Abstract
This article explores the personal and political significance of dancing for migrants trapped at the US–Mexico border, waiting to apply for asylum in the United States. Past research has often framed waiting as empty, static, boring, or even violent. Nevertheless, an emergent literature shows how people in contexts of violence also exercise creativity and care as embodied paths to collective healing. Drawing on nearly three years of patchwork ethnography at Comunidades, a cultural center and migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, including participant observation in person and over Zoom as well as in-depth interviews with migrants and staff, we explore how dance affects migrants’ relationships to trauma and offers its own mode of politics. We show how forced waiting was affectively complex. On one hand, being stranded at the border left migrants vulnerable to state and cartel abuse. At the same time, dancing helped people ‘come home’ to themselves, practice solidarity, and refuse dominant narratives of their suffering. In short, migrants can use creative practices – including but not limited to dance – for embodied healing, community building, and resistance to larger regimes of violence.
Introduction
Since November 2018, tens of thousands of migrants have come to the US–Mexico border in search of US asylum. Most are fleeing multi-sided violence, including gang threats, state persecution, and/or domestic abuse. The majority come from Central America, Mexico, and Haiti, though there are growing numbers from Venezuela, Cuba, and various countries in Africa. Most are poor. On their journeys north, up to 90% endure state and/or cartel violence (Andrews et al., 2021). Once migrants get to the border, US policies that include metering, the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), Title 42, and asylum-transit bans force them to wait on the Mexican side. While waiting, asylum seekers face physical and psychological violence that they probably would have avoided had they been admitted promptly for processing in the United States (Andrews et al., 2021; Neusner and Kizuka, 2022). In short, the United States has added waiting to the array of tools it uses to fortify its power and keep undesired bodies out.
Research shows that waiting is an important technique of state control (Khosravi, 2014). For instance, sociologist Javier Auyero (2011, 2012) reveals how waiting can discipline welfare recipients into patience and compliance. Controlling people’s time – indeed, taking their time – is also a central tool of state power over migrants and refugees (Bhatia and Canning, 2021; García et al., 2022). Under contemporary global immigration control regimes, migrants regularly end up waiting, stuck in limbo for indeterminate periods (Brigden and Mainwairing, 2016; Missbach, 2013; Varela Huerta, 2019). Waiting imposes deep material, emotional, and embodied costs (Fee, 2021). Nevertheless, as scholars like Ghassan Hage (2009b) and Amarela Varela Huerta (2016) point out, waiting can also be ambivalent, as migrants refuse the feeling of ‘stuckedness’ by ‘waiting out’ painful conditions or even protesting.
We bring such research into conversation with emergent scholarship on joy and creativity as sources of healing, especially in contexts of policing and militarization (brown, 2019). Creative practice can be a form of resistance to political, physical, and psychological violence (Motta, 2018). When people lack the words – let alone professional psychiatric care – to name or transform their trauma, bodily movement can help them to heal (Van der Kolk, 2015). Joy is also, as Hage (2009a) puts it, a ‘political emotion’. That is, by enacting their own vibrant aliveness, migrants and other marginalized people refuse the erasure and dehumanization of the US border regime. Indeed, ‘pleasure activism’, to borrow the title of adrienne maree brown’s (2019) book, and the attendant, seemingly individual practices of joy are widely used as an explicit political tool for resisting capitalism and racist violence. Creative politics also challenge the traditional approach to humanitarian aid, in which NGOs often focus on basic sustenance and deprioritize ‘cultural’ pursuits like the arts.
In this article, we consider how creative practices can help asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border endure the violence of forced waiting, with a focus on dance. To do this, we draw on three years of ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel et al., 2020) at ‘Comunidades’, 1 a cultural center and migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico. We combine the three authors’ observations of everyday life among migrants, dance parties, dance workshops, and uses of dance at protests – as well as more than 45 in-depth interviews with asylum seekers and shelter staff – to look at how dancing shifts migrants’ relationships to trauma and helps them endure protracted waiting. We narrate this process through three key examples, which expand from the individual, to the small group, to the public sphere: (1) informal dancing in the shelter, (2) a 2021 dance workshop with women asylum seekers, and (3) Comunidades’ use of dance in protests for Black migrants’ rights. We then trace how activists at Comunidades converted the everyday, creative practice of dance into a political project.
Policies forcing asylum seekers to wait at the US–Mexico border imposed incredible hardships. At Comunidades, participants often spoke of their experiences of waiting as ‘cruel’ and ‘torturous’, comparing waiting with being imprisoned or repeating phrases like ‘I can’t take it any longer’ (No aguanto más). Waiting produced anxiety, insomnia, fear, boredom, restlessness, agitation, depression, and other embodied suffering. It also left migrants vulnerable to violence, including kidnapping, rape, and beatings by Mexican police (Neusner and Kizuka, 2022). Waiting intensified the broader borderland limbo described by scholars and poets (Anzaldúa, 1987; Chávez, 2016).
Nevertheless, suffering only partially captured the realities of waiting. Even amid deep pain, migrants at Comunidades made space for creativity. Through dance, music, and art, many managed to survive, carry on, even thrive. Dance offered embodied healing and joy, allowing migrants, as many put it, to ‘come home’ to themselves. By dancing, they ‘shook off’ the geographic and temporal limbo of migrating and waiting – of being ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969: 95). They also developed solidarity with one another and a sense of collective morale, or communitas (Turner, 1969). And they challenged the idea that waiting makes time static and passive, and that basic needs must be met before there is space to create.
