Migration and the Americas Food as Infrastructure: Homemaking Practices Among (Transit) Migrants Across the Americas

  • Thursday, 3. July 2025, 18:15
  • HCA Atrium
    • Yaatsil Guevara González

This presentation explores how food operates as a form of infrastructure in the everyday lives of (transit) migrants navigating displacement across the Americas. Moving beyond symbolic interpretations, I examine food as a material and affective medium through which migrants create temporary forms of stability, belonging, and care in conditions of uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico and Costa Rica—including shelters, (temporary) camps, hotels, and informal ‘kitchens’—I show how practices such as cooking, sharing meals, and cultivating food-related knowledge function as homemaking strategies. These acts not only sustain life but also forge networks of support and resistance amid prolonged waiting and uncertainty. By approaching food as infrastructure, I foreground its capacity to enable relationality, agency, and situated forms of care within fragmented geographies of mobility. The presentation contributes to current debates in migration and infrastructure studies, emphasizing the entanglements of care, mobility, and materiality in transit contexts.

Karte der Welt als Fußabdruck
  • Address

    HCA Atrium

  • Event Type

All Dates of the Event 'Migrations and the Americas'

Migration movements turn out to be a particular global challenge of the twenty-first century in many regions of the world. The HCA addresses this topic together with the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies and the Institute of Geography with the lecture series “Migration and the Americas,” with a special focus on the United States and Latin America.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yaatsil Guevara GonzálezProf. Dr. Ulrike Gerhard