Writing Migration Now
Before a person is deported, they are arrested from somewhere—the front seat of their car on their way to get groceries, the back of house where they cook, a restaurant table where they eat with friends. People are found at sea in boats—sometimes sinking—and sent to detention zones that are often not in their country of origin or to their desired destination but rather purposefully located outside of public view. Globally, the rise in state-enforced expulsions and border control parallels an increase in movement by people who seek to escape hardship and violence, to unite communities, to work and support their families, and to live in safer environmental conditions (Figure 1). Overwhelmed by the growing uncertainty and increased violence of our moment, we ask, how did we get here? And do historians and researchers of migration and the built environment have a role to play in pushing against a wave of xenophobic sentiment and policy?
Figure 1: "Total Immigrant and Emigrant Populations by Country,” Originally published by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Data Hub. Reproduced with permission.
Systematically, peoples’ lives and histories have been flattened into migration narratives with schizophrenic tempos. Conversely called illegals, criminals, and parasites, or victims and heroes, or referred to by status as immigrants, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented, and unauthorized, migration discourse is ultimately a discourse of people. International migrants are people who carry with them profound knowledge of distant places and who are often faced with the exorbitant challenge of making new lives in new places (Figure 2). Such a task requires and develops skills, know-how, relationships, and ways of life. Such work is often responsible for the rich tapestry of sites, deeply layered and embedded with the place-related knowledge of distant places and even times. What we call a group of people is a political choice that privileges particular narratives while obscuring others, often sublimating personal histories in order to create a political class that can be easily targeted and attacked.
Figure 2. “Baldev Singh’s Passport,” 1958. Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive, UC Davis Library, Archives and Special Collections. Reproduced with permission.
The study of migration (both migration processes and so-called migrant peoples) has struggled to find a foothold in the disciplines of architectural and urban history. Architectural historians refer to textual and graphic documents from archives, papers that allow us to analyze and interpret buildings. Such dependance on written records produces a blindness where the contributions of “migrants” can be ignored or overlooked. This archival bias excludes the full lives, practices, and histories of people on the move; often failing to consider the fleeting and embodied experiences of the migrant and the contingent nature of the worlds they carry. If we aim to capture the formal and informal, the material and ephemeral, it seems we must rethink our ways of seeing, revise our methods of understanding, and reconstruct our approaches to data collection.
This PLATFORM series explores how migration and landscape scholars can attend to specific narratives that expose the vindictive power-angling distortion of the current migration discourse for what it is: a manufactured abstraction. An architectural history of migration sometimes complicates, sometimes supports, and always nuances the US-centered migration categories of assimilation, acculturation, and integration. These concepts are rooted in U.S. immigration laws and policies that, since 1790, have been shaped by questions of color, race, and geography of origin, reinforcing a persistent settler-colonial imagination that envisions the U.S. as white and Christian. The contributions in the following months aim to complicate those categories, revealing the diasporic epistemologies and migration histories fundamental to making places both within and beyond U.S. borders. We ask:
How do the authors that work at the intersection of migration and the built environment challenge flattening categories? To what extent does writing history challenge the categories of “migrant” and “territory” as a deviation from the norm? What kind and quality of evidence is the environmental and architectural context of peoples’ lives and how can material circumstances illuminate choices people make and the knowledge they carry?
To what extent are our methods of analysis complicit in erasure and disempowerment? Can one truly call themselves an architectural, urban, landscape, or place historian—focusing on materiality and place—and still do the work necessary to challenge xenophobic, nativist, and violent state policies? What does it mean to place mobility at the center of our studies of architecture, landscape and the built environment?
If we place mobility at the center of our studies of landscape and place, how are our methods, and historical and spatial categories—our epistemologies and hermeneutics—transformed by recognizing the importance of movement in shaping our environments? Does our research challenge boundary making and territorialization?
“Architectural history … plays a critical role in demonstrating the contingent and unique ways in which a place is not given but dynamically negotiated through migration.”
Our intention is to create a conversation about how built environments have long been intentionally shaped by formal and informal actors: the state incarcerating mobile populations, NGOs financing camps, people who move for any number of reasons and make new places often at the margins of society, but sometimes at the center. We are not asking for new migration histories but rather questioning the methods and assumptions that underpin our collective research. We view the social histories of people on the move as situated in time and place. We attend to the transnational flows of goods, communication, and knowledge and agentive acts of reuse, adaptation, and manipulation of structures, materials, and objects. This requires a recentering, whereby the movement of people, objects, and knowledge becomes a primary modality of placemaking. Architectural history, thus, plays a critical role in demonstrating the contingent and unique ways in which a place is not given but dynamically negotiated through migration. Material ephemera, practices and uses, and sometimes architectures, we argue, provide unique evidence that cannot be substituted by other primary sources. We must find new ways of reading against the grain and exploring alternative forms of archives to foreground these stories and practices.
People who migrate match state violence and environmental tragedy with resilience, ingenuity, strategy, and dignity, creating spaces that are meaningful. By repositioning people for whom migration may be a way of life as central actors in the production of the built environment, we dismantle any singular definition of who the “migrant” is, here replaced by the specificity of what people make and do as they embed movement into place. Over the course of the year, this series will feature monthly contributions from built environment, landscape and architectural historians who study migration. They will respond to the prompts above to foster dialogues about our current politics and the possibilities for solidarity across borders and different publics.
Citation
Ming Kyung Lee, Sarah Lopez, and Arijit Sen, “Writing Migration Now,” PLATFORM March 24, 2025.