By embodying their own wholeness and vibrancy, migrants also refused state power over their bodies and minds, defying the violent logic of state-imposed waiting. That is, as Audra Simpson (2014) argues, their internal and collective joy denied the presumed authority of the US state to erase them, remade an ignored narrative of vibrancy, and recreated a lived feeling of home. Upon seeing this effect, staff at Comunidades began to explicitly cultivate and practice dance (among other arts) as a strategy of protest, which they called #ResisteGozando (joy as resistance). The translation of resiste gozando is not straightforward: resiste is the imperative form of the verb resistir (to resist); gozando is the present participle of the verb gozar, which can be translated as ‘to enjoy, take pleasure in, or have a good time’. Gozando implies a pleasurable feeling in the body, which can be erotic. As a hashtag or slogan, #ResisteGozando instructs us to resist with a range of emotion, including desire. Through this term, staff and migrants named the pleasure of embodied action and linked affective joy to an active, public response to border militarization. In the process, they drew media attention and emphasized the complexity of the migrant experience.
Theorizing waiting, creative healing, and the politics of joy
Recently, scholars of migration have paid more attention to waiting (Frank-Vitale, 2020; Missbach, 2013). As Christine Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi (2021a) note in the introduction to their volume Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, media and the public often depict desperate refugees waiting – sometimes indefinitely – in camps, in detention centers, and at borders. Building on research on how states use time for control (Auyero, 2011; Jeffrey, 2010; Walker, 2022), these authors argue that waiting is now built into the governance of migration and the production of migrant ‘illegality’ (Garcia et al., 2022; Khosravi, 2014). Mexico, specifically, has increasingly become a bottleneck where migrants get stuck (Galemba et al., 2019; Varela Huerta, 2019). Others add that though waiting does not in fact work for deterrence, migrants now accept stopping, waiting, and containment as expected parts of their journeys (Brigden and Mainwaring, 2016).
Many analyses portray waiting as passive, indeterminate, and painful. Extending Victor Turner’s (1969: 95) theory of liminality as a period during which one feels ‘neither here nor there . . . betwixt and between’, scholars argue that states force migrants into indefinite states of liminality or legal limbo (Gonzales, 2015; Menjívar, 2006). Faced with protracted uncertainty – and the simultaneous threats of imminent and absent change – migrants often feel precarious, hopeless, afraid, stuck, or suspended in time (Fee, 2021; Griffiths, 2014; Haas, 2017). Many fear their future has been foreclosed (Jeffrey, 2010). Depriving people of freedom, agency, and a sense of control over their bodies, waiting can feel profoundly demeaning and disempowering (Menjívar, 2006; Riva, 2017; Turnbull, 2016). It also leaves people socially isolated (Griffiths, 2014; Haas, 2017). While waiting, many migrants also face ongoing threats and violence (Andrews et al., 2021). The effect is deep emotional and physical distress (Haas, 2017; Hvidtfeldt et al., 2020; Phillimore and Cheung, 2021). In short, forced waiting is traumatic (Haas, 2017).
However, other scholars contend that migrants in waiting cannot be reduced to passive, powerless victims whose lives are on hold (Jacobsen et al., 2021b). Waiting is not a simple deprivation of agency; it can also be done actively and even bravely, as migrants refuse to be simply victims (Hage, 2009b; Kallio et al., 2021). While waiting, migrants actively tolerate – even overcome – the constraints of their liminal status, often by improvising new routes and ways to operate (Brigden, 2018; Brun, 2015; Rotter, 2016; Sampson et al., 2016). Some even organize and protest their own disappearance (Varela Huerta, 2016). We add to this literature by analyzing more creative modes of agency while waiting. Our focus on dance draws attention to the moments of light, playfulness, creativity, and pleasure that help such migrants survive.
To frame the study, we turn to scholarship on embodied healing and pleasure activism. Such scholarship argues that pleasure is both a tool for healing from trauma and a mode of resistance to domination. Often, humanitarian aid prioritizes basic survival, food, and clothing above rights, dignity, belonging, or self-actualization, in accordance with Abraham Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs (Varma, 2020). Yet psychologists reveal that trauma is both held in and transformed through the body (Van der Kolk, 2015). Therefore, trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk suggests, dance, yoga, and movement can be modes of therapy, helping people reconnect with themselves and others. Throughout history, he points out, people have used communal music and movement to cope with pain and overwhelming emotions. Physical movement restores agency by bringing people into their bodies, rather than allowing them to dissociate or be ‘out of body’ (Van der Kolk, 2015: 331). This pattern is visible in a broad scholarship on the role of dance as a mode of resistance and embodied expression in Latin America and the Afro-Latinx diaspora (for discussion, see Aldama et al., 2012). Likewise, several studies point to the therapeutic value of expressive arts, which help bypass language when trauma is hard to express in words (Atkins and Duggins Williams, 2007; Knill et al., 2005). In contexts from Sri Lanka to Palestine to Holocaust survivors, arts can be liberating and affirming (Pruitt and Jeffrey, 2020; Schulberg, 1997; Soulsby et al., 2021). Black feminist scholar bell hooks (1995) adds that art is transformative politically, too, helping people liberate themselves and forge identities that resist the narrow limits imposed on them.
Recently, a growing scholar-activist movement in the United States – led by Black feminists – has embraced the politics of joy. Grounded in the longstanding feminist mantra that ‘the personal is political’, joy can offer an everyday practice, in which people refuse to succumb to pain and oppression through acts of embodied presence. As Ghassan Hage (2009a) insists, emotions are political when they give people a sense of power over themselves and their environment, challenging logics of domination. Black activist adrienne maree brown (2019: 13) defines pleasure activism as ‘the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy’. brown explicitly builds from Audre Lorde’s (1984) essay ‘Uses of the erotic’. In that piece, Lorde (1984: 56–57) writes of dance: ‘In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response . . . every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience . . . That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling.’ That is, dance brought Lorde back to herself and reminded her of her capacity for joy amid pain. Black feminists like Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts (2022) and Imani Perry (2020) add that joy can be a resource for Black people and challenge stories of Black life as just about hardship. Joy, Perry emphasizes, ‘is not about the absence of pain and suffering but exists defiantly through it’. All are clear: the practice of joy is a politics of its own.
