← New Books Network
New Books Network
Amelia Frank-Vitale, "Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds" (U California Press, 2026)
00:38:44
Loading summary
Transcript23 lines
- [00:02]
New Books Network Announcer
Hey, NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey, and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries, and institutions we partner with when we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users. It opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing. If you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:15]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:20]
Rachel Newman
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Rachel Newman, your host for today's conversation with Amelia Frank Vitale about her new book, Leave if youf Can Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds. Amelia is assistant professor of Anthropology and International affairs at Princeton University, and her book is published via the University of California Press.
- [01:42]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Welcome, Amelia. Thank you so much for having me here.
- [01:46]
Rachel Newman
So, as you share in this book, you're from Reading, Pennsylvania. So what's the story of how you got to Mexico and eventually Honduras to do your research?
- [01:55]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Well, yes, I am. I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. It's true, I took a lot of different twists and turns to get me to this particular project and this research. I guess one way to talk about how it started is in 2004. I was a it was the summer after my junior year of college, and I had the opportunity to go to the Southwest for the first time. And I was a politically engaged young person. I was involved in a lot of different activism at the time, around the Iraq war, around stopping the Iraq war, I guess I should say around workers rights and labor unions and immigrants rights. And so I had the opportunity to go to the Southwest. I was in Arizona, and I was. I don't know that I have a word. Strong Enough for what I was. I was outraged. I was heartbroken. I was intensely impacted by being in Arizona. And I really thought at that time that this is the most pressing, important, urgent, and also completely avoidable crisis that, that, that was existing at the time. And that felt like I, as a US Citizen who was engaged in sort of broadly constructed social justice basis, I thought, this has to be what I'm working on. This has to be where I dedicate my energy. This has to be the, the, the. The. This thing that I pour myself into. Because horrible to, to kind of come face to face with the reality of people dying in our desert every year. And also so maddening that this is the result of policies that we have put into place to. To ensure that more people die in our desert every year. So that really got me started on a, on a path of really focusing on. On immigration issues in one way or another. After that, I finished college. I was an organizer for a number of years. And then when I decided to go back to school, that, that continued to be the thread that I wanted to pick up on. And I had the opportunity to go to Oaxaca for the first time in southern Mexico this time. And in a similar sort of way, I ended up at the shelter for Central American migrants. Mostly it was Central American migrants who were passing through at the time. This is about 2010. And once again, I was, I was just really. It really felt urgent and necessary and like this thing that, that I needed to. I needed to pay attention to, I needed to understand, I needed to learn, and I needed to participate in. In whatever way I could. And so I grew up in Reading. I grew up in a place that was a very diverse little city. I grew up around people from all different parts of the world, a lot of whom were Spanish speakers. I grew up in a city that had a lot of stigma for being a violent place. And so that also kind of. And as I say in the book, that kind of shaped my. As I turned into a researcher, it sort of also shaped my approach to the world around me, to thinking about if someone said, you know, oh, that place is really violent, or those people are really violent. I had kind of, from my, my childhood, this sense of like, yeah, that's what outsiders say about people who live in a place. That's what other people say about, about people who are from a particular place. Like, what's really going on there? And what do the people who live there say? Having, having grown up in a place that, that had that kind of stigma attached to it is, is I think formative in my sense of, like, how I want to approach the world and perhaps why I've been drawn to end up doing work in. In a place, in a city, in a country that has had that kind of stigma attached to it, connected to all the work around migration that I've been doing over the years in different capacities.
- [06:07]
Rachel Newman
So let's talk a little about the big picture of the book. And I could see several audiences for this book, and I found it to be a really compelling and fluid read. Could you mention maybe one or two particular groups of readers you hope to reach and what message you would want them to take from your work?
- [06:25]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Sure. And I'm so glad that you found it a really fluid read. That's really high praise. And certainly I hope to be writing for many audiences. So I hope that fellow anthropologists, especially those who are engaged in questions of migration and displacement and deportation, find it useful to think with that. I also really hope that people who are interested in understanding what's going on in the world. We are in a moment where there is so much criminalizing language about migration itself, where the fact of people migrating is sort of treated with inherent suspicion. And I. So I hope that people who are trying to understand why it is that people keep migrating despite this. This moment that we are in, or why anyone would choose to migrate in the first place. I hope that it is also useful for a broader audience to get a deeper. A clearer sense of all the things that combine that coalesce to produce migration. And I'll say one thing, as I've been sharing that this book was coming out and sharing that this book was in print, I've had people reach out to me from different corners of different pieces of my life, from different moments. And one of the ones that really struck me was someone who is a schoolteacher in a community where there's a lot of Honduran youth here in the United States. And she said, I can't wait to read this book. So I can understand where my students have come from. And that's not an audience I necessarily. Particular audience I necessarily imagined when I was writing the book, but I think of how meaningful that is. And that's really exciting to me that a teacher who is working with Honduran youth who are probably dealing with a lot of different kinds of trauma in their. In their background and in. And in the context of being an immigrant child in this country right now, that she would find my book useful in helping to be able to understand where her students have come from. And work with them in the best possible way. Like, that's really exciting to me. I also think, as one of the things I have done based on my. My research in Honduras is to provide expert testimony in asylum hearings to help explain to immigration judges what the conditions are like in Honduras. And so I also hope that attorneys and people who are engaged in the asylum system in this country in general will find pieces of this book useful in, in illuminating the just what it is that young people have to contend with in urban hunters.
