This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
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In a continent marked by multiple overlapping crises—economic, health-related, political, climatic, and security-related—Migrant Struggles in Times of Pandemic and Crisis: A View from the Americas emerges as an urgent and deeply necessary work. Edited by Amarela Varela-Huerta and Soledad Álvarez Velasco, the book is a direct product of the transnational project (Im)mobility in the Americas and Covid-19, which brought together more than 50 researchers during the height of the pandemic to collectively reflect, from within, on how the health crisis reconfigured mobility, control, and the everyday lives of migrants across the continent. The result is a vibrant volume written from a clear and uncompromising standpoint: migration as struggle, and migrants as political subjects who transform the territories they traverse and inhabit.
The result is a vibrant volume written from a clear and uncompromising standpoint: migration as struggle, and migrants as political subjects who transform the territories they traverse and inhabit
The book is explicitly situated at a methodological and political crossroads that engages with several theoretical perspectives: the mobility turn, which centers movement rather than sedentarism in social analysis; the autonomy of migration, which highlights how migration precedes and exceeds control; and biopower, which provides tools for understanding the dispositives that administer and discipline migrant lives. Yet its most powerful contribution lies elsewhere. The book proposes a bottom-up perspective that politicizes care, dismantles sedentary categories of citizenship, home, and belonging, and introduces the concept of popular migrant epidemiology: a set of knowledges, practices, and territories of care created by communities on the move to sustain life in hostile contexts. This perspective moves beyond diagnoses of vulnerability and instead positions migrants as producers of knowledge, solidarities, and new forms of political action.
The book’s seven chapters span diverse geographies—Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, the Southern Cone, and Puerto Rico—and demonstrate how the pandemic intensified already hardening border regimes, while also showing how migrant collectives reorganized to survive, challenge, and redefine those very regimes.
In the first chapter, Guillermo Candiz, Tanya Basok, and Danièle Bélanger describe the extreme conditions of exploitation experienced by Latin American agricultural workers in Quebec during the pandemic. Against the hypermobility of the agro-industrial economy and the forced confinement of farms and labor camps, a central figure of the book emerges: the migrant who escapes modern forms of slave labor. The authors show that these escapes are not isolated acts, but collective practices of labor disobedience that exceed formal citizenship and generate forms of citizenship from below, grounded in the right to move, to care for oneself, and to break with structural deportability.
In dialogue with the first chapter, Eloy Rivas-Sánchez documents how undocumented collectives in Canada articulate struggles for “status for all,” challenging the legal apartheid reproduced by the state. His key contribution is conceptual: he shows how migrant justice movements deploy repertoires that reinvent citizenship on a global scale, detaching it from nationality and anchoring it in collective practice. Here, migrating, organizing, and demanding rights become forms of political flight from deportability.
Janneth Clavijo Padilla, Adriana González Gil, and Marcela Ceballos Medina examine caravans and mass walks of Venezuelans and other groups in transit through Colombia. The pandemic did not halt these movements; on the contrary, it deepened their precariousness. The chapter introduces a key notion for the book: the collectivization of mobility, in which walking together is not only a survival strategy, but also a way of making injustice visible and contesting public space in a country historically marked by forced displacement.
In the Brazilian case, María del Carmen Villarreal Villamar analyzes campaigns by migrants and organizations demanding regularization during the pandemic. Confronted with an unequal and racist state, migrant collectives framed regularization as a precondition for health, expanding the rights framework through what the author calls a “comprehensive notion of social health.” The chapter reveals a political shift: from demanding health protections to questioning the very model of exclusionary citizenship.
Nanette Liberona Concha shows how, in Tarapacá, one of the most racist and militarized regions of Chile, migrant organizations such as the Open Assembly of Migrants and Pro-Migrants of Tarapacá (AMPRO) organized community kitchens, shelters, and supply networks in the midst of the pandemic. Here, “care exceeds nationalities”: territories of care are constructed that confront criminalization, xenophobic discourse, and state abandonment, reconfiguring the border through everyday practices.
Carina Trabalón’s chapter is among the book’s most forceful. It traces how Haitian migrants en route to the United States transform mobility regimes in the Southern Cone through what the author identifies as the “creolization of migrations”: creative adaptation, circulation of their own codes, community care, and resistance to structural racism. The chapter shows how these practices confront not only Covid-19, but deeper forms of violence—obstetric, educational, and police violence—that shape anti-Haitianism in South America.
Finally, Adriana Garriga-López, Patricia Noboa Ortega, Glorimarie Peña Alicea, Marinilda Rivera Díaz, and Andrea C. Santiago Calvo explore how migrants in Puerto Rico, a territory shaped by colonialism, austerity, and cascading disasters, produced new forms of accompaniment, healing, and community organization during the pandemic. The chapter offers a powerful reading of the archipelago as both a laboratory of necropolitical policies and a space where forms of resistance emerge that link health, dignity, and collective memory.
The book does more than document struggles; it frames them as a key lens for interpreting the present. It offers alternative narrative categories to name the migrant experience: nomadic proletariat, itinerants, diasporas in motion. These categories, more political than administrative, work to demigrantize language, removing migration from the realm of anomaly. Indeed, demigrantization is one of the conditions for decolonizing the field of migration studies: for ceasing to view mobility through the lens of state suspicion and beginning to understand it as a historical form of social reproduction under global capitalism.
Migrant Struggles in Times of Pandemic and Crisis achieves something rare: it constructs a cartography of the continent from the perspective of those who walk it. It neither romanticizes nor aestheticizes suffering. Instead, it undertakes a profoundly political task: restoring the historical, creative, and collective character of human mobility, even under the most adverse conditions. For those working in support organizations, researchers, journalists, activists, and NACLA readers, this book is an indispensable tool for understanding how the pandemic not only exacerbated inequalities, but also multiplied forms of solidarity, organization, and collective action. At a time when states continue to deepen “social distancing” from migrants, when the U.S. asylum system is suspended and migrant pathologization is the norm, this book reminds us of a fundamental truth: life in motion always finds ways to care for itself, to resist, and to seek lines of escape.
Bruno Miranda is a researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIS-UNAM).