Figures into the afterlife: re-forming the dead migrant trans woman

• In Event: The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Abstract

This presentation seeks to memorialize incomplete narratives in order to add to activism and research that seeks to grief the lost on a migration journey; it does so through a transnational lens. I utilize the life narratives of two migrant trans women who were Otherized -and eventually killed- by the State, in their quest for living in the United States. The work that these border crossers make elucidates a newer lens for thinking through sociological ideas about gender as they intertwine with racialization; it also forces us to consider an afterlife without matter, or what I call the traces that will remain. Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez and Johana Medina León are the names of the two trans women who migrated from Honduras and El Salvador, respectively, seeking asylum, and died while on, or right after being released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. Border crossers –like trans people– are both hyper-visible and invisible; moral panics activate around the rhetoric of the “illegal alien” in ways that produce a figure out of the border crosser, and the trans person. Similarly to the figure of the trans woman of color, the migrant trans woman or trans migrant border crosser is unachievable for traditional methodological lenses within sociology – the lenses we have, and what these fields offer, are not yet enough to think through how we understand trans lives, which is often through deficit, risk, violence, and death. I do this the notion of absent presences from the sociology of the trace and using newspapers and journalist accounts. The lives and deaths of Roxsana and Johana reconstitute and re-form across the line between life and death, remaining in many ways celebrated for their quest for becoming, but also in the remembrance and the loss of what could have been.

Author

• Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, University of Connecticut