Amelia Frank-Vitale | Princeton University (original) (raw)

Papers by Amelia Frank-Vitale

Medical anthropology quarterly, May 22, 2024

Social Science Research Network, 2013

Central American migrants are fleeing increasingly untenable conditions in their home countries. ... more Central American migrants are fleeing increasingly untenable conditions in their home countries. Corruption among Mexican officials and tightened security at borders and checkpoints inside Mexico push these migrants into the hands of criminal organizations while in transit. As such, they are vulnerable to extortion, assault, kidnapping, and murder by those organizations and corrupt authorities. Members of the Catholic Church are stepping in to protect and advocate on behalf of migrants attempting the hazardous trek through Mexico, often atop freight trains, but hundreds of thousands are facing daunting, often lethal perils. The result is a humanitarian crisis that simultaneously strengthens criminal organizations – the unanticipated consequences, as seen by the Church and human rights advocates, of both U.S. and Mexican security and border control policies. Without changes in those policies, they believe, there is little chance that this situation will be overcome. As conditions continue to deteriorate in Honduras and elsewhere in Central America’s Northern Triangle, and the U.S. promises ever-stricter border enforcement, both the volume of out-migration of these refugees and the threats to the physical wellbeing of migrants will likely increase.

The journal of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology, Mar 1, 2020

Annals of anthropological practice, Feb 4, 2022

Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity... more Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender‐based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.

EntreDiversidades: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Jan 31, 2020

Nacla Report On The Americas, Apr 3, 2022

International Migration Review, Mar 1, 2015

Public anthropologist, Oct 5, 2020

In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump a... more In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump as played out through the fear felt by immigrant communities and the fervor felt by anti-immigrant Trump supporters. The discourses of both groups rest on competing claims of the American Dream. Weaving together ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted among migrants and immigrants in Mexico, Honduras, and the United States with expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment as evidenced through online interactions, I explore the intersections and outline the divergences in the ways in which the American Dream is invoked, contested, twisted, and rejected. I use the idea of the American Dream as a fulcrum for the hopes, dreams, and feelings of immigrants and nativists alike. As we face the next election, I ask: whose American Dream as a structure of feeling is the emergent structure, and whose is fading out?

Deep Blue (University of Michigan), 2021

Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Leave if You're Able focuses... more Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Leave if You're Able focuses on the experiences of young men deported back to neighborhoods labeled as among the world's most violent. I argue for understanding deportation not as rupture but, rather, I place it within a continuum of exclusions and displacements, examining what it means when deportation becomes an ordinary and traumatic experience, routine and catastrophic. Clandestine migration and deportation are positioned here not as exceptional, spectacular events in a life of otherwise stability but are instead shown to be the extension across national boundaries of the marginalization, criminalization, and displaceability of a population who is always already excluded, deportable, before ever leaving their country of citizenship. From 2015 to 2019, Honduras saw nearly 400,000 people deported – mostly from Mexico and the United States. With a population of just over 9 million, this means that more than four percent of Hondurans were deported over just five years. Through stories of deportation and displacement, I trace the legal violences employed to detain young Hondurans, the legal and illegal violences poised to harm them in their home country, and the circulation of violence through circuits of clandestine migration and re-migration. The first generation of deportation studies literature revealed deportation to be a process of rending, exiling people back to countries of citizenship that are unfamiliar and do not feel like home. This was a crucial turn, but a study of Honduran deportation today tells a different story than most of the existing deportation-as-exile centered ethnographies. While there is a small percentage of Hondurans who are deported after growing up in the United States, the majority of Honduran deportees were caught and deported before ever settling into life in the United States, many after having a claim for asylum denied, many before they ever reached the U.S.-Mexico border. Understanding post-deportation life in thes [...]

Trends in Organized Crime, Jan 9, 2023

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

The journal of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology, Nov 16, 2020

The Migration Initiative, 2023

In this blog post we take climate change and health as two vantage points for understanding how m... more In this blog post we take climate change and health as two vantage points for understanding how multiple factors overlap in contributing to migration. We call for a broader reconceptualization of climate change response away from preparedness for acute emergencies and toward everyday community-level health and stability.

