Ethnic Studies

Traditional, Western geographers have theorized a separation between land, capital, and labor, which naturalizes a conception of geography as completely independent of sociohistorical factors. This conventional ideology strips the landscape from its ongoing relationship with capital and labor, isolating the land from its white supremacist histories, which—according to Andrea Smith—are embodied through processes of anti-black racism/slaveability, genocide, and orientalism. Scholarship in critical geography has revealed that forces of colonialism and imperialism transcend conventional spatial-temporal limitations, constructing geographies of confinement for people in contemporary times. In focusing on Moms 4 Housing—a collective of Black, marginally housed mothers in Oakland, California—along with Abahlali baseMjondolo (Abahlali)—a Black, South African grassroots movement run by and for shack dwellers in Durban, South Africa—this paper investigates how racial capitalism maps onto the lives of Black peoples in localized regions. More particularly, it offers a transnational study that works to illuminate how African peoples are able to transform racialized sites into sites of resilience. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, my work contributes to a spatial understanding of how neoliberal capitalism confines Black peoples to particular racialized landscapes across the diaspora. Rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, along with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s conceptualization of abolition geographies, I examine what pushes distinct African peoples to mobilize around humanity in ways that advance a transformative and inclusive politic of Freedom. Ultimately, this study reveals similarities in processes and practices, as well as “slippages, openings, and contradictions” between Black peoples in relation to a global fight against racial capitalism and white supremacy.

Between the years 2005-2010, 1.4 million Mexican migrants residing in the US migrated back to reside in Mexico. The state of Oaxaca, a primary return destination, holds the highest and most diverse population of Indigenous nations in Mexico, with especially strong forms of communal organization locally and in diaspora. This project consists of both a documentary film in progress and an Ethnic Studies honors thesis composed of interviews with migrants who have returned to their ancestral homelands in Oaxaca after living in the US for several years. In the record of migration literature, theorizations of return migration have centered around settler colonial, nation-state forces of immobilization and confinement, thus, overlooking and oversimplifying the complex affective experiences of return. In contrast to such literature, my methodology and theoretical framework, grounded in Cine Comunitario (communal filmmaking) and Border Abolition, intentionally facilitate relationship building and long-form storytelling, politically structuring individuals within community knowledges and histories–rather than in state-centered approaches–as means for self-representation. This study is formed around several core enquiries, such as: What are the contradicting affective processes that Indigenous Oaxacan migrants experience when returning to their ancestral homelands? and How do they (we) understand concepts of home, ancestry, identity and belonging?