Distress Migration Symposium

Symposium Description: 
Jacqueline Bhabha (2018) introduced the term ‘distress migration’ to broaden the characterization of irregular migrants, including not only those forced from their homes (‘refugees’) and those who face an existential threat (‘survival migrants’) but also those who view mobility as the solution to chronic destitution or hopelessness. The unprecedented post-pandemic migration to the US-Mexico border (2021-2024) witnessed new strategies in response to this mass movement. While new state mechanisms to control or deter migrant mobility were introduced in destination and transit countries, migrants and those who facilitate and profit from their travel adapted in response. This symposium invites critical research and dialogue that examines the post-pandemic period of ‘distress migration’ to the US -- i.e., perspectives that reveal the restriction of movement and lawful pathways for migrants, forcing them into precarious conditions. Join a small community of migration scholars and activists from across the Americas to collectively deepen our understanding of strategies, consequences, and lessons learned during this post-pandemic period of ‘distressed migration’ with scholarship rooted in dignity and social justice.

Tentative Itinerary

10-10:30am: Welcome and Introduction

• Sarah Blue, Texas State University

10:30-11:30am: 2021-2024 Distress Migration: Who, What, Why

• Luciana Gandini, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)-CDMX
• Soledad Alvero Velazco, University of Illinois-Chicago
• Guadeloupe Correa-Cabrera, George Mason University
• Sarah Blue, Texas State University
  The Human Cost of Anti-Trafficking Immigration Enforcement: Assessing the US’ ‘Humane Border Enforcement’ Experiment

11:30-12:30pm: Panel Discussion: Connections, lessons learned, and future directions

12:30-1:30pm: Lunch 

1:30-2:30pm: 2021-2024 Distress Migration: Impact on Mexico

• Bruno Felipe de Souza e Miranda, UNAM-CDMX
• Rebecca Torres, UT-Austin
• Monserrat Valdivia, International Red Cross, Mexico City
• Alicia Barceinas Cruz, University of Kentucky

2:30-3:30pm: Panel Discussion: Connections, lessons learned, and future directions

Alicia Barceinas Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research combines approaches from political ecology, feminist political geography, and border studies to examine how geopolitical borders shape human and more-than-human lives. Her current work in Southern Mexico focuses on the expansion of commodity plantations to analyze the impacts that transnational politics and human migration policies have on agrarian livelihoods and land.

Sarah Blue is the Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Texas State University. She has maintained an ongoing interest in the political geography of migration, gender, and development studies, even as the place, location and focus of the projects have changed. Dr. Blue graduated from the University of Denver with undergraduate majors in geography and philosophy. She completed her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, focusing the mobilization of Guatemalan refugee women. Her dissertation from the University of California, Los Angeles emphasized the shaping of socio-economic inequality in Cuba. 

Dr. Blue’s later work in Cuba focused on Cuban medical internationalism and Cuban agroecology. Dr. Blue has also completed work on Latino migration to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the effects of U.S. policies on unaccompanied Central American migrant youth, and the process of inclusion and exclusion in migration and asylum-seeking practices in the United States. Her scholarly trajectory demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship and the broad place of the Southwest in the larger context of the Americas.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government, and co-director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at George Mason University. Her areas of expertise are border studies, U.S.-Mexico relations, international security, migration studies, and illicit networks. She is author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017; Spanish version: Planeta, 2018). Her newest co-authored book is entitled Frontera: A Journey across the U.S.-Mexico Border (Texas Christian University Press, 2024). Her forthcoming book in Spanish (2025) is titled: Carteles Inc: A “New Generation” of Criminal Networks (in contract with Siglo XXI Editores). Professor Correa-Cabrera is Past President of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) and co-editor of the International Studies Perspectives journal. She currently conducts research on human smuggling and transnational crime networks, and is writing her upcoming book titled Coyotes LLC: The Industry of Human Smuggling and the American “Dream.” Professor Correa-Cabrera was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Mexico and Visiting Scholar at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana in 2014-2015. In the Fall of 2025 she was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Davidson Institute for Global Security of The John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding in Dartmouth College. She is a frequent commentator on Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexico relations, (im)migration, and border security for several media outlets.

Dr. Lucinia Gandini is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Legal Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and Coordinator of the University Seminar on Internal Displacement, Migration, Exile, and Repatriation (SUDIMER), UNAM. She is a Level III member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (Sistema Nacional de Investigadoras e Investigadores, SECIHTI). She is also a Non-Resident Global Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (Washington, D.C.) and a Research Fellow at the Center for Latin American & Latino Studies, American University.

Dr. Gandini is a specialist in migration and refugee studies in Mexico and Latin America. Her research focuses on migration governance, socio-legal integration, forced mobility, human rights, and contemporary mobility dynamics, including the Venezuelan displacement and Central American caravans. In 2020, she co-founded the CAMINAR research group, which conducts rigorous comparative research on mobility, migration and asylum policies, and regularization processes across eight Latin American countries.

