In a climate of burgeoning hostility toward immigrants in the United States, how can groups whose families arrived in earlier times avoid both overstating and underestimating the differences between their stories and those of today’s targeted populations? How can the general public learn to navigate critically the formulae of immigration coverage in the American media, which sensationalise outbreaks of nativist cruelty yet quickly segue into reporting that normalises border securitisation and the cultural racism that undergirds it, including the anti-migrant antipathies of previous immigrant cohorts?

This keynote models a way to meet these challenges by juxtaposing Mexican and Greek stories of migrating to the U.S. Oral histories that he has gathered from Mexican migrant workers in contemporary America’s most dangerous jobs – meatpacking and day labour – signal the extraordinary forms of courage required in the face of state, corporate, and vigilante violence that recapitulates historically precedent patterns of racial formation and biopolitical domination. Placed side-by-side with his own family’s narrative of fleeing nationalist war, migrating (illegally) from Greece, and finding new footholds in America a century ago, these stories generate a warming friction that can kindle political hope in bleak times. This talk thus explores the power of memory, in all its complexity and fragmentation, to cut against fatalism and spark flashes of understanding and solidarity among disparate migrant groups.

This public keynote presentation is part of the EAAS Conference 2024.

Photo: Paul Apostolidis ©private