This talk examines how the financial realities of outmigration from Central America to the United States reinforce return attempts after deportation. Because of the nature of mortgage payments, liens, and debt terms, deported out-migrants often find themselves with little recourse except to try to emigrate North again to find employment. This talk, therefore, examines how prevailing narratives of migration ignore or work around a fundamental economic reality—not one principally of poverty and underemployment but one rather of indebtedness stemming from the significant costs of transnational migration itself.

John Kennedy, is a PhD student, Romance Studies, LASP Graduate Fellow, and a Public Humanities Fellow, Cornell University. John studies migration and its narratives, broadly conceived. He is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and is currently at work on a project on the financial ecology of migration in Mexico and Central America; he is a first-generation Guatemalan American.

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This event is sponsored by Monroe Community College and the Cornell University Latin American Studies Program with funding provided by a grant from the US Department of Education. Co-sponsored by: MCC’s Department of Anthropology/History/Political Science/Sociology and Global Education & International Services.