Diasporic media

President Donald Trump framed the migrant caravan during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as an invasion, using it to attack the Democratic party. Trump’s attitude towards the caravan can be placed in the wider context of relationships between the U.S. and Latin American countries, reinforced by the mainstream media’s representation of Latino/Hispanic migrants as the other. However, the diasporic media frame topics in ways that represent and support the migrant’s own interests and create identities that bypass transnational borders. This research examined 55 articles about the migrant caravan published by La Hora Voz del  Migrante, a Guatemalan diasporic newspaper, between Oct. 15 and Dec. 2, 2018.
We found wide and sympathetic coverage of the reasons for migrating and the situations the migrants face on their way to the U.S. This coverage actively challenged Trump’s rhetoric, creating a sense of pan-ethnic solidarity between the countries of the Northern Triangle and Mexico. However, due to the level of involvement and the power of the U.S. in the region, Trump remained one of the main actors driving the conversation about the migrant caravan.

In our previous issues, we have outlined our commitment to strengthen the focus on Society by critically examining the categories on which we build our work as scholars of language […] But so far we have done this without explicitly addressing the very institutional position from which many of us produce knowledge: the University – the big elephant in the room. And it is not always easy to do so. After all, the university is the workplace that structures our knowledge production while at the same time providing the means which ratify the social and intellectual legitimacy of what we do (including having access to editorial positions), even if this is under conditions of increasing precarity and instability. […] The five articles in the present issue offer us, in our view, with avenues for deepening reflection on these matters. Although authors weren’t exactly reacting to a particular call, we read their contributions as speaking to these concerns. We do so with two goals in mind. First, to insist that it is worth keeping an eye on the social relations of inequality that we continue to mystify as knowledge producers who write from within higher education institutions. Second, to sustain venues where we can continue talking about this openly and honestly, in ways that don’t paralyse us but which rather propel us to generate productive forms of transgression and counter-conducts within our universities – not only in the sense envisioned by Foucault (2007) but also in connection with the reactivation of a variety of non-European indigenous systems of knowing (Mbembe, 2003). More specifically, the contributions in this issue help us delve in a critique of the relations of power and inequality that frame and inform our work and that we have shaped. This includes a critique of: (a) our roles as researchers and knowledge producers; (b) the categories we mobilize when doing research; (c) the histories of our own academic disciplines; (d) the learning spaces that we contribute to create as teachers; and (e) our recruitment practices in universities.