Trends in Organized Crime

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

Trends in Organized Crime, 2023

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

NACLA Report on the Americas

Annals of Anthropological Practice

Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity... more Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender-based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.

In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump a... more In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump as played out through the fear felt by immigrant communities and the fervor felt by anti-immigrant Trump supporters. The discourses of both groups rest on competing claims of the American Dream. Weaving together ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted among migrants and immigrants in Mexico, Honduras, and the United States with expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment as evidenced through online interactions, I explore the intersections and outline the divergences in the ways in which the American Dream is invoked, contested, twisted, and rejected. I use the idea of the American Dream as a fulcrum for the hopes, dreams, and feelings of immigrants and nativists alike. As we face the next election, I ask: whose American Dream as a structure of feeling is the emergent structure, and whose is fading out?

NACLA Report on the Americas, 2020

Officer Mendez* had no illusions about fighting crime or making his country a better place when h... more Officer Mendez* had no illusions about fighting crime or making his country a better place when he decided to join the Honduran police force. After a failed attempt to migrate to the United States,...

Medical anthropology quarterly, May 22, 2024

Social Science Research Network, 2013

Central American migrants are fleeing increasingly untenable conditions in their home countries. ... more Central American migrants are fleeing increasingly untenable conditions in their home countries. Corruption among Mexican officials and tightened security at borders and checkpoints inside Mexico push these migrants into the hands of criminal organizations while in transit. As such, they are vulnerable to extortion, assault, kidnapping, and murder by those organizations and corrupt authorities. Members of the Catholic Church are stepping in to protect and advocate on behalf of migrants attempting the hazardous trek through Mexico, often atop freight trains, but hundreds of thousands are facing daunting, often lethal perils. The result is a humanitarian crisis that simultaneously strengthens criminal organizations – the unanticipated consequences, as seen by the Church and human rights advocates, of both U.S. and Mexican security and border control policies. Without changes in those policies, they believe, there is little chance that this situation will be overcome. As conditions continue to deteriorate in Honduras and elsewhere in Central America’s Northern Triangle, and the U.S. promises ever-stricter border enforcement, both the volume of out-migration of these refugees and the threats to the physical wellbeing of migrants will likely increase.

The journal of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology, Mar 1, 2020

Annals of anthropological practice, Feb 4, 2022

Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity... more Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender‐based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.

EntreDiversidades: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Jan 31, 2020

Nacla Report On The Americas, Apr 3, 2022

International Migration Review, Mar 1, 2015

Public anthropologist, Oct 5, 2020

In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump a... more In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump as played out through the fear felt by immigrant communities and the fervor felt by anti-immigrant Trump supporters. The discourses of both groups rest on competing claims of the American Dream. Weaving together ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted among migrants and immigrants in Mexico, Honduras, and the United States with expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment as evidenced through online interactions, I explore the intersections and outline the divergences in the ways in which the American Dream is invoked, contested, twisted, and rejected. I use the idea of the American Dream as a fulcrum for the hopes, dreams, and feelings of immigrants and nativists alike. As we face the next election, I ask: whose American Dream as a structure of feeling is the emergent structure, and whose is fading out?

Deep Blue (University of Michigan), 2021

Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Leave if You're Able focuses... more Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Leave if You're Able focuses on the experiences of young men deported back to neighborhoods labeled as among the world's most violent. I argue for understanding deportation not as rupture but, rather, I place it within a continuum of exclusions and displacements, examining what it means when deportation becomes an ordinary and traumatic experience, routine and catastrophic. Clandestine migration and deportation are positioned here not as exceptional, spectacular events in a life of otherwise stability but are instead shown to be the extension across national boundaries of the marginalization, criminalization, and displaceability of a population who is always already excluded, deportable, before ever leaving their country of citizenship. From 2015 to 2019, Honduras saw nearly 400,000 people deported – mostly from Mexico and the United States. With a population of just over 9 million, this means that more than four percent of Hondurans were deported over just five years. Through stories of deportation and displacement, I trace the legal violences employed to detain young Hondurans, the legal and illegal violences poised to harm them in their home country, and the circulation of violence through circuits of clandestine migration and re-migration. The first generation of deportation studies literature revealed deportation to be a process of rending, exiling people back to countries of citizenship that are unfamiliar and do not feel like home. This was a crucial turn, but a study of Honduran deportation today tells a different story than most of the existing deportation-as-exile centered ethnographies. While there is a small percentage of Hondurans who are deported after growing up in the United States, the majority of Honduran deportees were caught and deported before ever settling into life in the United States, many after having a claim for asylum denied, many before they ever reached the U.S.-Mexico border. Understanding post-deportation life in thes [...]

