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Paper short abstract

This project is a visual and sensory exploration of intergenerational migration, tracing the divergent experiences of displacement within my own family: my mother’s forced departure from El Salvador during the civil war and my father’s family’s flight from the Guatemalan genocide against the Maya.

Paper long abstract

This project is deeply personal and political exploration of intergenerational migration, memory, and inequality, told through the lens of visual, sensory, and digital anthropology as a student from Belize with immigrant parents. It juxtaposes my own privileged, voluntary migration to the United Kingdom with the forced displacements experienced by my family in Central America, specifically, my mother’s urgent departure from war-torn El Salvador and my father’s family’s survival amid the state-led genocide of the Maya in Guatemala.

Drawing from oral histories, archival materials, and auto-ethnographies, the film highlights the tensions between inherited trauma and lived privilege, asking: What does it mean to migrate safely when your ancestors migrated to survive? How do family stories of violence, survival, and loss shape contemporary diasporic identity? What do we carry across borders, emotionally and culturally? How is history felt in the body and across generations?

The film utilizes visual and sensory anthropology techniques - layered soundscapes, symbolic imagery, and embodied narration - to explore what is remembered, silenced, and lost across generations. Rather than presenting a single migration narrative, it emphasizes the unequal conditions of movement shaped by war, imperialism, and racialized border regimes.

By weaving personal reflection with historical context, this project challenges dominant narratives of migration as linear or universal. Instead, it frames movement as political, embodied, and emotionally complex. The result is not only an intimate act of remembrance but also a critique of the unequal structures that continue to govern who gets to move freely and who must flee.