Alexandra Délano Alonso
Biographic Data
| ID | 81765 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Délano Alonso |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra Délano |
| FAMILY NAME | Alonso |
| SIGNATURE | ALONSO A D |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-0688-2130 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
We Come Without Last Names / Venimos Sin Apellidos
Public grief and political transformation
Expressions of public grief have been ever more present in the context of growing numbers of migrant deaths acros many border regions. However, the political and transformative potential of collective acts of mourning or commemoration has been increasingly put into question. Instead of posing a tangible challenge to border policy, grief has often been co-opted or actively employed by state actors precisely to work against transformation of existi…
The Far-Reaching Impacts of Trump’s Anti-Immigration Offensive
The second Trump administration’s escalating and violent crackdown is intended to redefine who is allowed to be in the United States
Undoing nothing, making relevance, and embracing ambivalence
This paper is part of the review symposium of Paolo Boccagni’s Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025). I center my comment on the contribution of the three main concepts in the book: nothing, relevance and ambivalence, in relation to debates around integration, belonging, placemaking and temporality. I also consider how the focus on asylum seekers’ practices of placemaking in …
Mexico’s Structures of Violence
Confronted with a plague of criminal violence, the Mexican state has denied responsibility and taken to blaming the victims, claiming that a breakdown in morality is the cause of a ruptured social fabric
Introduction to the Symposium on Transdisciplinary Approaches to Migrant Solidarity in Theory, Law, and Praxis
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Solidarity as a Force for Systemic Change
Invocations of solidarity often appear to be merely rhetorical. In contrast, in this essay we seek to show that solidarity can be a potent force for systemic change. We focus on a particular kind of solidarity—experiential solidarity—which is rooted in shared and lived experiences. In doing so, we de-center the role of states as targets and agents of solidarity and foreground the communities that are actively “doing” human rights by fostering bot…
The Scales of Translocal Solidarity
This article discusses migrant solidarity projects across the Mexico-US border, considering community organizations and shelters that practice forms of accompaniment, mutuality, and flourishing that seek to transform structural conditions across different struggles that implicate both migrants and the communities that they join. Through interviews, participant observation, and a research practice informed by principles of solidarity and mutual ai…
Migrants in Waiting in Mexico
Under the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico has abandoned plans for a more humane migration policy. Faced with increasing flows of asylum seekers from elsewhere in the hemisphere, the Mexican government has adopted a strategy of control and enforcement that mirrors the US approach
Languages to Transform Contexts of Mobility
s oJames Baldwin writes that "a lan guage comes into exis tence by means of bru tal neces sity, and the rules of the lan guage are dic tated by what the lan guage must con vey." 1 In the face of the vio lences of existing bor der regimes, this bru tal neces sity man i fests in the gram mars and vocab u lar ies that chal lenge the lan guage of crim i nal i za tion, of ille gal ity, or "migrant cri sis."Such terms place the weight of respon si bil …
Transformative solidarity in contexts of mobility
Through an analysis of the work of select migrant shelters and community organizations in Mexico and the United States, this article examines mutual aid, solidarity and sanctuary projects that seek to transform structural conditions of injustice and inequality. It examines how different activist groups across the Mexico-US borders practise forms of solidarity that recognize the implication of both migrants and citizens in existing structures of v…
The Rebels Who Fought Mexican and US Oppression
In 2022, Mexico commemorated the centenary of the death of Ricardo Flores Magón, whose work with his brothers as newspaper publishers and leaders of a political movement helped bring about the fall of a Mexican dictator. Their cross-border activities also challenged white supremacy in the United States
The Struggle for Memory and Justice in Mexico
The debate about public memory has intensified in Mexico in a time of widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly in the context of the guerra contra el narco (war against drug cartels) that began in 2006. Confronting government narratives that criminalize victims of enforced disappearance and criminal violence, and the state’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, families of victims and other activists have led a struggle …
Migrant community responses to the Covid ‐19 pandemic
This article documents the impact of mutual aid, considering not just the food, resources and information that have been shared within and across communities since the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in New York City, but the ways in which these efforts are part of an abolitionist framework that precedes and transcends this context, aiming to transform relationships, build community and create alternative structures with justice and dignity at the…
The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics
Sanctuary Says