Joy is also political on a second, more public level, as a strategy of resistance. As people make music and dance in protests, they extend their joy beyond individual healing to a collective strategy (Motta, 2018). For instance, Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby argued that making music, singing, and dancing were a ‘strategy of joy’ and a mode of resistance to the ‘superabundance of fear’ imposed by Argentina’s dictatorship (Garrote, 2013). In this article, we respond to adrienne maree brown’s (2019: 13) call ‘to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics’ of things that makes our study participants feel joy. We then explore its potential as a tool for political change.
Data and methods
This article draws on 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork with asylum seekers, staff, volunteers, and artists at the community-based organization ‘Comunidades’ in Tijuana, Mexico, between November 2019 and April 2022. During this period, Tijuana had among the highest concentrations of asylum seekers along the border. It was also the site of innovative efforts to offer healing and aid, including by Comunidades.
Located a few blocks from the Tijuana–San Ysidro border checkpoint, Comunidades seeks to build spaces of care and creativity for migrants amid border violence. In 2012, after meeting at a youth leadership forum, a group of young, feminist activists came up with the idea to start Comunidades. They began by hosting art exhibits, concerts, and other cultural events for migrant men, women, and children. In 2019, the organization opened a shelter on its second floor, a large room with beds for 60 migrants – almost all families with children. 2 The bottom floor – filled with murals, flowers, instruments, and a children’s play area – continues to operate as a community center and event space. This space makes the shelter unusual if not unique at the border, where most shelters focus on food and lodging alone. Today, most staff at Comunidades are former guests.
This study began as a collaboration between Comunidades and the Mexican Migration Field Research Program (MMFRP) at the University of California San Diego, to inform advocacy for migrants’ rights. Leslie participated in the MMFRP as a student from January to March 2020 and continued to volunteer at Comunidades through the end of 2022. Abigail is the director of the MMFRP, and Paulina is the founder and director of Comunidades. During this time, the COVID-19 pandemic and rapidly changing US policies stilted our original connections and compelled us to adopt a patchwork approach, combining visits, Zoom conversations, texts, and in-person fieldwork (Günel et al., 2020). Here, we draw on in-depth interviews; informal conversations with migrants in person and online; and field notes from dozens of workdays at the organization and from Zoom workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In early 2020 and again beginning in summer 2021, Leslie spent at least one day per week at Comunidades, accompanying migrants in their daily routines and helping plan and participate in protests and cultural events. She also helped teach English, coordinate dance classes, and produce a telenovela (fictional soap opera) with migrants. Throughout, she took field notes on asylum seekers’ interactions and their affect before, during, and after events. She also jotted down quotes from informal conversations about people’s motivations for participating, how creative events made them feel, and the messages they wished to convey through their art. Abigail also visited the shelter and oversaw a team of students volunteering and doing in-depth interviews there. Paulina engaged via her role as director, sharing her observations with Leslie and Abigail.
When COVID-19 began, Comunidades temporarily closed for in-person events, though it continued housing several dozen migrant families. Leslie and Abigail remained connected via WhatsApp and Zoom, though we faced challenges due to poor internet connections. Nevertheless, Zoom and WhatsApp opened new pathways for long-distance and cross-border relationships. With some migrants, Leslie developed more frequent and intimate conversations and friendships, and she even danced with migrants across national borders (over Zoom).
Leslie also conducted 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with migrants and staff at Comunidades between January 2020 and March 2022 and analyzed another 20+ in-depth interviews conducted by fellow student-researchers in the MMFRP. Respondents included asylum seekers who lived at or participated in events at Comunidades, as well as eight staff members who were also asylum seekers themselves. In interviews, Leslie and other students asked people about their histories of migration, experiences of waiting, creative practices, reasons for participating in Comunidades, strategies of well-being, and hopes for the future. Most interviews lasted about an hour. Given the complexity of migrants’ histories, we trained in trauma-informed interviewing and made sure to ask open-ended questions that let migrants lead all conversations. Although asylum seekers often drew attention to pain, we also saw laughter, play, teasing, and expressions of joy, silliness, and friendship in interactions at the shelter and events like birthday parties, concerts, and dances. These observations drew our attention to joy. They also allowed us to observe how migrants changed as they became involved (or not) in creative activities at Comunidades.
Most people we interviewed came from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Haiti. A few came from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba. All but the Haitians had lived at Comunidades, and everyone had participated in the organization’s events (the Haitians and some others now lived in rental apartments). They ranged in age from 18 to 40, two thirds were women, and all were subject to one or more of the US policies detailed below. They had fled their homelands in response to persecution by state and non-state actors (such as gangs), poverty, gender violence, homophobia, political corruption, extortion, climate crisis (immediate and underlying), and, in the case of Cameroon, a brutal civil war. All had been in Tijuana at least a few months (for an average of more than a year) and faced precarious housing, legal, and financial situations. While their access to creative programming was unique, their experiences hint at how asylum seekers and others in situations of forced waiting and violence might benefit from dance and creative arts.
