.

 

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Art and Culture

Aliendigenism and Transtemporality: Chicanx and Transborder After the End of Art
Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Erich von Däniken, in his book Erinnerungen an die Zukunft: Ungelöste Rätsel der Vergangenheit, which literally translates as Memories of the Future: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, but better known as Chariots of the Gods or The Ship of the Gods, which inspired the popular German pseudo-documentary of the same name in the 1970s, argued that many cultures developed thanks to extraterrestrial influences. In this work, he maintains that structures such as the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, the Moai of Easter Island, and the Nazca lines are products of technologies far more advanced than those that existed at the time.

 

Fifteen Days in the Wilderness
Quince días en el desierto
Zazil Alaíde Collins
Illustrations by Xanic Galván Nieto

This piece is a geographical writing about the search for “home” of a migrant voice between the north of Mexico and the south of the United States, centered on language as a place of rootedness for those who migrate, as me. The reverie of the voice remains in the images of longing for the first home, a liminal body that transits presences and erasures. In the text, a fragment of my unpublished last book, love is also named and discovered through the mourning of the territory.

 

Art, Nature and Urban Landscapes in Full Color
Interview with Wilfried Raussert
Teresa Jiménez

The photographs by Wilfried Raussert in Walking Color City trace a journey through the streets of cities where urban art and natural landscape come together in a chromatic dialogue to create new meanings.

 

Cartography and Population Movements in the Modern Age
Ignacio Díaz de la Serna

There is a close relationship between the art of cartography from the 16th to the 18th century and the population movements prompted by the discoveries and colonization undertaken by the major European monarchies. The flow of Spaniards who traveled to the American continent with the intention of settling in the New World grew steadily during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II. For his part, Francis I was the first French king to define a clear policy of colonization and settlement, which crystallized with the arrival of the first settlers in the region of Acadia. With some variations, this policy continued until the reign of Louis XIV.

 

Far From Home:
Canadian Documentary on Residential Schools and Forced Displacement
(A Short Filmography)
Graciela Martínez-Zalce

The material presented here is from the research workshop on residential schools in Canada which, under the umbrella of the Cátedra de Estudios Canadienses Margaret Atwood, Alanis Obomsawin, Gabrielle Roy of CISAN and FFyL, worked for two years and resulted in the Allied Seminar on Indigenous Peoples’ Studies. It is a compilation of testimonies, documentaries, and literary texts that allow us to learn firsthand about what happened in these institutions from those who have suffered its consequences for generations.

 

Fleeing for Your Life: Displacement Due to Organized Violence in Mexico
Óscar Badillo

What do you do when you continue to live in your home and the state cannot guarantee your safety? The story of the Porras family, documented first by the press and then by filmmaker Marcela Arteaga in El Guardián de la Memoria, The Guardian of Memory (2019), helps us understand the dynamics of dispossession and forced migration that have been taking place in Mexico since the beginning of the so-called “War on Drugs” during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term (2006-2012).

 

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Reviews

CISAN State-of-the-Art Leadership in Publishing about Migration and Diasporas
Diego Ignacio Bugeda Bernal
María Cristina Hernández Escobar

Together with climate change, the disputes for geopolitical world hegemony, international armed conflicts, the scourge of organized crime and drug trafficking, the overall deterioration of human rights, and the disenchantment of many societies with democracy, prompting the rise of more or less authoritarian populisms both on the left and on the right, migration has undoubtedly become one of the biggest global challenges as we make our way through the third decade of the twenty-first century. All these contemporary global issues are interconnected and create a huge arena for uncertainty. Today, the fate of governance and international relations is a mystery, and no one knows for certain where they are going.