Figures of Deportation: Borders, Mobilities, and Andean World-Making

In Figures of Deportation, Ulla D. Berg reframes public and political discourses on deportation beyond the criminalized figure of the “illegal alien” to instead examine the efforts of South American migrants to make life through mobility under the global deportation regime. Berg bases her analysis on a decade of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with deported migrants and their families in Indigenous communities in southern Ecuador, urban districts in Peru, and in US detention centers, immigration courts, and urban communities. Across these sites, Berg recounts the profoundly disruptive effects of sudden separation of individuals from their families and communities but also reveals the mundanity deportation represents for Peruvian and Ecuadorian migrants, often leading to new mobilities. Berg makes the case that deportation studies should not solely center on state-driven and humanitarian logics but consider the social and material world-making activities of migrants and their communities. In doing so, she foregrounds Andean migrants as active and adaptive agents living with, but not defined by, deportation and its consequences.