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By Jerónimo Reyes-Retana
November 1st, 2023

Valentina Glockner Fagetti (1981-2023), Ph.D., was a Mexican anthropologist affiliated with Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE) at the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional  (CINVESTAV) based in Mexico City. She specialized in migration and childhoods. Her work with children and adolescents covered topics such as indigenous migration, day laborer migration, forced displacement, children’s work, Central American migration, and the internal and international mobility of Mexican families. She worked in the indigenous region of ‘La Montaña’ in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, day laborer fields in central Mexico, and at the Sonora/Arizona border, as well as in the United States, India, and Bolivia. Her research explored reflexive and participatory methodologies, as well as strategies for ethnographic self-representation and collaboration with (im)migrant, refugee, and indigenous communities. 

Valentina directed and co-directed projects funded by ConTex Alliance, the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and CLACSO-CROP.  She was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Matías Romero Program at LLILAS Benson at UT Austin, and Edmundo O’Gorman at Columbia University. Her doctoral thesis in Social Sciences and Humanities, which examines the relationships between NGOs, the state, and working-migrant children in India, received the Mexican Academy of Sciences Award. She also authored, edited, and co-edited several other research publications.

Valentina’s academic training did not prevent her from also remaining a committed social activist. She co-founded , a network of researchers specializing in social studies on childhoods in the Global South. She was also a member of the Mosaico Etnográfico de la Migración Infantil en el Continente Americano, a project funded by the National Geographic Society that addresses the issue of migration by gathering women working in the fields of anthropology, geography, education, and photography.

Valentina dedicated a large part of her work to managing support for girls, boys, adolescents, and families in situations of forced displacement along the Mexico-United States border. She also participated in the development of various resources to confront the effects that US immigration and asylum policies have on children.

What is your professional training, and how does it inform the projects you are currently working on?

I am an anthropologist. I have also trained in social studies on childhoods and migratory flows. My work focuses on the perspective of critical migrations in relation to the “border regime.” I am particularly interested in the ways in which this regime is used to govern and punish people's movement, but above all, the ways in which, from childhood and youth, people respond to this regime of control. I am simultaneously working on several projects. Some time ago, we founded Colectiva Infancias, which is a network of researchers who, besides having an eye on the Americas, also work with girls, boys, and young people in the context of mobility.

I also currently direct a project on the forced internal displacement of Mexicans who are fleeing to the border with the United States in the hope of being able to request asylum in this country. I have collaborated with colleagues from the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, as well as other Latin American and Central American countries. These projects seek to document what happens to girls, boys, and adolescents when they are detained in Mexico and subjected to deportation. In these projects, we are also in contact with organizations fighting to open alternative care that defends them from deportation and protects their right to migrate, thus opening possibilities for asylum in Mexico.

How do you define the notion of ‘border regime’?

The border regime is many things at once. The conception that I like the most involves, in Foucauldian terms, the analysis of those institutions, apparatuses, policies, and discourses that try to govern migrations from a perspective that focuses on racialization, filtration, and control of bodies. I am also very interested in thinking about the border regime, not only as a bureaucratic and militaristic political apparatus but also in bringing it down to the everyday dimension. A much more invisible one, which in the case of girls, boys, and young people, is very important because interventions in childhood and youth can work in much more subtle, much less violent ways. But in reality, what is exercised is violence in other magnitudes, in other dimensions. For example, something that in my work I am very interested in is making visible how the border regime codifies children and youth through protectionist dynamics that consider girls, boys, and young people as victims, as passive subjects in migration, and not as builders of decisions that require certain forms of attention. The states and civil society minimize children and youth, subjecting them to an immigration regime that decides for them, one that takes control of their lives, one that does not take into account their needs, their agencies, or their lives. As a migratologist, I am particularly interested in challenging how the border regime is constructed and implemented in the child and youth dimensions.

Considering that migration is directly related to crossing frontiers or geopolitical borders that intrinsically condition the identity of a body within a given space, do you think that the concept of 'intersectionality' can help expand the capacity for analysis and action to mitigate the migration crisis in the Americas?

First, it is important here to question the notion of crisis. The idea, the word, the concept of crisis is often used in convenient ways. Normally, it is the power regime that determines what is a crisis and what is not. Historically, when a situation is called a crisis, it is because it affects the power spheres. For example, the United States never recognized the importance and severity of child and youth migration flows until a problem arose on its border. That was when they named it a crisis. A crisis that opened the door for them to dictate a series of restrictive policies.

In the book,” which I co-edited, we look at child and youth migrations worldwide as an entry point to deeply question the concept of crisis. What is called a crisis? When does a situation become a crisis? Who has the power to name something as a crisis? Who decides when it starts and when it ends?