Since Leslie and Abigail are white US citizens, and Paulina (as director) held a position of power over migrants, we tried to be conscious of our positionality. We did interviews only after months of getting to know people, and we checked our perceptions against those of migrant staff who were close friends of Leslie and Paulina. Interviewing staff also allowed for richer conversations, as the staff were the migrants with whom we shared the most trust. We supplemented these data with public testimonies by asylum seekers and community organizers in virtual and in-person forums, webinars, radio interviews, and cultural events.
We used Dedoose to code field notes and interviews for the feelings associated with waiting and with participating in creative activities. We noticed how creative practice played dual roles, as individual healing and public politics. We also observed a cross-cutting motif, in which being creative made people feel closer to home. We then went back through the data to analyze these themes in depth. Here, we focus on dance as the most emblematic and embodied of several creative practices we observed. Though we spoke with men, women, and children (and Comunidades had programming for all of these groups), most of the examples here focus on women, with whom we (as women) were able to develop more easy and intimate relationships. While our findings may not apply to all dance, and the implications may not hold for all migrants, we hope they help identify spaces of possibility to be explored elsewhere.
The context: Forced waiting
The US government has increasingly used waiting to keep migrants out and, effectively, deny them asylum. Before 2019, asylum seekers who presented a credible fear of returning to their countries of origin were admitted to the United States and held in immigration detention and/or placed on parole while their asylum cases were processed. The process typically took around two and a half years, though it could last longer (National Immigration Forum, 2019). Ultimately, most were denied asylum (Meissner et al., 2018). Since 2019, however, the US government has made the majority of migrants wait in Mexico before they apply for US asylum and/or while their cases are processed. Key policies and practices include:
(2) Introduced by Trump in 2019, the
(3) Most sweeping, starting in March 2020,
Observers agree that these policies have fueled a humanitarian crisis (Neusner and Kizuka, 2022). Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have waited in Mexico for months or years. They live in makeshift camps, shelters, and other precarious situations. Many go hungry. In a broader study, our team found that four out of five asylum seekers forced to wait in Tijuana endured beatings, kidnapping, extortion, rape, and/or verbal abuse by cartels or state agents (Andrews et al., 2021). The Department of Homeland Security (2021) itself has acknowledged that MPP ‘impos[ed] substantial and unjustifiable human costs on migrants who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico’. Likewise, public health experts, immigration lawyers, and human rights advocates have denounced Title 42 for harming vulnerable people (Program on Forced Migration and Health, 2022).
Forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous and dehumanizing conditions, these policies seem designed to wear them down physically and emotionally (Meyer, 2022). Our interviewees often described waiting in Tijuana as being ‘trapped in a cage’, unable to move forward to the USA or back to the places they had fled. Between homes, with time suspended by US policies, they lingered in limbo, as if, as one participant put it, they were ‘suspended in the air’. Often, they spoke of feeling a profound lack of control. As one woman from Venezuela told Leslie, ‘There is nothing more desperate for a human being than to be in a situation where we have no idea what to do.’ The uncertainty presented its own form of trauma – compounding hunger and fear.
#ResisteGozando: Embodied responses to weaponized waiting at the US–Mexico border
Yet migrants’ feelings about waiting were not just negative. In what follows, we explore how asylum seekers at Comunidades used dance as a form of therapy. We show how dance helped bring people ‘home’ to their bodies, establish community amid anomie and surveillance, and articulate a relationship to home from afar (for more on home, see Ahmed et al., 2003). We also explore the role of art, especially dance, in the politics of joy, described by activists and staff at the shelter as #ResisteGozando (joy as resistance). Practicing joy as an internal and collective affect also represented a refusal to be worn down or give up in the face of US exclusion and border militarization (Rosas, 2012). Comunidades’ use of dance and the arts for healing, connection, and activism thus challenged Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, even in the face of severe deprivation and violence.
Dancing as ‘coming home’
Unlike most humanitarian organizations, which prioritize food and shelter, Comunidades began with a focus on rights and dignity. Its young leaders emphasized the arts, organizing concerts, photo exhibits, dance workshops, and more. No day was complete at the shelter without at least one serenade, karaoke performance, band practice, dance circle, birthday party, or other, usually spontaneous, burst of creativity by staff and residents. For migrants, this space of creation felt healing. Dancing brought them ‘home’ to their bodies and connected them to their cultures of origin from afar, countering feelings of displacement, stagnation, and isolation. In the process, it helped them build new communities of care. In short, dance offered a powerful (if fleeting) counterpoint to the limbo of protracted waiting.
In Comunidades’ regular círculos de palabra (group meetings) with residents, migrants often clash, but one thing they almost always agree on is to hold parties and dance. With 60 men, women, and children of different backgrounds housed in the shelter, it can be tough to make decisions. But the love of dancing cuts across almost all migrants’ cultures. They start spontaneous dance parties or join events planned by staff, like bachata and Zumba classes, political demonstrations (where chanting and dancing are common), and music rehearsals and concerts.
A Zumba workshop for women asylum seekers in November 2021 offers an illustrative example. Zumba is a fitness dance set to upbeat Latin music, and it is not demanding: you just follow the instructor as you go. Thus, Zumba was ideal for a workshop aimed at pleasure and bonding for women (versus formally learning or making ‘art’). Because of COVID-19, the workshop was limited to 15 participants, from Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, Cameroon, Ghana, Chile (staff), Guatemala, Colombia, and the USA (Leslie), who ranged in age from 20 to 40.
The workshop opened with reggaeton music, with some women giddy and others subdued. Twin asylum seekers from Haiti – who were organizers at Comunidades – giggled as they rehearsed Zumba choreography they had learned on YouTube, which they planned to teach the group. A Colombian and a Cameroonian woman arrived with big smiles, laughter, and hugs, and immediately started to groove to the music. Other participants seemed more reserved, pulling up chairs to sit and wait for the event to start. One, from Honduras, stood in the corner whispering to a staff member and wiping tears from her eyes. While friends sat together, the group as whole was dispersed.