- [09:11]
Rachel Newman
So let's talk a little bit about the places where some of the youth who migrate in your book come from. Maybe we can zoom into these urban neighborhoods where you did your research. And these neighborhoods, they're not actually prisons. They don't have any international borders running through them.
- [09:29]
Amelia Frank Vitale
But you say that everyday life in
- [09:32]
Rachel Newman
these places, especially for young men, has a lot in common with carceral and other kinds of policed spaces. So can you share some stories to kind of help set the scene and explain this further?
- [09:44]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Yeah. One of the features of life in the urban margins in Honduras, as in many other places, right. This is, this is not necessarily unique or exceptional is that there is a kind of patchwork of control, neighborhood by neighborhood by, by the different gangs that control different pieces of, in this case, San Pedro Sula. You know, I was, I was driving down a dirt road in one of these neighborhoods. I tell the story in the book. I was driving down a dirt road with a local pastor in the passenger seat of my car. And we were going from his neighborhood in the center of this is Sector River Hernandez in San Pedro Sula. And we were going from his neighborhood to another neighborhood and we went over like a particularly steep speed bump. And again, these, these are compacted dirt roads. So we went over a particularly steep speed bump. And my car was a, a little two door hatchback that you really felt the speed bumps in this car. And as we, as we went over this speed bump, this pastor turned to me and said like, ha, ha, we just crossed the border. With a kind of knowing look on his face of like he knew I was interested in migration. He knew that these were the kinds of questions I was, I was wanting to understand. And so he was sort of knowingly eager to point out to me this unceremonious sort of border crossing. And what he was making deference to are these often invisible borders. So in this case, there was a speed bump that was definitely discernible, but there's no signs, there's no markers, there's no walls. But the borders between neighborhoods and the borders then that demarcate where one gang territory ends and another begins are really borders of great importance for young people. In the urban geography of San Pedro Sula, as elsewhere. Another person from this same neighborhood said to me, and this is also in the book, like these are, these are borders of death. These borders are more deadly and more real than any concrete wall that could ever be built. These borders are borders of death. And in particular for young men, crossing the border from one neighborhood to another when they are controlled by rival gang is a real death sentence. There is an intense desire to maintain control over the neighborhoods that they control through controlling the mobility of people who are residents of that neighborhood. And I should be clear, like the folks who are doing this are also residents of that neighborhood. The gangs for the most part are not like external actors who have come in from the outside to, to impose this control there. They're homegrown, mostly young men who have grown up in the neighborhood who are. Imagine themselves to be protecting the neighborhood from outsiders and from incursions of people who would come in and take them over and do them harm. And part of that terror of outsiders coming in, it manifests in controlling the mobility of the people who, who, who, who are from their, their neighboring neighborhoods. This real surveillance of who comes in and who goes out. And, and especially this is the case for young men. You know, as I was writing this book, I. I had in mind sort of bordering regimes, bordering policies in the back of my mind and, and was seeing this sort of emerge in the neighborhoods that I was working in. As people talked about, they, they use the word borders. They talk about pronteras, internas, fronteras, invisibles. They talk about borders. That's the language they use. And so I, I was struck by that. Since the book has come out, one of the things I've. I've been thinking about a lot is just how much, you know, as I was describing this, right, this intense surveillance, the suspicion of anyone who's from the outside, of anyone trying to cross the border into their neighborhoods, who, they don't know, who's from a different neighborhood, just how much that is actually the same logic at the root of what the states are doing, what the bordering regimes are really the sort of obsession with surveilling national borders and the, the inherent fear or mistrust or suspicion of anyone who is coming in from the outside. That, that's really the same logic that, that these gangs are operate with something
- [14:39]
Rachel Newman
I think that many bilingual readers will like about your book, and I think has already come through in the answers you've already given, is that you bring in Honduran Spanish into your text, and that lets us encounter the words that were actually used by the people you spoke with. There are also always translations into English just so that potential readers who don't know Spanish know they're included as well. So one of your chapter titles is Manana Memandan Manana Mevengo. Could you tell us about this title, what it means literally, and how it relates to this idea of circulation?
