How does your research inform and transform your discipline?
I am a social anthropologist and human geographer researching on the inter-relationship between mobility, control and spatial transformations across the Americas. I study the intersection between undocumented south-north and south-south transit migration, border regimes, the formation of migratory corridors across the Americas and the migrant struggle across these transnational spaces. I draw upon an interdisciplinary perspective combining anthropology of violence, anthropology of the state, critical anthropology, critical geography, critical migration and border studies, and Latin American feminist decolonial political geography. Because I am interested in understanding migrant spatial struggles embedded in the complex dynamics of global unequal geographical development, I pay attention to the political economy of migratory transit corridors, as well as how racism, patriarchal violence, adulto-centrism and global and regional border regime impact the bodies of migrants and how they constantly deploy strategies of resistance. In my research I combine a multi-scale and historical analysis with multi-sited ethnography and a digital ethnography based on a migrant centered perspective to reconstruct migrants’ spatial and temporal trajectories. I foreground the Andean Region, as a key space for understating the dynamics at stake in the transits of Latin American, Caribbean, African and Asian migrants to the U.S., and to Latin American destinations. I analyze the spatial articulations between global mobilities and how border regimes impact those movements, paying special attention to how the externalization of U.S. border enforcement policies have expanded across the Americas serving systemic global formation of selective mobility control. I also study the irregularized movement of unaccompanied migrant children and families across those migratory corridors, and how transnational smuggling networks operate facilitating the movement of a global diaspora across the migratory corridors in the continent. My interdisciplinary approach contributes thus to expanding and complexifying both anthropology and human geography in a critical dialogue around the politics of (im) mobilities and the politics of space with evidence from the Americas. My methodological approach, on the other hand, makes an additional contribution: by focusing on spatial interconnections across borders at a regional and global scale, it questions methodological nationalism that tends to trap migration studies, while emphasizing how subjects in struggle, in this case, undocumented migrants in transit, play a crucial role in our complex present.

What drew you towards your field and work?
Our research craft cannot be dissociated from our own biography. Transnational migration caught me since I was very young. Aged 4, I migrated with my mom from my home country, Ecuador, to Brazil, where she studied. I became literate in Portuguese and my first awareness of having a home was not in my country of origin, but in that first destination. When I returned to Ecuador, four years later, I experienced what it meant to leave behind the home we had built. I returned to a place that was foreign and familiar at the same time to me. That experience marked me in multiple ways, making me extremely attentive and sensitive to what migrant children live. In fact, later it became one of my research focuses. I spent time as a high schoolstudent in Ecuador, while the country was struggling through one of its most severe socioeconomic and political crises. This crisis triggered one of Ecuador’s biggest emigration peaks: thousands of Ecuadoreans left the country by plane, by land or even by sea, to reach the U.S. or European destinations. Migration was at the center of the media and political agenda, something that decisively triggered my awareness of the complex dynamics involved in crossing borders. Thinking on the Ecuadorean case, I started to ponder questions that still accompanies me: how do migrants get from their places of origin to their desired destinations? What is involved in crossing dozens of borders irregularly? What is at stake in this crossing and what does this crossing reveal to us in the present time? What relation do these crossings have with power dynamics? and with the history of our continent? These questions led me to focus on one type of migration: the undocumented transits from the Andean Region to various destinations in the Americas, including the U.S. It was my master’s research, while studying in Mexico, that also opened my eyes to how Latin American borders are global borders: conducting ethnography in Tapachula, the first migrant with whom I was able to enter into a long dialogue was from Eritrea. He had been en route for more than five months. Among other places he had traversed, figured Turkey, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. He had just arrived to Mexico, and he was trying to figure out how to move from Tapachula northwrads. That encounter together with the story of his journey made it clear that multiple forms of violence are intertwined in those transits that are journeys between life and death. In his story he also confirmed how his mobility interconnected Africa, with South America, later with Central America, with Mexico and that it would surely reach the U.S. It was in Tapachula where I opened my attention to those global transits, their complexities, their heterogeneity in terms of age, genders, race, ethnicity, nationality, and how their inter and transcontinental journeys are a a struggle to protect their lives.

