Tobin Hansen

TOBIN MICHAEL-PERRY HANSEN, a graduate student at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, received funding in July 2016 to aid research on ‘Belonging: Place, Care, and Masculinities Among ‘Criminal Aliens’ Deported to Mexico,’ supervised by Dr. Lynn Stephen. This project explored a fundamental question: How do displaced people seek to belong? In recent decades, the U.S. government’s conjoining of immigration control with tough-on-crime policies has increased so-called ‘criminal alien’ deportations, many of men who arrived as children and grew up considering the United States home. Ethnographic research in northern Mexico examined these men’s disorientation, social isolation, and stigmatization after deportation as well as the ways that shared identities and collective memory enabled solidarity in the joint struggle to carve out narrow spaces of belonging. The boundaries of social difference in northern Mexico that demarcated criminalized, ‘Americanized’ outsider identities and relegated deportees to the margins, simultaneously permitted their mutual recognition and coming together to circulate everyday material and affective care. Illuminating the relationships between social and legal belonging, identity formation, and belonging to place(s) in the context of forcible displacement provides insights into ways that regional and personal histories, cultures, and interpersonal relationships form the basis of belonging.