Join us on April 13th from noon to 1:30pn in Beach 452.
Amelia Frank-Vitale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University. An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Dr. Frank-Vitale has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions on movement. Her book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of mobility control – and the creative ways people challenge them – across scale and space.
Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds
Hondurans have been at the heart of some of the most visible migration phenomena in the last few years, as well as the direct target of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. In Leave If You Can, anthropologist Amelia Frank-Vitale offers a fine-grained portrait of the Honduran exodus and what it reveals about the broader consequences of changing US border enforcement policies. She highlights the stories of those who are often presented as unsympathetic: deported young men implicitly associated with the very violence they were trying to flee, challenging underlying assumptions frequently held by policymakers and humanitarian agencies.
Connecting overlapping regimes of mobility control, from the invisible gangland borders within San Pedro Sula to the growing expansiveness of the US border’s reach, this book shows how deportation does not deter migration but, in fact, keeps people moving, and how U.S. policies fuel the migration “crisis” they claim to address. Drawing from her own accompaniment of migrant caravans over many years, Frank-Vitale also explores how caravans emerge as both protest movement and migration tactic in response to this expanding border regime.