Follow the Migrant

ASB 340 & SOC 328, A r i z o n a S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y

In Arizona immigration is controversial—how about in the rest of the world?

Over 232 million migrants now live outside their birth country. Some 41 million migrants live in the US—where are the other 191 million migrants?
Why has global migration accelerated in the last 40 years?
Why can’t the “search for a better life” happen any longer in migrants’ home countries?
How has migrants’ ethnic diversity provoked a re-imagining of national identities worldwide?
What is the impact of migration on gender relations in countries of origin and settlement, now that half the world’s migrants are female?

In this undergraduate course we study global migration from current social science perspectives to learn how Arizona’s migration issues fit into this larger context. Explore global migration & culture embedded in a transnational field of social, economic, and political relations. Map the impact of migration as the effect of global restructuring of capital and culture. Study grounded in empirical research about migrants' lives, struggles, identities in migrant-receiving and sending countries worldwide.

Field Trip to Nogales, Mexico

A full-day excursion on April 1st brought to life our study of migration. We walked on migrant trails in the Arizona desert; interviewed migrants to learn their stories at Mexico’s border patrol Grupos Beta; ate lunch with a family at their home in an informal settlement colonia; walked along the border fence and to the memorial for Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez; spoke with Jesuit priests who work with migrants at the Kino Border Initiative; visited a community center that provides services to make border life more sustainable in Mexico; held discussions about migration and globalization. The fieldtrip was safely guided by staff of BorderLinks, a Tucson educational nonprofit.

Follow the Migrant

PHOTOGALLERY

Our PHOTOGALLERY has tons of great photos from our fieldtrip to the US/Mexico border.

Migrant Interview Project

An interview is like taking a fieldtrip into someone else’s story. For the final assignment each student interviewed an immigrant or refugee and created a web-based project to tell their story. Our project draws inspiration from Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America by Warren Lehrer & Judith Sloan (2003). The book presents fascinating interviews with immigrants and refugees in Queens, a borough of New York City.

We take metropolitan Phoenix as our study site, an urban and transnational social landscape increasingly rich with “strangers, neighbors, aliens,” whose migration stories are every bit as intriguing as migrants in Queens. Building from the interdisciplinary social science approaches and perspectives on im/migration patterns and processes of our course, we look for migration stories “in the shadows between the superstores,” where we find the global has moved right in to our local communities. In conducting close-to-home expeditions, each student’s interview contributes to a collaborative, synergistic, whole picture of local migration that is more rich and complex than its separate parts. In Crossing the Valley, we cross the globe.