Then, the Haitian twins called the women into a circle and explained that because we would be recording audio of the workshop, each woman would assign herself a pseudonym, using the name of an artist or genre of music she liked to dance to. Leslie introduced herself as ‘Samba’, explaining that Brazilian samba is her favorite to dance to because even though it sounds celebratory, the lyrics are often sad. ‘Compa-cumbia’, from Haiti, added that dancing compa reminded her of her home in Haiti; cumbia, another dance she was learning in Mexico, made her feel she belonged there, too. In their own introductions, almost everyone echoed her words that music and dance helped them feel ‘at home’.
What does it mean to feel at home? When Compa-cumbia described feeling at home, she referred to the experience of being in her culture, her house, city, or country. The external sensory information was familiar: the rhythms and sounds triggered smells, landscapes, and tastes, creating the sensation of being culturally at home and triggering memories of the places and people she loved. Like eating comfort food, dancing to the drums of compa gave her a way to ‘return’ to Haiti, a strong contrast to the alienation and fear of waiting in Mexico.
‘Merengue’, an asylum seeker from El Salvador, echoed the theme of home. Describing the dance parties she and her friends would throw when she lived at Comunidades, she recalled: When I was in the shelter – because I lived here eight months at Comunidades – the thing I think made me feel like I was myself was to dance. To be able to listen to music, to be able to share with my friends who I had while I was here. And I remember really well how we used to make ourselves look pretty on those days, and we would get ready starting days ahead, to be able to throw a super great party (pachangón). And we took advantage of that opportunity like gold, no? For me, for my friends in that moment, it was the chance to be able to be ourselves, to be able to feel like we were in a place of our own – that was ours. Because the music was ours. And we could be the owners (las dueñas) of our own bodies. (Interview 4)
Merengue linked ‘home’ to a feeling of being herself. Because there was no privacy at the shelter and she faced many threats in Tijuana, Merengue could rarely relax. She was always on guard. But when she danced, she felt like she could let go. When she did, she felt like both her body and the place were her own. Interestingly, merengue music originates from the Dominican Republic, not Merengue’s home country of El Salvador. Dance could return someone ‘home’ to their body without necessarily being specific to their culture of origin.
Later, Merengue elaborated on the enlivening, liberating power of dance: Dance is an art to cure the heart, because you let yourself go, you laugh. . . . You just have to let your body flow along with the music, and it helps you to free yourself. At least for me, I feel that it has helped me a lot to free myself, because it’s like I feel more – I even feel more beautiful when I dance. I feel happier. There’s something in me that’s alive. (Interview 4)
When Merengue danced, she ‘freed’ herself from the ugliness, sadness, and lifelessness of waiting. If US border enforcement trapped her, dance made her feel happy, beautiful, and alive – enabling an internal experience of ease in her body.
‘Coming home’ through dance thus had two dimensions: the external sensory experience of being culturally at home and the internal experience of being at ease in one’s body. 4 Monique, an asylum seeking mother from Cameroon, staff member at Comunidades, and fabulous dancer, touched on both sides of being at home. When Monique lived in the shelter, she taught other migrants to dance. The children and other guests liked learning African dance and started asking to hear her music. The experience made her feel, ‘Everywhere you be, you can create some energy positive, like you’re all in your house. Just to be like, well with the people, love the people. I’m trying to learn and teach the people your reality, your country, your culture’ (Interview 2). That is, teaching African dance helped Monique create ‘positive energy’ and ‘love’ that made Comunidades feel like her home. In turn, her Latin American friends loved how Monique also danced to their bachata and reggaeton. As Audre Lorde puts it, sharing joy formed ‘a bridge between the sharers’ that deepened their mutual understanding. Dance enabled isolated people from multiple cultures to find common ground.
Monique did not just love dancing as a reminder of Cameroon. She also liked how it felt in her body. While dancing, she said, I be like a baby girl. I like to dance. I like to be happy. I like to see the people happy. I like happiness. Just like that. Dance and the singing is like a therapy for me . . . It is my therapy . . . I feel like I’m renewed. I feel well, comfortable, like libre, like free. I’m free. I have a power. (Interview 2)
In short, dance made Monique feel uninhibited and in her body, like a baby – precisely the opposite of the confinement the USA was imposing on migrants. Interestingly, she also linked this feeling to power and freedom, just as Merengue described being ‘in her body’ as owning it, suggesting a sense of control – the opposite, that is, of the powerless feelings of protracted waiting. In contrast to existing theories, people like Monique and Merengue were not just bravely ‘waiting out’ US policies, nor were they outwardly protesting. Rather, through embodying joy, they presented a more everyday refusal of the implications of US and Mexican policies meant to confine them.
Dancing was not sheerly joyful; rather, migrants’ sense of empowerment coexisted with sorrow and pain. This complexity became visible when we transitioned to the second half of our workshop. After a Zumba class full of laughter, women were hugging and talking, expressing a new camaraderie. Then, Comunidades staff invited the women to write and/or draw a message to other women migrants, using colored paper and markers. They could give advice, provide encouragement, or express anything else they wanted to say. Afterward, the group would ‘translate’ these messages into dance. Ultimately, staff hoped to combine the 15 ‘danced’ messages into one, which the Dance Conservatory of Mexico in Tijuana would choreograph for an upcoming event.
The room – which had been filled with laughter and music just minutes before – got quiet as women sat down to write. As we joined in a circle to share, many women cried. Reading their messages, they spoke of suffering, gender violence, fighting for their children, and trusting in God. They talked about family members they had left behind and struggles they had faced on their journeys. Some described the exhaustion and depletion they felt in Tijuana.
