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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic embroidery workshops with undocumented migrant women in New York City, this paper explores how more-than-human relations sustain translocal care and solidarity amid forced (im)mobility, environmental dispossession, and restrictive border regimes.

Paper long abstract

Increased global flows and interconnectedness are intertwined with forced (im)mobility, growing border restrictions, and unequal access to freedom of movement (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Tošić and Palmberger, 2016). People in contexts of undocumented migration living in the United States navigate daily life as “impossible subjects”, simultaneously “welcome and unwelcome” as they face a political economic system that both relies on them as cheap disposable labor and criminalises and deports them (Ngai, 2014, p.2).

This presentation emerges from my doctoral research project working with people from rural towns in Mexico now living in contexts of undocumented migration in New York City. The research focuses on how more-than-human entanglements are lived, transformed and negotiated translocally, in response to environmental dispossession and forced (im)mobility.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork using participatory and arts-based methods, the proposed paper discusses findings and conversations that emerged from a series of embroidery workshops co-designed with a group of 25 women in Corona, Queens, and the South Bronx. These workshops sought to engage, through circles of embroidery and care, with participants’ relationships to nonhuman nature carried across borders and through rural-to-urban migration.

In short, through care-centered ethnography and the creative method of embroidery, this paper explores the role of human/nonhuman relations in sustaining translocal ties and solidarity in contexts of (im)mobility. I argue that translocal entanglements with more-than-human nature reveal ongoing flows of care and affect that exceed restrictive border regimes in contexts of forced (im)mobility.