IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section B

Abstract

Border internalization refers to the amalgam of institutions, practices, and infrastructures by state and non-state actors that implement the necessary social, political, legal, and affective parameters to sustain migration regimes within bordered territories. This project analyzes the ramifications of border internalization in the lives of queer Latin American migrants living in Barcelona. To do so I draw from Chiara Brambilla’s (2014) notion of borderscapes, which deconstructs the epistemological and ontological assumptions that borders typically elicit. The literature on borderscapes has not substantially engaged with queer theory and intersectionality, which obfuscates the structural multiplicity inherent in mobility regimes. I address this gap by interpolating queer theory to the borderscapes notion, resulting in ‘queer borderscapes’, a framework that I introduce to understand how queerness shapes the ways that mobility regimes are encountered, experienced, and resisted. I draw from semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and walking ethnography to examine the dislocated border in quotidian settings. Differential mobilities endure long after a border has been crossed, conditioning migrant lives in ways that are just as differential as the mobility regimes themselves. Disentangling these qualities and examining them through an intersectional lens is essential to understanding the fraught relationship between the border and the migrant ‘other’.