Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge: Building a Community Archive

Robert Irwin

Language: English

Published: Nov 8, 2022

Description:

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge , the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

Review

A remarkable resource, guidebook, and history of humane digital engagement. Robert McKee Irwin and fellow contributors compellingly identify and unpack the urgency of recognizing, collecting, co-producing, and publishing hundreds of Central American and Mexican immigrant deportee digital stories into the public online archive known as Humanizing Deportation. -- Ana Elizabeth Rosas, University of California, Irvine, author of Abrazando El Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border

An extraordinary digital storytelling project, the Humanizing Deportation Project offers a rich and expanding trove of first-person accounts by migrants who have been deported from the United States to Mexico. By centering migrants’ voices, perspectives, and knowledge, this remarkable collaboration eloquently testifies to the lived consequences of forced migration. -- Catherine S. Ramírez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Assimilation: An Alternative History

Review

An extraordinary digital storytelling project, the Humanizing Deportation Project offers a rich and expanding trove of first-person accounts by migrants who have been deported from the United States to Mexico. By centering migrants’ voices, perspectives, and knowledge, this remarkable collaboration eloquently testifies to the lived consequences of forced migration. -- Catherine S. Ramírez, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Assimilation: An Alternative History

About the Author

Robert McKee Irwin is a professor of Spanish at UC Davis. He is the author of Mexican Masculinities and Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands , and he is the coordinator of the Humanizing Deportation digital storytelling project.