Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation

Policy conversations about migration and borders are always framed in terms of “crisis,” but as Eithne Luibhéid and Karma R. Chávez argue in their introduction to the edited collection Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, the focus of the crisis is too often misplaced. Where politicians articulate and legislate the “crisis” in terms of overburdened national/local infrastructures, Luibhéid and Chávez rightly redirect our attention to the crises that cause displacement, as well as the humanitarian crises of expanded illegalization, detention, and deportation with emphasis on queer and trans migrants as the most vulnerable. Designed as a companion piece to Luibhéid's (with co-editor Lionel Cantú, Jr.) 2005 collection Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, Luibhéid and Chávez successfully curate a collection that expands the possibilities of coalition between academics, activists, and artists, and that centers LGBTQI+ migrant experiences as they negotiate and resist dehumanizing state containment policies.This collection is an excellent introduction for graduate students and activist-scholars invested in queer and trans migration studies and coalitional organizing. In a critically self-reflexive introduction, Chávez and Luibhéid model a deep commitment to disrupting both disciplinary boundaries and the typical U.S.-centric emphasis within migration studies. They acknowledge that despite a broad call for participants, the collection still overrepresents the U.S. experience, but they caution that this experience should not be read as universal. Indeed, Chávez Luibhéid define queer and trans analytic rubrics as multidimensional approaches that resist universalizing, while also providing dynamic frameworks to interrogate how sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity, class, and legal status complicate LGBTQI+ migrant experiences. These frameworks allow Chávez, Luibhéid, and their collaborators to reimagine how we think about citizenship and migration. Moreover, by incorporating the voices of activists and artists along with academic analyses, this collection serves as an insightful, informative resource for practical mobilization.Luibhéid and Chávez have organized the text in four parts. Part 1: Contextualizing blends scholarship with activist perspectives, and this section provides both historical and contemporary contexts for migration controls as well as community intervention efforts. Luibhéid carefully outlines how cisgendered heteronormative U.S. immigration controls have been weaponized against vulnerable migrants who exist outside of this limited framework; she also briefly describes queer and trans resistive interventions within this system. Julio Capó, Jr., moves to a more localized examination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black Bahamian women migrating to Miami. Here, Capó uses queer analysis as he examines how gender, sexual nonconformity, and ethno-racialization cemented a lasting state legacy of surveillance, criminalization, and exclusion against migrants deemed “undesirable.” Moving from these historical contexts, activist-organizer Sasha Wijeyeratne's presents a strategic conversation which centers storytelling and power sharing to build community and solidarity between queer and trans Asian/Pacific Islanders (API) and Black Lives Matter. Wijeyeratne's practical insights are useful in their recognition of the coalition's successes and failures, and organizers can take lessons from both.Part II: Negotiating Systems centers the fraught nature of migration controls and the devastating impact these controls have on LGBTQI+ migrants. These conversations overlap and occasionally diverge as the authors represent a variety of experiences, perspectives, and methods. Speaking as a scholar-activist and expert witness, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda focuses on Central America and how the linked relationship between U.S. foreign policy and immigration policy both destabilizes Central American countries and fails to recognize or protect LGBTQI+ migrants and asylees as they flee life-threatening situations. Moving toward critical ethnography, Fadi Saleh examines the coercive ideological restraints placed upon queer Syrian asylum seekers in Turkey, and he interrogates how queer Syrian resettlement policies privilege those who uphold pro-U.S. narratives of Syrian homophobia. Elif Sari's project is also an ethnographic study of Iranian LGBTQI+ asylum seekers in Turkey as they negotiate political instability, increased restrictions, and potential threats of violence while waiting for resettlement to the United States or Canada. Returning to the U.S. context, Rafael Ramirez Solórzano's contribution focuses on queer undocumented youth organizing in Miami, Florida, and he advocates for more place-based studies of Undocuqueer movements. Rounding out this section is HIV activist Ryan Conrad's account of the ways in which Canada's health-based restrictions for immigration disproportionately affect queer migrants.Following this section, Luibhéid and Chávez include an insert with high-resolution