Brittany (Britt) Dawson

BRITT DAWSON, then a graduate student at Univeristy of California, Berkeley, California, was approved funding in September 2023 to aid research on “Somos Musulmanes: Living Islam at the Mexico-U.S. Border,” supervised by Dr. Charles Hirschkind. In the last decade, Muslim communities have emerged in the northern Mexican border city of Tijuana and its surrounds. Muslim communities in Tijuana are diverse, comprised of Mexican converts to Islam, Muslim immigrants to Mexico, and migrants who hope to enter the United States. Together, Muslims in Tijuana confront the various challenges of life in the borderlands through a radical openness and attunement to the work of Allah in this world. Navigating life at the Mexico-U.S. border, Muslims perform border work — acts oriented toward a future world in the present. Through border work, Muslims in Tijuana inhabit the border between taking responsibility for their own actions in this world and accepting that certain aspects of their lives are predetermined and out of their control. Between building and running the only shelter for Muslim migrants in Mexico, providing charitable aid, piety, waiting, witnessing, and other forms of enduring, they remain open to transformation and change but also to the fact that circumstances might stay the same. Through border work, Muslims in Tijuana demonstrate ways of the various crises the ummah faces today.