- [15:14]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Sure, yeah. And let me just say a note about the. The choice of including all the Spanish. That was something that seemed. It seemed kind of obvious to me. Like, honestly, it was. It seemed like the. The only way to write this book was to keep as much of the Spanish in it as possible. And it was only in the process of going through editing and. And working with publishers that I realized that that was actually an unusual choice. I mean, I guess I knew that, but I. I didn't know it, but I was. I was really. It was very important to me to keep as much of the Spanish in there as I could, especially because I'm not a native Spanish speaker, and I've come to speak Spanish quite well, I think. And all the work I did was conducted in Spanish, and I became very familiar with urban Honduran Spanish in particular. But I did want to keep people's original words in there for an audience who I think might be bilingual, who might be hunthuran, to have. To have sort of that additional layer of access whenever possible. So. So one of the chapters, as you say, is, and that really comes from this line, that a young woman who I met at a shelter, in that same shelter I mentioned earlier in Oaxaca, I met her many years ago, and she was telling me her migration story, and she was telling me how she had. I go into this in more detail in the book, but she was sort of threatened by. By immigration agents in Mexico, and she kind of scoffed. It was a really dismissive kind of recounting of how she reacted to these immigration aids. And she said, like, they standing back tomorrow, tomorrow I'll come right back. And that is a. A phrase that struck me at the time, but really has stayed with me over the years Now a good 16 years later, because it really does encapsulate something that I saw emerging in. In Honduras, in Mexico first, but then in Honduras, where people were just not deterred by. By deportation. Deportation did not end people's migration journey. It did not stop people from the the destinations that they hope to one day reach. And so this, this woman, she was telling me this, this had been her second or third try to get through Mexico. She had been deported, I think, at least twice by that point. And it is something that I think really captures what was at the time a kind of emerging feature of migration. And this is where I get into this idea of circulation. So really thinking about how the changing border regime, how the changing nature of border controls both expanding outward from the US Mexico border, but also hardening and militarizing at the points where people encounter it. So at the border and beyond, produces a kind of life lived in circulation, that people are displaced initially for one reason or another or for a confluence of reasons, and they get caught up in this expanding and hardening bordering regime that produces more movement. Rather than fixing people in place or stopping movement, it produces ongoing and often unwanted movement. And so it precludes perhaps people from arriving to their imagined destination, but it keeps people cycling through these spaces of displacement, detention, deportation, displacement, detention, deportation, maybe endlessly. You know, I think this, the research for this book was done, a lot of it was done during the first Trump administration. A lot of it was done prior to that as well. And right now, I think a lot of people are rightly shocked and outraged by the kind of violence of immigration enforcement happening within the United States. In Minneapolis, obviously, that's one of the most clear and horrifying examples. But everywhere, right, the deployment of ice, of masked agents into cities all across the country, I think has shocked the conscience for a lot of people. And I think one of the things this book shows and what this idea of circulation I hopes to, I hope it helps us get at, is just how much, even when that hasn't been how immigration enforcement has looked, even when that sort of violence in the streets of US Cities was, was not what was happening, the violence of our immigration enforcement regime was, was very much still happening. It was just kind of kept out of view, kept further from, from US Territory, but still drastically impacting people's lives.
- [20:31]
Rachel Newman
Effy, in Honduras, where the welfare state was never large, never robust to begin with, citizens today can count on very little support from the government. So you explained that social services in Honduras tend to come from non governmental organizations or NGOs. What work are NGOs doing relating to migration and deportation in Honduras? And does this work make ordinary Hondurans lives any better?
