International Public and Engaged Scholarship Persists because of PIRI Grant

After well over a year of being unable to visit our research sites due to pandemic travel restrictions, several of our team members – project principal investigator, Professor Robert McKee Irwin; UC Davis graduate students, Lizbeth de la Cruz and Brooke Kipling; and UC MEXUS postdoctoral scholar, Ernesto Zarco – finally obtained permission to carry out fieldwork Tijuana, Mexico in late summer of 2021.

The trip was invaluable. Not only did it help revive our in-country relationships, which is critical to our work of illuminating stories of displaced migrants and refugees; but, it also impressed upon us the importance of our public scholarship work in light of the pervading pandemic and its fall out.

Displacement and Deportation Overwhelm Tijuana

Once in Tijuana, we observed a huge backlog of refugees and other migrants. Because of the Centers for Disease Control’s Title 42 restrictions that were still in place, very few asylum seekers were permitted to enter the United States and initiate application processes. Many refugees and migrants were still hoping to cross to the United States, while others were seeking to settle in Tijuana.

Meanwhile, deportations from the interior of the U.S. have continued unabated throughout the pandemic, as have Title 42 expulsions of those caught crossing the border without documentation. Because of these two factors, we found the city of Tijuana to be teeming with displaced people and local migrant service providers to be overwhelmed.

For example, the Border Line Crisis Center, a migrant community center with which we planned to collaborate in organizing several public events with our Public Impact Research Initiative (PIRI) grant, was doubling as an emergency migrant shelter. About 20 tents were pitched around the perimeter of its main activities room, housing migrant families from Central America, Mexico, Haiti and Africa.

We also visited the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter, whose larger main room was packed with tents. They offered safe, albeit uncomfortable, accommodation to some 175 migrants. Another large group of migrants had set up camp outdoors near the Chaparral border crossing in hopes that the gateway would eventually reopen, allowing them to enter the U.S. and petition for asylum. The city government was trying to encourage these migrants to seek safer and healthier accommodations in shelters; but, many refugees and migrants were concerned that if they moved out of immediate sight of the border, it would hinder or delay their chances of entry.

An Urgent Need

The Humanizing Deportation project, whose mission is to disseminate the experiences of vulnerable migrants through digital stories via its open access bilingual website, realized that there was much to document. While a great deal had been published in news media about the current dynamics in Tijuana, migrant stories offer many insights into issues that receive very little dissemination. Our team felt an urgent need to get to work.

Rather than just produce new digital stories, however, we decided to we decided to adjust our plan of action and leverage the remaining funding from our PIRI grant and expand our activities in Tijuana to include new forms of public outreach and collaboration.

Public Scholarship Partnerships Grow

We were optimistic about our new plan because of successes we realized with our past public scholarship work in Tijuana.  As I shared in a previous blog post for PSE, we produced a digital story during the pandemic called Comida Calientita en Pura Pandemia that focused on the story of Esther Morales, Morales is a deported migrant who expanded her tamale business into a public service project in collaboration with Al Otro Lado, a Los Angeles-based migrant legal-services provider who is active in Tijuana. This partnership allowed Morales to deliver much-needed food to migrant shelters as well as to Tijuana’s large homeless population, a group consisting largely of deported migrants.

During our 2021 summer trip, we collaborated with Morales and financed Comida Calientita events in migrant shelters in order to establish working relationships and trust with several different sites with which we had had no prior contact. These relationships have allowed us to produce digital stories of migrant profiles that previously had been difficult to obtain. We saw our greatest success at El Jardín de las Mariposas – a shelter catering to LGBT+ migrants, many of whom, as it turned out, were eager to publish their stories on our website. As of mid-January 2022, we’ve published nine of these stories, with a number of others in our production pipeline.

Part One: Vulnerable Migrants in Tijuana

Professors Robert McKee Irwin and Leticia Saucedo received a Public Impact Research Initiative grant to deepen ties with migrant communities in Tijuana through Irwin’s digital storytelling project, Humanizing Deportation, which has been active in Tijuana since its launch in 2016. Read their previous blog post to learn more. 

