Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Assistant Professor, Anthropology and Latin American & Latino Studies, “Inhabiting Transit: Migrant Spatial Struggles from South America to the U.S. and Back Again”

Transborder migrant transits through the Americas have become a deeply political phenomenon. This talk examines the contemporary condition of inhabiting transit: being forced to restart journeys and dwell in a geography of uncertainty, living in a permanent state of (im)mobility in search of safety. Drawing on digital and multi-sited ethnography, historical research, and a migrant-centered approach, it reconstructs the journeys of 14 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela, whom Velasco met in Quito, Metetí, and Houston between 2016 and 2022. Their trajectories from their countries of origin to Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil became prolonged, repeated transits across South American cities and borders before heading toward the U.S.—and, in some cases, back south as part of contemporary reverse transit. The talk analyzes how these South–South, South–North, and North–South movements collide with violence, uneven geographical development, and racialized, exclusionary border regimes. At its core, it centers migrants’ flights and fights—their struggles for movement, survival, and belonging.

Dr. Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer analyzing the interrelationship between mobility, control, and spatial transformations across the Americas. She holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from King’s College London. Before joining the University of Illinois Chicago in January 2023 as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Latin American and Latino Studies, she was an Assistant Professor at Heidelberg University. She is the author of Frontera sur chiapaneca: El muro humano de la violencia (Mexico: CIESAS-UIA, 2016) and co-editor of Luchas Migrantes en Tiempos Pandémicos y de Crisis (Puerto Rico: Editorial Educación Emergente, 2025). Her research has appeared in Geopolitics, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Studies in Social Justice, Antipode, Migration and Society, and the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She co-founded and co-coordinated the transnational digital projects (Im)Mobilities in the Americas (2020) and Children on the Move: An Ethnographic Mosaic of the Americas, funded by the National Geographic Society (2019).

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