- [20:59]
Amelia Frank Vitale
So there has, there have been over the last decade or two, a lot of organizations, a lot of NGO work in Honduras that was directed at keeping people from migrating or trying to reinsert deportees into, into Honduras. Does that make ordinary Hondurans lives any better? I mean, yes, on the one hand, right, a lot of the folks who were deported, who got a little bit of, of money, a little bit of startup capital, the opportunity to study a trade that was meaningful. I mean, people live lives really close to the margin in a lot of cases in Honduras. And so a little bit of help is meaningful and really does, can make a meaningful difference in people's lives. That said, it doesn't change the structural condition of precarity that is sort of looming in the background and waiting for people. So a lot of these programs have offered like short periods of, of technical training or skills training and like how to cut hair or do nails or repair cell phones or repair like air conditioning units, which are all like useful, useful skills. But a lot of people, once they go through these training programs, find themselves kind of at the same place they started, which is not being able to find steady work, not being able to feed their kids and not being able to feel totally safe in their homes and that. So the, the confluence of factors, the kind of precarity, the poverty, the structural abandonment, it all comes together. And, and the NGO work, although, although meaningful, I don't want to discount it wholeheartedly. It doesn't change the underlying factor. I found that in Honduras, migration was often like the last best option, but once people got to that last best option, it was the thing that they went back to again and again. And so if a family, if someone loses a job, if someone dies, if someone gets ill, if the, the borders, if the gang land borders change, if a new gang comes in and the, that, that's, that disrupts the sort of tenuous peace. If one thing goes wrong in people's lives, often the only thing that they feel like they have to do is migrate at that point. And so, because, because as you said, there is no real social safety net, there is no real other backup plan. And so once that has become what a family or an individual feels like is the next best thing to do, the next best option, the, the sort of small scale interventions of NGOs aren't enough to really change the fundamental sort of structural situation that produces migration in the first place.
- [24:08]
Rachel Newman
So in your book, after telling us about some of this work NGOs are doing and some of the sort of limits and what impact it can have, you shift to migrant caravans. These have been making the news for over a decade now. They were just in the news this week once again. And you explain that these caravans do warrant the widespread attention that they receive, but maybe not for the reasons that journalists, politicians, and even some researchers, you know, sort of tend to focus on. So how are these caravans which move through space and across borders? Your narrative moves us into Mexico, where we haven't been as much in the rest of the book. How is this actually part of the same story that you've been telling about Honduran neighborhoods?
- [24:55]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Yeah, so I. This is, this is the chapter that I decided to add kind of towards the end of writing this book. I wasn't entirely sure that it would be part of the book initially, but one of the things that has been a kind of feature, although it wasn't my, like, object of, of study, it wasn't what I was intending to focus on, but that I've been a part of for many years, was migrant caravans. And in the book, I talk about going back to 2011, when I was part of one of the earlier, one of the earliest migrant caravans that, that, that slowly builds to what kind of captured the world's attention in 2018. But even at first, during the 2018 caravan, which was right in the middle of when I was doing field work in Honduras, I initially thought, like, I'm not gonna go. That's not what I'm. What I'm working on right now. And so even I thought that maybe it was a sort of separate story. But as I kept coming back to. To the dynamics that I was focusing on and the stories that people told me, I started to really think that caravans are part of the same story. And I say this because caravans are a couple of things. They are, first and foremost, a particular kind of mobility tactic for people engaged in by people who are already trying to migrate and get stuck. They get stuck either because their money runs out, they don't have the funds to hire a pollo to get them across the next stretch of Mexico. They get stuck because immigration enforcement has amass in a certain place and is giving people a harder time around getting through. Or they get stuck because the myriad landscape of organized crime actors has made traveling through a particular piece of territory particularly dangerous or particularly risky or expensive. And so caravans emerge as a way to get through, a way to get forward, as a way to keep moving when people get stuck. And so as I, as I, as I traced the kind of changing landscape of immigration through Mexico over the years, I also saw the kind of circulating of this idea of caravans as a potential tool within a repertoire of of possibilities that folks who are trying to migrate would use as a way to navigate around all of the dangers and all of the, all of the costs that could be associated with migrating. And in this way, I think. So it is not a coincidence that as I am sort of focusing on the burgeoning exodus from Honduras, the increasingly apparent limitations that folks in Honduras are contending with and where migration seems to be the, the only thing that people feel like they have to, to choose that the very, very large caravan of mostly Hondurans sort of burst on Tennessee. But it is also the result of this many years of a kind of idea of how migrating could could work could we how, how people could could get through Mexico if they didn't have the means to to pay to get through Mexico. That the caravan was also kind of a circulating idea among these circuits of folks who were trying to migrate, getting detained, getting deported, trying to migrate, getting detained, getting deported with them. So too circulated the, the idea of a caravan as a possibility. And so I think the moment that really becomes sort of well known in 2018 is also in a sense, the, the sort of most visible, the clearest example of the dynamics that I have been trying to to put my finger on and trying to explain that have been building over many, many years.
- [29:23]
Rachel Newman
So speaking of the passage of time, you mention as well in the book, and this is normal for all academic books, it's been a while since your main fieldwork stint ended, but you have stayed connected to the people and communities that you write about in the book and continued to observe U.S. immigration policy through a tumultuous period. You've already mentioned sort of the massive deployment of ICE in Minneapolis and in other places. So what are some of the developments in recent years? Sort of what's happened since you finished your field work that most stand out to you, and how is this shaping your own research agenda?