They also emphasized how dance made them feel something different: stronger, lighter, more energetic, and ready to carry on. One wrote to her fellow migrants, ‘Choreography has helped me emotionally and mentally. We have a lot of problems, but we have to dance for you to release stress and problems from your head and body.’ Another shared, ‘I know you are tired, but you know what? Your body needs to breathe. To get back to having energy again, dance a little. You’ll see that your chest will open, and the air will enter your lungs. You’ll see that after doing this, you’ll feel lighter, and ready to go on.’ Others emphasized how migrant women were strong, beautiful, inexhaustible, brave, alive, and never alone. Explicitly countering the movement of her body with the cages of US detention (and the more metaphorical cage of waiting), one wrote: ‘They planted fear in us, from which our wings grew. I am a woman with wings, not of cages.’ Another echoed the protest chant, ‘Sí se puede’ (Yes, we can) and reminded the others to keep #ResisteGozando. When Leslie started dance/acting the women’s messages back to them (most felt too depleted to do it themselves), several participants cried. One had chills down her back. When ‘Afromix’, a theatrical and funny person, took over from Leslie, her interpretations made people laugh. Throughout, women hugged and gave thanks. While the women did not name this as politics, they began to feel something different from what scholars have come to expect of people in waiting.
Dance also brought people together. As women shared their stories of pain, the group offered comfort, affirmation, and solidarity. José, who works at Comunidades but did not attend the event because he identifies as a man, told Leslie that after the workshop the women put on loud, festive music in the dormitory and kept dancing as they cooked dinner. Their joy, he said, ‘infected’ the others, and some of the children started dancing as well. Thus, even those who had not joined the workshop got to feel women’s positive spirits, exemplifying the ways dance can help nurture collective healing. As Monique put it, dance was shared: ‘Everybody dance, baby dance, young dance, old woman dance. When the people starting to dance, we don’t see the difference. Everybody’s happy to dance.’
Perhaps the first step in fighting weaponized waiting is to create spaces where the sadness and feelings of powerlessness momentarily lift from one’s chest, and then to spread that to others. Once, at another dance party at Comunidades, laughing and chatting with the migrants to reggaeton, Leslie overheard an asylum seeker hug a friend and say, ‘I feel so happy, like the sadness has been lifted off my chest.’ The joy she felt while dancing might have been ephemeral, but it spread among all of us in that moment, a stark contrast to the anxiety and despair that often pervaded Tijuana’s shelters.
#ResisteGozando as public politics
During our fieldwork, Comunidades also began to adopt #ResisteGozando as an explicit political strategy, extending the embodied, affective power of dance to the public sphere. In 2019, Nora, a staff member at Comunidades and anarcho-feminist activist, started wearing a T-shirt with the hashtag #ResisteGozando to protests, concerts, and cultural events at Comunidades. She traced the concept to her feminist group in Tijuana. In that group, after learning that women in Italy would come out to dance when bitten by tarantulas (the tarantella), the feminists decided to dance in their meetings, instead of sitting to talk. 5 The dancing helped Nora become aware of the feeling of joy in her body, which she linked to her resistance to multiple forms of oppression. So she made her own T-shirt: #ResisteGozando.
When other staff at Comunidades heard this term, it spoke to what they were already doing: making space for culture and art as therapy. Soon the concept became an explicit political strategy, where art and dancing played an instrumental, external role.
Adopting the mantra of #ResisteGozando and incorporating art and dance into their protests helped Comunidades challenge public portrayals of migrants as victims. Paulina felt that the media and large organizations like UNICEF, Amnesty International, and other NGOs often used ‘poverty porn’ to spur empathy. For one of her press releases, she remembered, the media chose a stock photo of Black people lined up and looking terribly sad, probably from when thousands of Haitians arrived in Tijuana in 2016. Paulina wondered, ‘Why do they project the Black community like that? . . . They project [migrant] communities as people that are very poor and that need help, that need a savior.’ By sharing images of sad, dirty, Black migrants in line, media and NGOs encouraged voyeurism and reduced the fullness of migrants’ lives. Such images also normalized the conditions in which the USA forced racialized migrants to wait.
In contrast, Comunidades wanted to express the complexity of the migrant experience at their protests and events. Dancing, music, and art let migrants publicly tell (or show) their own rich stories as humans. Paulina reflected, ‘Art brings people closer together, or it can make the media portray them as what they are, like humans, just like regular people that can also have other emotions, not just sad and desperate, like in the pictures.’ In 2020, Comunidades posted an outdoor photo exhibit of Haitian migrants on the busiest and most iconic street in historic, downtown Tijuana: Avenida Revolución. The images showed a wide range of Black migrants expressing all kinds of different emotions. The art itself highlighted migrants’ multiple, embodied ways of being in Mexico.
Using joy as a tool of protest was also strategic. For instance, in 2020, Tijuana had its first ever Black Lives Matter protest (the few Black people in Tijuana are mostly immigrants from Haiti and Africa). Migrants and staff from Comunidades joined activists from several countries in downtown Tijuana to protest racism and police brutality against Black people, especially Haitians, culminating in police beating a Haitian migrant to death while in custody. Black activists and asylum seekers spoke. But the group also celebrated Black joy and resistance by making chalk art and dancing to Afrobeats music. The creativity was instrumental: dancing and making art helped attract the attention of the media and amplify the migrants’ demands. Comunidades also hoped that the celebratory approach would keep the tone light, despite the heaviness of the subject at hand, and thereby keep the police at bay.