color images of artist contributions. There are seven pieces represented in the text by artists Rommy Torrico, Myisha Arellanus, Molly Fair, Adela C. Licona and Greg Bal, Matice Moore, Felipe Baeza, and photographer Maria Inés Taracena. Artist statements are included at the end of the insert, but because the artist statements are separated from the respective artwork, some back and forth is required for the reader to fully engage and appreciate each piece alongside the artist's intent. Luibhéid and Chávez note they selected emerging and established artists whose work was “thematically relevant, had a powerful message, and that we found visually compelling” (6). Matice Moore's “They Don't Deserve This” is a particularly poignant representation of the systemic cruelty and violence that occurs against trans women in U.S. detention.Part III: Resisting/Refusing is the most multilayered section of the collection. As multiple activist-scholar perspectives document organizational and individual acts of resistance, the contributors in Part III challenge the heteronormative, assimilationist, neoliberal immigration narratives which circulate in political and activist circles. Abolitionist Jamila Hammami describes the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP) as a movement to build bridges between prison abolitionists and migrant justice advocates, simultaneously centering queer and trans migrants as the most vulnerable and queering the migration narrative to reject heterosexist binaries privileged in migrant movements. Myrto Tsilimpounidi and Anna Carasthasis also disrupt the heteronormative narratives of “desirable” refugees in Europe by documenting the results of an LGBTQI+ refugee photography workshop in Athens, wherein refugees were invited to photograph their experiences outside of the lens of the “exemplar” refugee. By contrast, performance scholar AB Brown shifts back to interrogate how assimilative behaviors within LGBTQI+ African refugees function as both a performance of survival and radical unworlding, wherein migrants/activists can begin to imagine beyond the fantasy of current conditions. The final two contributions in this section also focus on coalitional survival. The first, co-written by activists Jack Cáraves and Bamby Salcedo, examines the creation of the TransLatin@ Coalition and argues for greater visibility as a means of liberation for trans Latin@ populations. The second is a piece by activist scholar Ruben Zecena, who argues for greater visibility through “shameless interruptions” that queer notions of comportment to draw attention to migrant communities who are excluded from mainstream LGBTQI+ communities.Part IV: Critiquing is the final section in Luibhéid and Chávez's collection. This section is particularly useful for emerging scholars as the contributors model different methods to critique popular movements and liberal migration frameworks. Writer-activist Yasmin Nair argues the Undocuqueer movement's emphasis on queerness actually supports neoliberal regimes of power and captivity and fails to take into account what happens when the act of coming out renders one prime for surveillance—she questions: What happens then? Migrant justice organizer José Guadalupe Herrera Soto uses a personal narrative to critique performative white allyship and white allies’ too-frequent coercive expectations of gratitude for minimal contributions and no sacrifice. Using rhetorical analysis, Chávez and Hana Masri also critique this system as they examine the Obama administration's capitalization of the liberal activist framed “child migration crisis” in 2014 to institute devastating immigration policies. In response, Chávez and Masri offer queer migration critique as an opportunity to imagine possibilities beyond heteronormative notions of liberal activism.This section concludes with a powerful roundtable discussion between scholar-activists Leece Lee-Oliver, Monisha Das Gupta, Katherine Fobear, and Edward Ou Jin Lee. This discussion is the most overtly and specific decolonial contribution to the text, and the participants identify and work through important complex issues, such as the “messy” incommensurability between decolonization and immigration rights. Positioning this conversation as the final note in the text was a brilliant move by Luibhéid and Chávez. The roundtable participants coalesce around many of the explicit and underlying themes and questions throughout the book, and their conversation reveals how a strong coalition of thought can engage complexity in fruitful ways, creating decolonial possibilities, imagining new queer alternatives that disrupt binaries and hierarchies that maintain systems of control. In a text that deftly moves from negotiation to resistance to critique, this final conversation perfectly punctuates Luibhéid and Chávez's goal to imagine queer and trans coalitional possibilities for LGBTQI+ migrant justice. In disrupting and redirecting how we think about “crisis” and by mobilizing voices outside of disciplinary bounds and cisgendered heteronormative activism, this collection models the radical potential for LGBTQI+ worldmaking.

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