Trends in Organized Crime, Jan 9, 2023

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

The journal of Latin American and Caribbean anthropology, Nov 16, 2020

The Migration Initiative, 2023

In this blog post we take climate change and health as two vantage points for understanding how m... more In this blog post we take climate change and health as two vantage points for understanding how multiple factors overlap in contributing to migration. We call for a broader reconceptualization of climate change response away from preparedness for acute emergencies and toward everyday community-level health and stability.

Trends in Organized Crime

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

Trends in Organized Crime, 2023

In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue ... more In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.

NACLA Report on the Americas

Annals of Anthropological Practice

Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity... more Developing ethnographic knowledge is largely about understanding and retaining nuance, complexity, and, even, contradiction. In the asylum courtroom, however, the law looks for certainty, clear percentages of likelihood of harm, and general, essential claims that a given people/country are a particular way. In this essay, I reflect on the ways in which the asylum system, by requiring that individuals be at risk because of their category (particular social group with immutable characteristics), casts other categories of people as inherently violent. I am particularly concerned with this dynamic in terms of gender-based violence claims, where women's very real fears of domestic abuse in Honduras are frequently argued in such a way that serves to reinforce the idea that Central American men are uniquely violent. This, then, undercuts the asylum claims of young Honduran men who are, at the same time, those most likely to be killed upon deportation.

In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump a... more In this article, I trace the structures of feeling underlying the 2106 election of Donald Trump as played out through the fear felt by immigrant communities and the fervor felt by anti-immigrant Trump supporters. The discourses of both groups rest on competing claims of the American Dream. Weaving together ethnographic data from fieldwork conducted among migrants and immigrants in Mexico, Honduras, and the United States with expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment as evidenced through online interactions, I explore the intersections and outline the divergences in the ways in which the American Dream is invoked, contested, twisted, and rejected. I use the idea of the American Dream as a fulcrum for the hopes, dreams, and feelings of immigrants and nativists alike. As we face the next election, I ask: whose American Dream as a structure of feeling is the emergent structure, and whose is fading out?

NACLA Report on the Americas, 2020

Officer Mendez* had no illusions about fighting crime or making his country a better place when h... more Officer Mendez* had no illusions about fighting crime or making his country a better place when he decided to join the Honduran police force. After a failed attempt to migrate to the United States,...

Religious Responses to Violence : Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present, 2015

In Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present, edited by Ale... more In Religious Responses to Violence: Human Rights in Latin America Past and Present, edited
by Alexander Wilde. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2015.

Trends in Organized Crime, 2023

This special issue of Trends in Organized Crime brings together recent empirical research on migr... more This special issue of Trends in Organized Crime brings together recent empirical research on migrant smuggling. Challenging the overemphasis on criminal networks that has long characterized mainstream discussions on smuggling, and which gained renewed traction during the pandemic, the contributions refocus our attention towards critical but underexamined dynamics present in the facilitation of irregular migration in corridors around the world. The contributors demonstrate how the excessive attention to the persona of the smuggler present in smuggling research and migration policy has led to the invisibility of the mobility efforts facilitated by other critical actors –most notably, migrants themselves. Furthermore, using intersectionality-informed approaches, the authors shed light on the roles lesser examined elements in smuggling like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex and intimacy play in irregular migration, often becoming key determinants in the ability of a person to migrate.

Migration Policy Practice, 2021

This special issue of Migration Policy Practice on children in the current Central America– Mexic... more This special issue of Migration Policy Practice on children in the current Central America– Mexico–United States context identifies critical blind spots on child-related migration data. It urges readers to look beyond cyclical trends, to instead identify underlying and pressing policy and practice issues that have remained unattended or ignored by past United States administrations, and that are at risk to remain so unless we collectively – and critically – examine our understandings of child migration.

Published jointly by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and Eurasylum Ltd.