At another protest in 2021, a troupe from the Dance Conservatory of Mexico choreographed a dance based on the messages the women wrote in our Zumba workshop. The women from the workshop chose the name Orgullosa de Ti (‘Proud of You’) for the piece, emphasizing how the dance would not just raise awareness but also remind other migrants that they had courage and strength. The music and dancers quickly drew a hushed crowd. They began the routine looking fragile, abused, and trapped. Slowly, they broke free, flinging their arms to the sky, leaping upward and landing softly as they ‘escaped’. Later the dancers faced ‘blows’, showing women losing their homes, as if fighting demons both inside and out. They ended in a circle, as one dancer stopped to yell ‘Ahhhhhh!’ and the others joined in. It was a shout not of fear, but of rage and resolution. The dance put migrants’ suffering, their dreams of liberation, and their defiance into physical, embodied form.
Afterward, ‘Afrobeats’, a mother who fled domestic violence and war in Cameroon before getting stuck at the US–Mexico border for more than two years – said she saw herself in the dance. For her, she said, ‘It’s the story of a woman. When problems come, she gets lots of scars. Life beats her up . . . She gets lots of scars on her body, her heart, her life, her face. And when she gets these scars, this problem, she wants to give up.’ At that point, Afrobeats switched to the first person, talking as if the dancer was her: ‘And now, when I think that I couldn’t do that, that I couldn’t leave it all, my whole life, just for some people or a life situation that is so hard.’ When the music sped up, Afrobeats saw a shift in the plot, going on: It changes from a woman who is so fragile, so alone. She gets energy that comes from a place where – she doesn’t know where it comes from. But it’s the power of love. It’s called the power of love. Only a pure, true love can change your vision, your life, your suffering, and give a person more strength. I see – when the song changed to a faster beat, a new rhythm, I could see the girls’ faces. It was a face of determination. It was a face that ‘I know where I am, where I’m going, what I need to do.’ It’s a determined expression . . . It looks so strong when they dance so determined like that. The tenderness is gone, but I see her as a ferocious animal. Yes, who wants to do things decisively. (Interview 1)
As the music shifted from slow to fast, and the dancers switched from slow, pained movements to wild kicks, sprints, and screams, Afrobeats felt the woman deciding to carry on. Though Afrobeats hinted that she had wanted to end her own suffering by suicide, love gave her reason to continue living. Seeing her own determination in the performance and her refusal to be defeated, Afrobeats felt moved to encourage migrant women to stay strong: ‘You shouldn’t put on such a fragile face that will put you down even lower. Put on a cara de decisión (decisive face)’ (Interview 1).
Afrobeats’s feelings were contradictory. She found the performance ‘so sad, but in the end it’s also a really, really happy story with a lot of success’ (Interview 1). While there were no smiles or obvious displays of joy in the dance, Afrobeats imbued it with the happiness she hoped to feel in her future. Accessing joy in the present, through hope, helped her carry on when she felt inclined to ‘abandon everything’. Waiting, many scholars argue, obstructs such visions for the future, keeping people trapped in an eternal present. But public art can offer relief from such hopelessness, giving people space to envision the future and its potential for pleasure. Such art is personal and affective, insisting on hope, offering space for healing, and giving a sense of control over one’s body. But it is also a political act of refusing to be worn down or give up.
For many migrants, dance (and joy more broadly) felt both universal and subversive. JD, a Haitian asylum seeker who spoke at the first Black Lives Matter protest in Tijuana, had since moved to San Diego. Though he spoke in Tijuana, he was afraid to speak publicly in the United States. He feared the USA might use the words against him in court. However, he was willing to dance. He explained by drawing a parallel between Haitian slaves and today’s fight for justice for Haitian migrants. For both, he said, dance was a language of liberation: The slaves [in Haiti] didn’t have a good way to communicate among themselves, because they came from different countries: from the Congo, from Benin, from Guinea, from all of them. And they didn’t speak the same language. The only thing they had in common was that they were all Black – and their strength . . . So, they used the body. It’s communication by gestures. And that’s where they start to talk, to communicate, and there they start to say: what are we going to do to get free? (Interview 3)
If we opened YouTube right now to look up a Haitian dance, JD insisted, each movement would have its politics. Today, he went on, the electronic ankle monitors the USA placed on asylum seekers resembled the chains put on Haitian slaves (See Gurusami, 2019; Haley, 2016; Walia, 2013). If JD danced at the protest in San Diego, he added, ‘the artists and sensitive people in the audience will understand, but the authorities will not’. By dancing, he would transmit a message to other Black migrants that ‘despite everything, we still dance. We still feel the range of emotions, not just negative ones . . . La lucha sigue (the fight continues)’ (Interview 3).
This encounter of seemingly oppositional expressions – joy and pain, control and resistance – is a characteristic aesthetic in Black art. It creates a private language, as JD suggested, performed for one’s peers but invisible to the oppressors. For asylum seekers to use such performance and proclaim that ‘we are more than our pain’ is to reclaim and complicate the narrative that’s been told about them, that trauma and suffering have purely negative effects on people’s lives. Holding two oppositional truths at once – that trauma can be destructive and generative; that waiting is painful and (sometimes) joyful – is a provocation and a disruption to binary logics of domination.
Conclusion
This article has shown how dance can offer a source of personal healing and public politics for migrants stuck at the US–Mexico border. Today, many migrants waiting for US asylum are trapped in Mexico, in extreme precarity. While waiting, they endure insecurity, limbo, and risks of violence. Though such conditions leave migrants feeling disembodied (see Riva, 2017), dance and other creative, communal practices offer a potent counterpoint. When people danced together, we found, they ‘came home’ to their bodies and cultures. They also felt a sense of ownership, place, and community. This practice of joy – albeit fleeting – could restore a sense of power and hope, mitigating the trauma of border violence. It could also spread to other migrants, even those not directly engaged, offering a collective dimension to healing. Waiting could be creative, generative, meaningful, and transformative, rather than just empty or painful. Migrants’ everyday claims to aliveness also defy state efforts to snuff them out. By dancing, migrants resist having their humanity reduced by the US border regime.
