Re-bordering life and labor during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Five years after the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic public health emergency, and amid a growing body of specialized scholarship arising from this exceptional historical moment, this Special Issue underscores the analytical and political urgency of revisiting the early years of 2020–2021 from the situated perspectives of migration and borders across Latin America and the Caribbean. This period offers crucial insights into the ongoing transformations of mobility and control across the Americas. The “emergency” conditions of the pandemic enabled a redoubling of border enforcement and anti-immigrant/anti-refugee policies, intensifying pre-existing re-bordering dynamics at national and transnational levels—particularly through the expanded reach of U.S. border externalization. Simultaneously, these conditions gave rise to intensified spatial struggles: from border crossings to mutual aid networks and autonomous organizing aimed at sustaining migrant lives increasingly exposed to abandonment and premature death. By foregrounding ethnographic accounts of these seemingly localized experiences, this Special Issue reveals how early pandemic dynamics shaped—and continue to shape—new hemispheric geographies of re-bordering, exclusion, and resistance. Revisiting these cases offers valuable insight into enduring forms of social struggle in defense of life and labor, where the autonomy and subjectivity of migratory projects emerge as central to contesting the expansion of our authoritarian present.