In 2018, the New School Working Group on Expanded Sanctuary collaboratively organized a series of workshops in New York to reflect on the question of sanctuary as a conceptual and practical starting point for cross-coalitional politics, including its tensions and risks. This short piece is an attempt to bring together the sentiments expressed in those workshops by activists, organizers, students and academics focusing on anti-racist, pro-migrant,…
Memory Activism and Mexico’s War on Drugs
The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to…
Sanctuary in Countries of Origin
While current interpretations of sanctuary are most often associated with practices to protect, support, and accompany migrants with precarious status in countries of destination in the Global North, debates around the concept and practice of sanctuary in countries of origin reveal different historical and contemporary understandings. This article explores questions related to sanctuary’s symbolic and political power in the Mexican context, speci…
Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics
Time for an Alternative Politics of Migration
Research Article| February 01 2020 Time for an Alternative Politics of Migration Alexandra Délano Alonso Alexandra Délano Alonso Alexandra Délano Alonso is an associate professor and chair of global studies at The New School, and a Current History contributing editor. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (2020) 119 (814): 73–76. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2020.119.814.73 Views Icon Views Arti…
C ristina S alinas . Managed Migrations
The historical connections between U.S.-Mexico border enforcement and the demand for labor by employers in the agricultural sector have been amply examined as examples of the contradictions of a system of migration laws built on a premise of control and restriction versus a reality of a demand for farmworkers who have been the basis for economic growth and development in border regions. Cristina Salinas’s Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers,…
The microfoundations of diaspora politics
Recognising the need to unpack the ‘state’ and problematise the term ‘diaspora’, in this special issue we examine the various actors within (and beyond) the state that participate in the design and implementation of diaspora policies, as well as the mechanisms through which diasporas are constructed by governments, political parties, diaspora entrepreneurs, or international organisations . Ex tant theories are often hard-pressed to capture the em…
Consular Protection and Solidarity across Borders
This chapter demonstrates how Latin American governments with large populations of migrants with precarious legal status in the United States are working together to promote policies focusing on their well-being and integration. It identifies the context in which these processes of policy diffusion and collaboration have taken place as well as their limitations. Notwithstanding the differences in capacities and motivations based on the domestic p…
Integration through Ventanillas de Salud and Plazas Comunitarias
This chapter presents empirical evidence of origin-country diaspora programs with a focus on immigrant integration. It draws from examples of programs focused on education, health, financial literacy, and labor rights, carried out mainly by Mexico throughout its consular network in the United States. Through interviews, it examines the ways in which these programs have emerged and evolved, emphasizing the coalitions formed among consulates, publi…
Conclusions
This chapter discusses diaspora policies focused on integration and protection of social rights from the perspective of questions around the boundaries of citizenship and global migration governance. The evidence engages a larger debate about solidarity across borders focused on equal access to rights from a perspective of shared responsibility and accountability. It considers the examples of extension of rights and the expansion of concepts such…
The microfoundations of diaspora politics
Recognising the need to unpack the ‘state’ and problematise the term ‘diaspora’, in this special issue we examine the various actors within (and beyond) the state that participate in the design and implementation of diaspora policies, as well as the mechanisms through which diasporas are constructed by governments, political parties, diaspora entrepreneurs, or international organisations . Ex tant theories are often hard-pressed to capture the em…
Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility
Between 200 and 500 people have died every year along the United States-Mexico border since the late-1990s. The void of responsibility for migrant deaths is exemplified by the lack of care for and visibility of these bodies during the processes of recovery, identification, and burial. Many of the bodies, mostly those unidentified, are buried in cemeteries, potter’s fields, or even private ranches near the United States-Mexico border, often far re…
Introduction
The rise in the number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe is the latest in a series of “crises” related to the movement of people that have captured the world’s attention. In the past two decades, hundreds of people have died every year in their attempts to cross borders, from the US-Mexico border, to the Mediterranean and beyond. This introduction proposes to look at the political force of public grief in the context of these border dea…
Bringing the Dead Back into Society
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF) was one of the world’s first professional war crimes exhumation groups to produce evidence against governments and military personnel involved in human rights violations. In 2009, cofounder Mercedes Doretti expanded the EAAF’s work by establishing the Border Project in response to the large number of cases of disappeared migrants along the migrant trail from…