Organizations can also intentionally cultivate dance and the arts as public strategies of resistance, as Comunidades attempts to do with #ResisteGozando. Indeed, #ResisteGozando provided asylum seekers a platform to publicly condemn their experiences of violence, support each other, and share messages of resilience in the face of extreme hardship. As in the examples of protests for Black migrant lives in Tijuana, creativity can be a tool to draw positive attention to migrants, deflect policing, and reframe the narrative of migrants’ suffering into a more complicated human story. Other artists and performers have also begun using creative expression to speak back to dominant border logics and inspire new kinds of thinking. For instance, artist JR installed a monumental photograph of a toddler behind the border wall. Border performance artist Guillermo Gomez Peña has challenged the racialized, gendered spectacle of border violence. Lizbeth de la Cruz Santana, a doctoral student studying Spanish at UC Davis, commissioned a mural of migrants on the wall, and the Kino Border Initiative has started encouraging artistic expression around the border. While we did not have room to speak to other creative modes in this article, in our fieldwork, poetry, music, and visual art played similar roles for migrants.
There are risks to highlighting asylum seekers’ joy, particularly as scholars in positions of privilege who are not facing such violence ourselves. Describing a Zumba class or a birthday party may seem to dilute the pain of displacement and racist asylum policies. Perhaps even more dangerous is the risk of romanticizing migrants’ joyful expressions, contributing to a colonial legacy of exotifying dark-skinned ‘others’ as foolish or entertaining subjects in the white imagination. We emphasize that the joy asylum seekers experience never replaces but rather coexists with the suffering imposed upon them. By framing waiting at the US–Mexico border as a form of state violence and observing the complex ways asylum seekers both submit to and resist its power over their bodies and minds, we shed light on the contradictions and generative possibilities of waiting. Even if such moments may at first appear superfluous or simply ‘fun’, when movement lets people reclaim their full, embodied selves, it is highly powerful. This approach also bolsters a growing body of work that challenges deficit-based approaches to trauma and highlights its contradictions.
Our findings speak to a specific time and place, exploring the feelings of migrants participating in an extraordinary organization. Comunidades is the only shelter in Tijuana to operate a cultural center and organize concerts, photo exhibits, arts workshops, and more. Importantly, Comunidades has also been very proactive about listening to migrants, formally positioning them as decisionmakers in the organization. Other organizations might look to this practice as a central component of joy as resistance and take Comunidades as an example. At the same time, other groups may have fewer tools to promote the arts alongside providing shelter and food.
Nevertheless, the histories of trauma and the struggles with weaponized waiting depicted here reflect a broader, contemporary condition in which migrants at the US border and beyond must endure protracted uncertainty. Metering, MPP, and Title 42 are only a few among a slew of global policies trapping migrants in liminal spaces. When we started this research, for instance, we had no idea that forced waiting would last so long or extend through multiple US political parties and administrations. Other countries have also increasingly used waiting as a tool of immigration control.
The stories shared here offer insights into one practical, embodied way that people endure such waiting. While #ResisteGozando cannot replace the provision of basic needs, Comunidades shows how the two can exist side by side. Other organizations might learn by example, encouraging dance, music, poetry, and other forms of art as means to endure and to heal. Future studies could also explore a wider range of creative pleasures and their impacts on different people. It would be instructive to see how far the #ResisteGozando model could travel, both as a personal and as a political practice. Scholars and advocates might consider: What other strategies of everyday resistance might be available to migrants like these? Who is best positioned to embrace and benefit from such forms of joy and resistance? And how else could these practices be integrated into activism and protest? In short, our findings point to new possibilities for advocacy and research, as migrants and their allies seek to stave off the worst impacts of being forced to wait.
These findings might also be used by civil society organizations and sympathetic state agents to develop other creative initiatives to enable healing and joyful politics at the border, similar to those mentioned above. In situations of severe trauma, where mental health care is virtually nonexistent (as at the US–Mexico border), dancing and arts can offer a practice of healing, even if they cannot replace professional psychiatric care. Through expanding access to these forms of expression, migrants’ rights organizations might shift existing, one-dimensional portrayals of migrants as victims and embrace the complex and even contradictory emotions people feel while they wait. Thus, they might offer a form of healing that comes hand in hand with a refusal to be erased. Such creativity cannot be an afterthought to food, shelter, and safety but must coexist alongside it: fundamental to people’s survival, well-being, and resistance to domination.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, we thank the migrants who shared their space, dances, and art with us and trusted us with their stories. We are grateful to the staff of ‘Comunidades’ for being partners in organizing and collaborators in this work. We also thank the students who helped conduct interviews for this project. Finally, we appreciate the feedback from the participants and leaders of the Women’s Rights After War workshop on creative resistance amid violence and from anonymous reviewers at Security Dialogue and the editors of this special issue. This research was approved according to the University of California-San Diego Human Research Protections Program, Protocol #181793.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Interviews cited
1. ‘Afrobeats’, community organizer and asylum seeker, Tijuana, Mexico, 6 November 2021.
2. Monique, community organizer and asylum seeker, Tijuana, Mexico, 18 December 2021.
3. JD, asylum seeker, San Diego, California, 7 April 2021.
4. ‘Merengue’, community organizer and asylum seeker, Tijuana, Mexico, 6 November 2021.