Reflections

Our visualizations and data are mere parts of this larger story. As scholars of space, race, gender, and the digital, members of our team are contributing their own reflections on what this project means to them and how they are reacting to the news.

As we have gathered and curated this data and produced these visualizations, we share certain underlying assumptions: the express knowledge that data is imprecise, impure, and as much a tool for incarceration and control as it is for revealing the truth; that maps, which have become of primary importance to our daily life, are themselves highly contingent fabrications, bending the physical reality of the world to our innate need to grasp and process, and dangerously full of altered data.

Hence, in addition to reflections from our own project group, we have reached out to a small group of historians, activists, artists, and writers to provide their own readings of our curated data and visualizations. We provide all the reflections below in order to help contextualize both our impetus and our efforts.

The Fight for Dignity.
by Estefanía Castañeda Perez.
Ph.D. Student, UCLA Department of Political Science and Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow; Co-President, Binational External Affairs Coordinator for @TASO.

Needles without a North.
by Alex Gil and Myrna Milagros Fuentes Boom.
Gil is Digital Scholarship Librarian and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University and the eldest son of Fuentes Boom; Fuentes Boom is a business woman in Dominican Republic.

Lines Less Determined.
by Daryl Meador.
PhD student, Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

The Violence of Immigration Deterrence.
by Meghana V. Nayak.
Professor of Political Science, Affiliate Faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies, Pace University. Author of Who Is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and U.S. Immigration Politics

41 Bullets.
by Sujani Reddy.
Writer, educator and organizer based in Jackson Heights, New York City.

Seamos Aliados.
by Rubria Rocha de Luna.
PhD Student in Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University.

Representation Matters.
by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira.
Scholar of literature and space.