Migrant Voices in the Digital Sphere: Life Narratives from the US-Mexico Borderlands

The two-thousand-mile border that divides the United States and Mexico has been described as a “contact zone” of cultural friction and unbalanced power relations, as defined by Mary Louise Pratt. This paper aims to contribute to studying and comprehending lives in the US/Mexico borderlands by analyzing a digital platform that documents migrant autobiographical narratives. Starting from the fundamental question of whether the subaltern can create an autobiography (Spivak 1988), it centers on the following question: How can digital technologies and platforms aid the dissemination of life narratives of migrants? Most migrants’ stories are “un-documented” and erased from the historical record as they are fluid citizens. Digital resources facilitate recording narratives of and by individuals whose lives are typically hidden under the shadows and xenophobic tropes. This paper will focus on the digital project “Humanizing Deportation.” This is a community-based digital narrative project documenting the consequences of deportation. Many migrants who have been deported share their personal experiences on this platform, which aims to give them agency over their life stories. The paper studies how this digital project engages in archival and analytical work to build a repository of digital resources that can be used in the field of Border Studies (Anzaldúa 1987). The methodology will be a qualitative analysis of a cluster of migrant autobiographies that describe the consequences of deportation. This contribution aims to contest stereotypical representations of the border and suggests that digital tools and platforms can help capture and circulate border life narratives.