Organised by Susanne Klengel, project Border Temporalities and/in Literature, Research Area 1: "Competing Communities" in cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. This event is part of the lecture series "Border Temporalities: Doing Literature in a World of Walls".

Speaker: Pia Berghoff (Berlin)

– lecture in English –

Since its existence, the northern Mexican border city of Tijuana has been shaped by diverse migratory movements. For a long time, it functioned as a transit point, where the majority of migrants stayed for a few days before applying for asylum or starting their irregularized journey across the border to the United States. However, looking at Tijuana today, it becomes evident that over the last few years the city has become a “waiting room” for a large part of the migrant population. This is due to a set ofmigration policies that hinder migrants from entering the US and deliberately put them in a state of prolonged waiting. With recourse to ethnographic material from her recent fieldwork at the US-Mexico border, Pia Berghoff explores these temporal dimensions of transit migration and their reflection in the migrants’ narratives. Recent literary approaches to transit migration through Mexico and the US-Mexico border are used to complement and contextualize these narratives. Furthermore, as Pia Berghoff will show, they open up valuable perspectives on the important methodological question: How can and should migration be researched and portrayed?

Pia Berghoff completed her Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig. She has a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies with a specialization in Gender Studies from Freie Universität Berlin. During her studies she spent some semesters abroad in Mendoza, Argentina at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo and at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. From 2019 to 2022 she worked for the research project “ForMOVE – Forced Migration and Organized Violence: A comparative study in Europe and the Americas.”She is currently a research assistant and PhD student in Cultural and Social Anthropology in the International Research Training Group “Temporalities of Future” at Freie Universität Berlin, supervised by Prof. Dr. Stephanie Schütze.