- [30:01]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Yeah, one of the things that I think I saw emerging that hadn't fully sort of been hadn't fully come into being but was on its way was a shift in sort of U.S. rhetoric from, from really focusing on immigrants on, on undocumented immigrants to focusing on asylum as like the area where people were were exploiting loopholes or getting around the process or in the, in the sort of early 2000s. I, I don't think the rhetoric was around asylum in quite the same way that we really saw, I think, really start to develop in the first Trump administration, although there were some parts of it in the Obama administration too. And that has really intensified and I think we see a growing, almost closure, like almost complete abrogation of any of the sort of commitments that we had under international law and under U.S. law to try and adjudicate needs for protection. We never lived up to our, our stated ideals. I don't want to valorize or romanticize any earlier periods, but I do think rhetorically the sort of focus on asylum seekers is, is different and is, is newer. And I think we really see that coming to new heights. During the second Trump administration. They have really focused on immigration courts as one of their primary areas of attack, both in terms of reshaping the immigration judiciary. Firing tons of immigration judges. They fired over 100 immigration judges in the first year out of like 700 immigration judges. They have also sent ICE agents to arrest people who are going to immigration court. They've made some sort of in the weeds legal maneuvers to dismiss cases of people who are already in the process and then make them re arrestable. But there's been a real attack on the people who are actually doing things through the legal channels, people who have, who are following the laws as we have required them to do. And this has really sort of shut down asylum in, in almost all cases. And still I am going to suggest that despite the kind of wholesale attack on immigrants that the United States has, has really proclaimed to the world and the, the hostility towards immigrant communities that I think folks all across the country are feeling right now, I think the sort of thesis of my book that for the most part the things that we do to, to deter and detain, or maybe not for the most part, but the things that we do to deter and detain don't fundamentally work when people feel like they just don't have a chance or much when at at home. And so we saw a slowdown, we saw a decrease in people trying to cross the US Mexico border. Certainly legal immigration, and by that I mean visa, the immigration has, has really slowed. But I understand that just in the last month we have seen an uptick once again in apprehensions at the US Mexico border after quite a few months of lower numbers. And I think that that's just starting to be an indicator of what I fundamentally believe to be true based on my research, that sure, there are some people who are dissuaded by anti migrant rhetoric, rhetoric from the United States, some people who are, who are going back, who are, who are doing reverse migration tracks towards the south. And yet for a lot of communities, for a lot of people, they still think that their best chance had a better life, but that sort of mix of opportunity and safety that, that, that they feel is not available to them at home. People still feel like their best chance is to get to the United States. So I, I guess I think this is a roundabout way to, to answer your question. I think in so many ways the world looks different than it did when I was engaged in the bulk of this research. The we have gone through a pandemic since then. We have gone through two presidencies since then. The the politics of Latin America have shifted substantially. Honduras is, has gone through two presidencies as well. The former president of Honduras, who was the president when I was doing research there, Juan Orlando Hernandez, had since been extradited to the United States, found guilty of drug trafficking offenses, sentenced to decades in prison, and then most recently pardoned by Donald Trump. So the world has changed a lot. And certainly immigration policy has, has focused on terrorizing immigrants within the interior of the United States in addition to fortifying the border in, in both literal and figurative senses. And we've just seen a wholesale attack on immigrants writ large, regardless of sort of how people got here or what their status may be. And yet I think the lot in many ways the world is the same. The features of life that push people into making really hard decisions. The sense of having to leave behind a world that people know because that world is just not giving them the opportunity for a fulsome future. That is still something that people are contending with both in Honduras and in many, many parts of the world. So I hope that the work that is showcased in the book is still feels relevant for this moment, even though the world has gone through a lot and a lot of changes since then.
- [36:25]
Rachel Newman
Well, I certainly learned a lot from reading the book. It has certainly influenced how I'm thinking about what I'm observing here in the world in this moment that we're living through. And I'm certainly looking forward to other works that you'll produce to help us understand more about what's going on. Looking ahead. So today we've been speaking with Emilia Frank Vitale about her book Leave if youf Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds Emergency. Amelia, thank you for this fascinating and important book and a really exciting conversation.
- [36:59]
Amelia Frank Vitale
Thank you so much for having me. It was delightful to talk to you.
- [37:14]
New Books Network Announcer
No time for full TV shows. TikTok has endless short dramas you can watch anytime. Fast paced, easy to follow and hard to stop. Download TikTok now and start watching.