In 2021, she received the William M. LeoGrande Award from American University for the best academic book on Latin America, for the co-authored volume Caravans. In 2025, she was awarded the Lelio Mármora Prize by the Academic Network of the Quito Process for leading the CAMINAR research project on the regularization of Venezuelan migrants in Latin America, in recognition of its contribution to understanding and improving migration and asylum policies in the region.

Dr. Gandini has an extensive publication record in academic books and peer-reviewed journals. She also serves on several editorial boards, including International Migration Review and Frontiers in Human Dynamics.

Bruno Miranda is a Research Assistant at UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (Institute of Social Research) and co-editor of (Trans)fronteriza, a newsletter on Border Studies hosted by CLACSO. His recent research areas include the transformation of border cities into waiting spaces in Mexico for transcontinental (Asia and Africa) and Caribbean migrants.  He is interested in the changes and rearrangements in migration systems caused by diverse, protracted and complex mobilities. 

Among his latest publications are:

• Movilidades en contextos migratorios. Ruralidades, control migratorio y dinámicas sociales. (UNAM, edited volume) (2025)
• Fugadas del Talibán: instalaciones espaciales de migrantes de Afganistán en las fronteras de México. (CLACSO, chapter) (2024)

Rebecca Maria Torres is associate professor in the Department of Geography & the Environment, associate of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), associate of the Population Research Center (PRC), and affiliate of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of interest include (im)migration, Children/Youth Geographies, Gender, Feminist Geography, and Activist/Engaged Scholarship. Since 2015, she has collaborated with a bi-national, trans-disciplinary team of scholars on research focusing on the current situation of refugee/migrant children and youth from Mexico and Central America. Project publications include: A Year After Obama Declared a ‘Humanitarian Situation’ at the Border, Child Migration Continues, NACLA, 08/27/15; “Re-Conceptualising Agency in Migrant Children from Central America and Mexico,” in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS); and“A Crisis of Rights and Responsibility: Feminist Geopolitical Perspectives on Latin American Refugees and Forced Migrants” in Gender, Place, & Culture. Other articles related to child/youth migration include: “Child Migration and Transnationalized Violence in Central and North America,” JLAG; “Dibujando al ‘Otro Lado’: Children’s Depictions of the United States in a Rural Mexican Migrant Sending Community,” JLAG; “Undocumented Students’ Narratives of Liminal Citizenship: High Aspirations, Exclusion and ‘In-Between’ Identities,” Professional Geographer; and “Luchando Por Una Nueva Vida: Academic Aspirations of Latino Immigrant Youth in the U.S. Rural South,” in Education in a World of Migration: Implications for Policy and Practice. She has also published migration-related articles in journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Gender, Place & Culture, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS), Geoforum, and Geographical Review, among others.

Rebecca has been involved in various activist and community engaged research projects, including partnering with a rural public school system in North Carolina to establish Los Puentes Dual Language Immersion program to address ESL needs of Latino immigrant children. She also collaborated on a project examining construction workers’ conditions in Austin, spearheaded by the worker’s rights organization Proyecto de Defensa Laboral (PDL)/Worker’s Defense Project.  She holds a BA in History, Ibero-American Studies. and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MS in International Agricultural Development and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California at Davis. 

Montserrat Valdivia is a Mexican Posdoctoral Fellow at UT Austin. She got her PhD at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) program at UT Austin. She holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology and an MA. in Asian and African Studies from the El Colegio de Mexico (COLMEX). Her research interests are the relationship between childhood and violence, migration, and refugee studies. For her PhD dissertation she worked on a transnational dissertation research project examining the experiences of Central American adolescents who have backgrounds as gang members as they leave their home countries and traverse the increasingly arcane asylum process through Mexico. She was particularly interested in knowing how those adolescents were perceived by the law and institutions in Mexico and their possibilities of being recognized as refugees. After her PhD graduation, she worked for four years as National Head of the Migration and Internal Displacement Program of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Mexico.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer whose research analyses the interrelationship between mobility, control and spatial transformations across the Americas. She investigates the intersection between undocumented global south-north and global south-south transit migration, border regimes, the formation of migratory corridors across the Americas and the migrant struggle across these transnational spaces. She combines a multi-scale and historical analysis with multi-sited ethnography and a digital ethnography based on a migrant-centred perspective to reconstruct migrants’ spatial and temporal trajectories. In her research, she foregrounds 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 reach the U.S., or other southern cone and Caribbean destinations. Her work also analyzes the impact of the externalization of the U.S. border regime across the migratory corridors of the Americas, the movement of unaccompanied and undocumented migrant children, as well as the dynamics of transnational migrant smuggling networks operating across those transnational spaces.