Ep. 129 — Rethinking Borders, Rethinking Belonging with Drs. Patsy Lewis and Kristen Kolenz

Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, brings together scholars and artists to map movement beyond the U.S.-centric view.

We dive into case studies that challenge assumptions: Venezuelans navigating layered sovereignties in Curaçao and Trinidad, Haitian communities negotiating visibility and exclusion, and Chinese migration in Central America shaped by shifting ties between Taiwan and China. We unpack racial triangulation and diaspora politics from Miami to New York, examining how belonging shifts across languages, borders, and Blackness. Along the way, we trade the crisis script for a people-centered approach that recognizes migrants as creators of social worlds, economies, and culture. Through interdisciplinary methods—history, political economy, decolonial and feminist frameworks, literature, and film—we build a toolkit for studying migration that is rigorous, humane, and usable for students, organizers, and policymakers.

Patsy Lewis is the Research Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Kristen Kolenz is an assistant professor in the international studies program and co-chair of the gender studies program at Centre College in Kentucky. Before joining the Centre faculty in 2022, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and earned her PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at  The Ohio State University. She also recently published “Mesomapping the Borderlands: Seeing Life, Making Home, and Thinking Iteratively” in Aztlán.

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