Environment, Atmosphere, Feeling Series: A. Naomi Paik

This talk examines migration through protected areas of the Sonoran Desert from the 1990s to the present. During this time of accelerating globalization and transnational migration, US border policy has pushed migrants to cross the southern border through the desert, often through protected areas (PAs) like the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. In response conservationists and nationalists have cast migrants as “ecological others” who harm the natural landscape, and US state agencies have weaponized environmental protections to further criminalize migrants, as well as humanitarian volunteers working to prevent migrant injury and death. And yet, while pitted against each other, the violence migrants and nature endure share the same root causes—US imperial policies that drive people to move long distance and US border regimes that then channel those migrants, and the anti-migrant enforcement that attempts to exclude them, into the desert. This shared source of harm means that the violence against migrants and the environment intertwine. By analyzing the layered histories of militarism, migration, border regimes, and conservation in the Sonoran Desert, this talk works to bring migrant and environmental justice together under the framework of abolitionist sanctuary that would provide refuge to all lives.

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Host or Publisher Northeastern University Asian Studies Program