Dispelling Misinformation about Migration

Additionally, we launched a new collaboration with Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Red Franciscana para Migrantes, a Catholic charity that runs a chain of migrant shelters and food kitchens across Mexico. Our team was inspired to pursue this collaboration because we were alarmed at the misinformation that seemed to be circulating widely among migrants who were in transit toward the United States. Together we produced three informational videos, titled Migrar Informado Es Migrar Más Seguro, on the complications of crossing the Mexico and U.S. borders, applying for asylum in the U.S., and seeking refugee status in Mexico.

A Meaningful Event

On November 5, 2021, two-and-a-half years after our previous in-person public event in Tijuana, we staged Los Migrantes Hablan, Los Migrantes Actúan, Los Migrante Saben at the Border Line Crisis Center. This accomplishment was made possible because of a collaboration with the Observatorio de Legislación y Política Migratoria of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and because of our PIRI funding from PSE.

The event was a premiere screening of three digital stories produced by Humanizing Deportation over the past year, which we projected live and simultaneously streamed via UC Davis’s Global Migration Center, with additional streaming via Facebook Live through la Red Franciscana para Migrantes. The first story was Esther Morales’s Comida Calientita, mentioned above, introduced by UC Davis Ph.D. candidate Brooke Kipling and Morales herself. The second was the Migrar Informado project, introduced by Hermana Isabel Turcios, who we became connected with through the Red Franciscana’s Frontera Digna migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, Coahuila. The third was Una Pareja Gay que Busca una Vida de Paz y Amor, a digital story created by two Honduran asylum seekers from the Jardín de las Mariposas shelter, which I introduced alongside Jaime Marín, the Director of this shelter.

We were especially pleased to broadcast the event from the Border Line Crisis Center, a new space dedicated to Tijuana’s migrant community. The space is all the more important because it realizes the vision of Danny Ruiz, a deported migrant whose own story, Turning Personal Bad into Public Good, was published on the Humanizing Deportation website in spring of 2019.

We are now working on producing its sequel, in which Danny recounts the founding of the Border Line Crisis Center and the many services and activities it offers migrants and refugees.

 

 

Roughly 75 migrants in Tijuana, with dozens more attendees connected via the live streams, attended the event; which was, in many ways, emblematic of the current context of migration in Tijuana. Multiple underfunded organizations collaborated to bring it to fruition, and migrants from the shelter, the street and the nearby border encampment made up the largest portion of the audience.

More Partnerships in Public Scholarship

Since then, we have continued to expand our collaborations with Esther Morales and have begun producing digital stories of migrants in other shelters across the city. We are now thinking about featuring some of these new productions in another hybrid, live/streamed-public outreach event at the Border Line Crisis Center some time in 2022.

Our goal for this planned future event is to publicize several live, in-person consulting sessions that we are now planning with Raquel Aldana of the UC Davis Law School. This project, which is supported by our PIRI grant and matching funds from the Law School, will allow Aldana to bring eight of her students who are enrolled in a workshop in immigration and asylum law to Tijuana. Our plan is to host public presentations and individual consulting sessions at different migrant shelters in the city and to collaborate with Al Otro Lado’s Tijuana office on a new project that serves deported migrants.

In addition to public outreach, Humanizing Deportation continues to produce and publish new digital stories created by migrants. We are excited to have been awarded a grant from UC Berkeley’s Health Initiative of the Americas through its Programa de Investigaciones en Migración y Salud (PIMSA) project. We are in the process of creating training for new graduate students from El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and UC Davis so they can become fieldwork team members on the project. Our hope is to empower this new cohort of public scholars so they can pursue projects that illuminate the displacement experiences migrants endured because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The combination of funding that PSE provides through PIRI grants to engage in both public outreach and research is ideal for a project like Humanizing Deportation. We have already begun to document through audiovisual production some of the special hardships migrants faced during the pandemic. Our intent is to use these stories as evidence to inform and personify public policy recommendations made to authorities in both Mexico and the United States. We are excited to be back in the community of engaged and public scholars, and it seems that the community is very pleased to have us back.

Learn more about their PIRI Grant Project 

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 All blogs are the personal accounts and opinions of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect the those of Public Scholarship and Engagement or UC Davis.