Inhabiting Transit: Migrant Spatial Struggles from South America to the U.S. and Back Again by Soledad Alvarez Velasco

Inhabiting Transit: Migrant Spatial Struggles from South America to the U.S. and Back Again

Soledad Alvarez Velasco, University of Illinois, Chicago

Trans-border 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 I 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 whose research analyzes 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 an 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 her research has been published in Geopolitics, Antipode, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Geography, Studies in Social Justice, Migration and Society, the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and other academic journals in both English and Spanish.  During the 2025–26 academic year, she will be a resident scholar at the UIC Institute for the Humanities, where she will complete her current book manuscript, Inhabiting Transit: The Migrant Spatial Struggle from Global South America to the U.S.

March 26th, 2026

Time -TBD

Location, TBD