What do you like most about teaching art/humanities/humanistic social sciences?
Teaching social sciences is an opportunity to understand that the production of knowledge can play a preponderant role in contributing to a critical and radical transformation of the present. Post-colonial and decolonial studies, Feminisms and Black Studies, are just some examples of how from a diverse interdisciplinary perspective it is possible to produce knowledge that questions hegemonic categories that have sustained power structures. Critical anthropology and critical human geography, based on ethnographic work, allows us to understand how subjects – with their diverse ages, genders, race, ethnicity, nationality–, while being impacted by structures of power – racial capitalism, patriarchy, the border regime, for example–, are subjects with power, who can resist and reinvent their lives. Analyzing those power structures and those subject struggles is the center of a critical research agenda in the social sciences, and this agenda the contributions that Latin American scholarship has done is immense. For me teaching social sciences allows to travel across spaces and places to meet, figuratively speaking, the legacy and genealogy of critical and radical scholars from around the globe, to learn about their research questions, methods and their commitment with communities. I try to provoke such journeys with my students so that together we can trigger our research and political imagination to question hegemonic narratives and built contra-narratives –theoretically and methodologically informed –, to understand how structures of power operate and ultimately to contribute in unsettling them. What I also like about teaching social sciences is all that I can learn from my students and how the encounter in the classroom opens a dialogue of knowledge between them and me where not only the reading of assigned authors is involved, but our lived experiences help us to understand in another way the social science topics we are discussing. I always bring my own academic training and research experience and findings to the class. I share with students the difficulties that I myself have faced when conducting research, my position in the field, and how I came up with my research interests. I strongly believe in each student’s own creative capacity. Therefore, I stimulate in my students this sort of inquiry through the development of critical reading, writing, and interpretive skills as an essential component of each and every class I teach.

What is a challenge that you encountered in your teaching academic career and how have you addressed it?
Our students come from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and have very different personal and family trajectories. It is fundamental to understand the heterogeneity of the student body in terms of age, genders, race, ethnicity, class and nationality as this determines their educational process. In order to support them I tend to include all possible pedagogical tools and provide all possible feedback so that any knowledge gaps can be filled. I try to be as flexible as possible, without losing the need to demand them so that they can challenge themselves and advance in their learning. Being flexible and adapting the syllabus to the needs that arise in the classroom is not always easy. However, these challenges are usually discussed with my colleagues, who are an immense source of apprenticeship and support for me: from them I learn a lot and together we are constantly discussing how we can improve our teaching practice, which new strategies might help, all this with the aim of supporting our students.

What advice do you have for graduate students in your field?
Never stop activating your investigative and political imagination as much as possible, to be creative and not to be afraid to push for a critical interdisciplinary dialogue based on ethnographies that emerge from a dialogue of knowledge. We live in a very pressurizing moment at multiple levels. This is because systemic contradictions have been exacerbated, inequality, violence, climate change, increased migration, and the redoubling of border control, are proof of this. In an era of extremes, research imagination is needed to raise critical questions that illuminate investigations that are not conformist, but that appeal to provoke transformations in a present that should not be reproduced but radically transformed. The critical knowledge that students can produce is essential for this process.

What projects are you working on at this moment?
Currently I am focused on my second book which will discuss on the politics of (im) mobilities and the politics of space in the production of Ecuador as a global transit space for Latin Americans, Caribbeans, Africans and Asians heading to the U.S. I am also working on three complementary projects:

1) The political economy of global transit migratory corridors connecting the Andean Region northwards with the U.S., southwards with Southern Cone countries and northeastern with Caribbean countries;

2) Regimes of Violence and Waiting Time across global transit migratory corridors in the Americas, and

3) Care Economy on the move and the migrant struggle across the Americas.