The Scales of Translocal Solidarity
This article discusses migrant solidarity projects across the Mexico-US border, considering community organizations and shelters that practice forms of accompaniment, mutuality, and flourishing that seek to transform structural conditions across different struggles that implicate both migrants and the communities that they join. Through interviews, participant observation, and a research practice informed by principles of solidarity and mutual ai…
Migrant community responses to the Covid ‐19 pandemic
This article documents the impact of mutual aid, considering not just the food, resources and information that have been shared within and across communities since the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in New York City, but the ways in which these efforts are part of an abolitionist framework that precedes and transcends this context, aiming to transform relationships, build community and create alternative structures with justice and dignity at the…
Incorporation, development, migrant organizations and state responsibility across borders
The State and the Grassroots examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of transnational activities carried out by both economic migrants and refugees, through a comparative analysis of different countries or origin and areas of settlement, and considering historical and generational shifts over time. This collection deepens the conversation across transnationalism, development, immigrant integration and diaspora studies, and pushes further the…
Mexicans in the United States
The disadvantages faced by Mexican migrants, the challenges of their integration into US society, and the question of the rights due to noncitizens are at the core of the immigration debate in the United States
Use your power and feel
Bringing the Dead Back into Society
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF) was one of the world’s first professional war crimes exhumation groups to produce evidence against governments and military personnel involved in human rights violations. In 2009, cofounder Mercedes Doretti expanded the EAAF’s work by establishing the Border Project in response to the large number of cases of disappeared migrants along the migrant trail from…
Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility
Between 200 and 500 people have died every year along the United States-Mexico border since the late-1990s. The void of responsibility for migrant deaths is exemplified by the lack of care for and visibility of these bodies during the processes of recovery, identification, and burial. Many of the bodies, mostly those unidentified, are buried in cemeteries, potter’s fields, or even private ranches near the United States-Mexico border, often far re…
Introduction
The rise in the number of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe is the latest in a series of “crises” related to the movement of people that have captured the world’s attention. In the past two decades, hundreds of people have died every year in their attempts to cross borders, from the US-Mexico border, to the Mediterranean and beyond. This introduction proposes to look at the political force of public grief in the context of these border dea…
Sobre Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso, Voces de la repatriación
Incorporation, development, migrant organizations and state responsibility across borders
The State and the Grassroots examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of transnational activities carried out by both economic migrants and refugees, through a comparative analysis of different countries or origin and areas of settlement, and considering historical and generational shifts over time. This collection deepens the conversation across transnationalism, development, immigrant integration and diaspora studies, and pushes further the…
Consular Protection and Solidarity across Borders
This chapter demonstrates how Latin American governments with large populations of migrants with precarious legal status in the United States are working together to promote policies focusing on their well-being and integration. It identifies the context in which these processes of policy diffusion and collaboration have taken place as well as their limitations. Notwithstanding the differences in capacities and motivations based on the domestic p…
Integration through Ventanillas de Salud and Plazas Comunitarias
This chapter presents empirical evidence of origin-country diaspora programs with a focus on immigrant integration. It draws from examples of programs focused on education, health, financial literacy, and labor rights, carried out mainly by Mexico throughout its consular network in the United States. Through interviews, it examines the ways in which these programs have emerged and evolved, emphasizing the coalitions formed among consulates, publi…
Conclusions
This chapter discusses diaspora policies focused on integration and protection of social rights from the perspective of questions around the boundaries of citizenship and global migration governance. The evidence engages a larger debate about solidarity across borders focused on equal access to rights from a perspective of shared responsibility and accountability. It considers the examples of extension of rights and the expansion of concepts such…
From Here and There
