The Binational Politics of Return Migrant Activism: An Interview with Caroline Tracey

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode of the Matrix Podcast features an interview with <a href= "https://cetracey.com/">Caroline Tracey</a>, who holds a PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, and whose</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">research uses ethnographic, archival, and literary methods to study the American Southwest, Mexico, and the US-Mexico border. Tracey's dissertation, "Binational Politics from Intimate Scales: Motherist, Feminist, Queer and Trans Activism by Deportees and Return Migrants in Mexico City," responds to existing scholarship that has focused on deportation as a male phenomenon, and argues that women and trans deportees and returnees carry out fundamental community-building and activism on the ground in Mexico that has improved emplacement over the long term for all return migrants.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a journalist, Tracey's work has appeared in <em><a href= "https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-immigration/fighting-for-the-right-to-come-and-go"> The New Yorker</a></em>, <a href= "https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/01/climate-change-impacts-saline-salt-lakes/672722/"> <em>The Atlantic</em></a>,</span> <span style= "font-weight: 400;"><a href= "https://cetracey.com/The-Polycrisis-at-the-Border"><em>The</em></a></span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href= "https://cetracey.com/The-Polycrisis-at-the-Border">Nation</a>,</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">and other outlets, and in Spanish she is a frequent contributor to Mexico's</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Nexos</span></em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">. She is currently the Climate Justice reporting fellow at the</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">High Country News</span></em> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">and an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. </span></p> <p>The interview was conducted by Julia Sizek, Matrix Content Curator and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Social Science Matrix. An edited transcript of the interview