About the Talk:

What becomes of men the U.S. locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the U.S. deported morethan five million people—over 90 percent of them men. How does expulsion shape men's lives and sense of themselves? This talk rethinks the old apartheid migrant labor structure to show how the current carceral system weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization to undermine migrants as men. This system is gendered, racialized, and aimed at erasure rather than mere exploitation. Guards and gangs beat men down, till they feel like cockroaches, pigs, or dogs. Many lose ties with family. In contrast to old ideas about migration between "here and there" do not go home. Indeed, few feel at home in Mexico at all. Instead, they end up in limbo: stripped of their very humanity. Against the odds, they fight for new ways to belong. At once devastating and humane, the talk offers a clear-eyed reconsideration of the violence of deportation and the possibilities for refusal.

About the Speaker:

Abigail Andrews is Director of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program, Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, and affiliated faculty in Sociology at the University of California-San Diego. Her scholarly research focuses on state violence, gender, and grassroots advocacy among migrants from Mexico and Central America. She is a leader in community-engaged learning and an award-winning teacher, integrating undergraduate and graduate students directly into collaborative, applied, and trauma-informed research to make the world more just for migrants and us all. Her publications include Undocumented Politics: Place, Gender, and the Pathways of Mexican Migrants (UC Press, 2018) and Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deportation (UC Press, 2023).