Assistance for immigrants to learn English, receive health services, open a bank account, apply for naturalization, or get a work certification is generally considered the responsibility of the government and society of the country where they reside, as part of the process of supporting their integration and ultimately their formal acquisition of citizenship. But in the past two decades, Mexico and other countries of origin of Latin American migr…
The microfoundations of diaspora politics
Recognising the need to unpack the ‘state’ and problematise the term ‘diaspora’, in this special issue we examine the various actors within (and beyond) the state that participate in the design and implementation of diaspora policies, as well as the mechanisms through which diasporas are constructed by governments, political parties, diaspora entrepreneurs, or international organisations . Ex tant theories are often hard-pressed to capture the em…
Time for an Alternative Politics of Migration
Research Article| February 01 2020 Time for an Alternative Politics of Migration Alexandra Délano Alonso Alexandra Délano Alonso Alexandra Délano Alonso is an associate professor and chair of global studies at The New School, and a Current History contributing editor. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Current History (2020) 119 (814): 73–76. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2020.119.814.73 Views Icon Views Arti…
C ristina S alinas . Managed Migrations
The historical connections between U.S.-Mexico border enforcement and the demand for labor by employers in the agricultural sector have been amply examined as examples of the contradictions of a system of migration laws built on a premise of control and restriction versus a reality of a demand for farmworkers who have been the basis for economic growth and development in border regions. Cristina Salinas’s Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers,…
The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics
Sanctuary Says
In 2018, the New School Working Group on Expanded Sanctuary collaboratively organized a series of workshops in New York to reflect on the question of sanctuary as a conceptual and practical starting point for cross-coalitional politics, including its tensions and risks. This short piece is an attempt to bring together the sentiments expressed in those workshops by activists, organizers, students and academics focusing on anti-racist, pro-migrant,…
Memory Activism and Mexico’s War on Drugs
The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to…
Sanctuary in Countries of Origin
While current interpretations of sanctuary are most often associated with practices to protect, support, and accompany migrants with precarious status in countries of destination in the Global North, debates around the concept and practice of sanctuary in countries of origin reveal different historical and contemporary understandings. This article explores questions related to sanctuary’s symbolic and political power in the Mexican context, speci…
Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics
The Struggle for Memory and Justice in Mexico
The debate about public memory has intensified in Mexico in a time of widespread violence and human rights abuses, particularly in the context of the guerra contra el narco (war against drug cartels) that began in 2006. Confronting government narratives that criminalize victims of enforced disappearance and criminal violence, and the state’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, families of victims and other activists have led a struggle …
Migrant community responses to the Covid ‐19 pandemic
This article documents the impact of mutual aid, considering not just the food, resources and information that have been shared within and across communities since the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic in New York City, but the ways in which these efforts are part of an abolitionist framework that precedes and transcends this context, aiming to transform relationships, build community and create alternative structures with justice and dignity at the…
The Rebels Who Fought Mexican and US Oppression
In 2022, Mexico commemorated the centenary of the death of Ricardo Flores Magón, whose work with his brothers as newspaper publishers and leaders of a political movement helped bring about the fall of a Mexican dictator. Their cross-border activities also challenged white supremacy in the United States
Migrants in Waiting in Mexico
Under the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico has abandoned plans for a more humane migration policy. Faced with increasing flows of asylum seekers from elsewhere in the hemisphere, the Mexican government has adopted a strategy of control and enforcement that mirrors the US approach
Languages to Transform Contexts of Mobility
s oJames Baldwin writes that "a lan guage comes into exis tence by means of bru tal neces sity, and the rules of the lan guage are dic tated by what the lan guage must con vey." 1 In the face of the vio lences of existing bor der regimes, this bru tal neces sity man i fests in the gram mars and vocab u lar ies that chal lenge the lan guage of crim i nal i za tion, of ille gal ity, or "migrant cri sis."Such terms place the weight of respon si bil …
Transformative solidarity in contexts of mobility
Through an analysis of the work of select migrant shelters and community organizations in Mexico and the United States, this article examines mutual aid, solidarity and sanctuary projects that seek to transform structural conditions of injustice and inequality. It examines how different activist groups across the Mexico-US borders practise forms of solidarity that recognize the implication of both migrants and citizens in existing structures of v…
Political science (27 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (11 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (9 works) · Political economy (8 works)