Going back to your question, intersectionality is a framework of analysis that feminist scholars developed to describe the conditions of political visibility within structures of identity categorization. Intersectionality opens space to think about the overlaps crossing realities of oppression and violence that determine the lives of certain people, groups, and communities. For this reason, it is clear that intersectionality has an influence on how different migratory experiences are exposed to different degrees and types of violence, all conditioned to identity. Of course, the mobility processes are going to be very different if you are a girl, if you come from a racialized population that has also been victim of an economic and/or historical context of political oppression. 

However, something that I consider crucial within this discussion is that intersectionality does not become an argument to atomize the strategies and perspectives through which the processes of migratory mobility are observed and attended to. The idea is not to create a scheme where we see who is more or less subject to oppression and violence. It is not about individualizing the expressions or effects of these intersections. I believe that the debate should not be about how intersectionality produces individual identities; instead, it must be about how increasingly huge groups of people and populations in the world are subject to violence and oppression that are structural and historical. Both of which are impossible to reverse at the individual level. This is why I consider it essential to pay attention to how intersectionality, as a framework of analysis, could contribute to impulses that help shape support strategies developed within collectivities and communities.

As an activist and researcher specializing in migratory flows within the Americas and considering its multidimensional complexity, what has your experience been working on projects that involve a transdisciplinary approach?

All the projects in which I have participated as a creator or co-creator have been transdisciplinary in nature. Even those that were not planned as such. I think that working with children and youth has—subconsciously—led me towards transdisciplinarity. This is in response to the fact that Western adult-centric and positivist disciplines are built based on tools created exclusively for the adult world. Tools that do not fit and do not provide the width to work with children and youth. This is why, for many years, I have been interested in learning ludic methodologies from the arts. No matter how important and 'generative' the tools of anthropology and ethnography pretend to be, they are not designed to work with children. This is why you have to adapt them to other methods, to other materials, to other spaces, to other questions. 

This impulse was an amalgamating force for those of us who have been doing research with girls, boys, and young people in the context of mobility. Because of this impulse, we started coming together, creating a community of like-minded activists and researchers that, in the beginning, was rather small compared to how it is now. When I started, around 2008, those of us who were interested and moved by this concern used to meet regularly. Some came from psychology, others from geography, others from education, and others from anthropology. Basically, we were brought together under the excuse of having conversations in which we shared ways of thinking and approached different dimensions of what we were seeing. Conversations that arose through friendship and political commitment. 

So, basically, I would tell you that, in all the projects we have worked on together, we have been aware from the beginning that a single academic discipline –by itself– is not enough. Above all, we were aiming not only to interconnect the disciplines but also to be very aware of the limitations of the adult-centric construction of these disciplines.

Reports published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and other organizations dedicated to examining migratory flows show that the anxiety and stress of migratory processes have a great impact on mental health. That said, and based on your experience, do you think that promoting culture and art within spaces that offer humanitarian support to the migrant community could generate a positive impact in this regard?

Absolutely. However, we live in a world in which—for obvious reasons—food and health emergencies in contexts of armed conflict and forced displacement are the center of attention. It never occurs to anyone to think of culture and art as a primary necessity. Thus, the entire concept of education in emergency contexts is based on proposing strategies based on tools for psychosocial well-being to nurture a safe context –physically and emotionally– through educational projects, which should also be artistic and cultural. Directing attention to emotional well-being is essential to restore a sense of security and joy to the individual and the collective. That is the perspective of education in the emergency contexts where I work. But I would like to return to this point: in contexts in which there is no physical security, as is the case of shelters and organizations defending the rights to migrate, places that cannot afford to provide essential support such as accommodating people to have a roof over their head and enough to food on the table, art and culture remains a last priority. It is difficult to think of art as a basic necessity since it contributes to achieving other objectives.

Nonetheless, something that worries me about reports such as the ones published by the IOM and UNHCR—which we now see more and more, is that mental health issues appear to be a concern that is getting worse at an accelerated rate in certain contexts. Nonetheless,  within these reports, it is almost never mentioned what is causing this deterioration in mental health. They try to make us think that being subject to the violence of migratory transit is a natural fact, which is absolutely false. The problem of mental health is due to the imposition of a border regime based on death, the filtration of bodies, and the punishment of the right to migrate. These reports fail to mention that the border regime is a product of the global design of modernity/coloniality. It is not a factor of nature that migrating is dangerous, that migrating can cost your life, that migrating means that you can lose your emotional health, your physical health, a limb, or that you have to be subjected to the worst sexual violence.

All of this is a product of immigration policies. So, it is important to identify the biases when international voices that have a lot of weight, which are also taken up by a lot of actors, systematically omit to mention the origin of all this violence. A lot has been said about the worsening of the mental health situation, but we are not talking about the origin. I believe artistic interventions—in the sense of cultural creation—that open up other sensibilities and understandings are also necessary for those who produce and exercise this border regime. We need urgent artistic interventions for those who support the regime of death based on racism, on the loss of thousands of lives, on the idea that there are disposable lives, on the idea that if people dare to challenge the geopolitical order, they deserve to be exposed to death. They are the ones who need a lot of artistic and cultural interventions, but we always focus on migrants.

