The theme for the 2015 Institute, “Migrations and Diasporas,” asks participants to consider the contemporary political valences of these terms, and to bring historical and cultural perspectives to bear on them. As an Institute organized across national boundaries by a collective of scholars from throughout the Americas, the Tepoztlán Institute will convene in July 2015 to consider the topics of migrations, diaspora, and how the concept of the transnational has changed in scholarly and political life since the Institute was conceived in 2003.​

Diaspora and migration have long involved circuits of labor and coercion, as well as fugitive imaginaries and exorbitant lives. Borderlands are policed as combat zones, complete with bleeding-edge technological innovation, while migrant laborers craft kinship networks and diasporic longings. Since the colonial period, the great wealth of universities, churches, states, and political parties in the Americas has been extracted from the labor of migrant and stolen bodies, as well as the dispossession of indigenous lands, labor, and lives. In turn, the stolen and the dispossessed forged new lifeways by robbing, striking, fleeing, gathering, and imaginatively remaking all they were imputed to be. Sometimes, extraction and dispossession were and are hardly distinguishable from imaginatively remade lives. Given this landscape, how might the concepts of “diaspora” and “migrations” help us to reconceptualize the past and offer a necessary counter-force in the present?   

We seek contributions from scholars, activists, and artists from across the Americas who are engaged in work on the broad theme of Migrations and Diaspora. We especially hope to question ongoing assumptions and categories in diaspora studies, and encourage scholars whose work challenges traditional ways of conceptualizing the Americas.