About the talk:

As the US, Europe and Canada have foreclosed the already-limited possibilities for asylum, queer and trans migrants have had to navigate rapidly changing legal regimes, continuing to confront state and non-state violence while also seeking ways to make life. How do displaced communities find safety, security and solidarity, and what meaningful ways researchers and creators can engage with such experiences? This talk analyzes the process and products of video digital storytelling workshops with Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ migrants from Central America and the Caribbean seeking asylum from the US. Drawing from work in Tijuana, Los Angeles and Oakland, this research hones on a critical moment from 2018 forward where different political interests converged to both shutter the possibilities of asylum as visible violence against queer and trans communities expanded in various forms across the Americas.

Drawing on the process of producing, narrative-driven short films with asylum seekers in the U.S. and Mexico border regions, the talk highlights the potential of methodological techniques of repurposing everyday smartphone technology to capture meaningful audio and visual data—as defined by participants—in such contexts of forced migration. Confronting deeply personal and political questions such as anonymity and self-representation, this process rooted in co-production of knowledge revealed the ways participants redefined singular narratives of victimhood/safety and offered new theoretical and practical directions in interdisciplinary queer, migration and ethnic studies. This includes confronting the salience of dominant “coming out” tropes and global queerness that constructs imagined Global North “safe havens” versus Global South “high-risk” zones. This talk will also explore insights on the praxis of digital, collaborative research in contexts of racialized (im)mobility, sexualized stigma and produced crises.

About the speaker:

Darío Valles is an Assistant Professor in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies (CHLS) at California State University, Long Beach. Utilizing a lens of community-engaged cultural, linguistic and visual ethnographic methods, Dr. Valles’ work expands queer, feminist and migration studies and speaks to the ways Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran migrants shape new horizons of transnational solidarity, abolition and citizenship. Dr. Valles’ current work includes a feature-length, participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis converging in Mexico. In addition, he is producing a book manuscript examining comadre networks of care among Central American and the between welfare state restructuring and migration in Los Angeles. He has taught at Brown, Columbia and UCLA, and his research has gained recognition from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) and funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin America Geography (JLAG) and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).