Circling back to this idea: there has been a long-standing and necessary debate on how the museum represents a space full of paradoxes and contradictions but also possibilities. On the one hand, the museum has historically been a key in the constitution of an apparatus of hegemonic control that safeguards the production and access to culture. On the other hand, it is also within the museum where processes of unlearning aimed at political visibility can crystalize through the emergence of counter-narratives that seek to re-program dominant discourse. Taking this paradox as a departure point, do you think the museum can be an ally to dismantle the border regime?

I do believe in the museum, but in el museo de barrio, el museo comunitario, el museo colectivo itinerante. Those conceptions of the museum as non-institutionalized and decolonized spaces. I do not believe in the museum as a forum for appropriation but rather as one for constructing experiences and other forms of coming to know. I believe in a museum that dismantles walls and that lends itself as a space that uses other tools to propose other conversations and let other frequencies flow. In a museum like this, I do believe, and I find hope and power in what is beginning to emerge within the artistic work of those who are committed to the cause. It is important to note that attention must not only be directed to dismantling a border regime but also to making the migrant community tangible and present. A community that, even in the rhythms and conditions of scarcity and precariousness, advances and moves. 

Now that you bring up the notion of movement into the conversation, I will connect the next question to , a project that I am currently working on that uses to appropriate the GPS and insert, in this way, interactive sound maps into places that offer humanitarian support to the migrant community moving from the Americas to the Mexico-US border. The sound experiences can be accessed freely through smartphones, which have become a sacred artifact for people in the context of mobility for many reasons. With that in mind, how do you envision strategies to appropriate mobile technologies to create spaces where it is possible to liberate the mind and alleviate the emotional distress caused by the harsh conditions of migratory journeys?

How do we appropriate those media and those languages? Well, I would say by hacking, right? In our last conversation, you shared an idea that stuck in my mind. You talked about how it is possible to crack spaces of power through art. As you mention in your x-o.global project, GPS is today a fundamental crucial for hegemonic dominance, and I don’t know if we, as mundane people, are going to be able to defeat a regime that uses such tools to constitute structures of political, economic, and cultural control. What we can do is open spaces for reinterpretation through hacking.

I definitely believe that technology is an incredibly powerful weapon that, just as it is used for surveillance, control, and the dismantling of dissident initiatives, it is also at the disposal of other alternatives that seek to crack and hack to divert the dominant narrative toward emancipatory spaces. Technology also has infinite uses. It always offers alternatives far beyond what one can imagine. It is a tool that, in the hands of someone else, has the unexpected power for so many other unforeseen things. For example, I am sure that the geolocative technology that you are using in your project (x-o.global), whenever in the hands of migrant youth, will surely be re-invented to find new forms of implementation. I think that something very important about technology when we work with it is to imagine it not as something closed and predetermined but as something open to collaboration and transformation. It is important to wonder what happens and how when someone with intelligence, creativity, and experience leads technology to other paths.

Nonetheless, it is one thing to think about the emancipatory potential of art and technology itself in the abstract, and it is a whole different conversation to think about it in these contexts of extreme precariousness and necessity. If you put a smartphone in the hands of a young person in the context of mobility, the first thing they need to do is call home, the second thing is probably to contact the person who is guiding them, and the third thing may be to try to fill out their application in. The fourth thing would be to give it an artistic or academic use, which are purposes that are very separated from real needs.

This is why, from my perspective, I like to look at academia and research as technologies that also have to be hacked, that we also have to dismantle and be treated as tools for controlling thought and our limits of political imagination. When our political imagination can no longer do more than write articles and publish or participate in conferences, it means that something very serious is happening. That is when strategies must be woven to unlearn those ways of using technologies such as academia and research.

In contrast, art has an end in itself that academia and research will never have. Art also has this dimension of joy. Under the Western lens, joy has a bourgeois connotation; it is unthinkable to think about enjoying yourself when there is nothing to eat, and immigration is besieging you. This is why there is a highly political, critical, and emancipatory potential in interrupting those harsh conditions in which priority issues, such as getting food on the table, must first be resolved before having a playful and aesthetic experience of joy. In that sense, art has a unique dimension to create experiences of aesthetic appreciation that are themselves political.

That’s why my work deals with migrant childhood—not to idealize them, but because they are political subjects in essence. All the time, they interrupt what is systematicallysystemically established with their desire to play, with their questions, and with their tantrums and breakdowns. This is why they are political subjects, political actors who live in other rhythms with a playful capacity to detach by playing and laughing from the harshness of what they are experiencing.