The Intersections Working Group in English

"Migrant Personhood and the Defense of Sovereign Power in North America”:

A Lecture by Alicia Schmidt Camacho (American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University)

This talk examines the construction of borders in North America and the concurrent criminalization of unauthorized migrants as an expression of a defensive form of governance, which seeks to reconstitute the sovereign power of the nation-state within a transnational security project. My focus is the ways border crossers have sought to defend their migrancy against militarized border regulation and immigration enforcement.

Alicia Schmidt Camacho is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She is the author of Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Borderlands (New York University Press, 2008), winner of the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize, and articles about gender violence, migration, labor, and human rights in the Mexico-U.S. border region. Her current book project concerns social violence, border construction, and the criminalization of undocumented migration in the Americas. She serves on the board of Junta for Progressive Action, a community agency serving the Latina/o community of Fair Haven, and is a contributor to local and transnational projects for immigrant and human rights.