Amelia Frank-Vitale

Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, “Everyday Deportations” focuses on the experiences of young men deported back to some of the world’s most violent neighborhoods. This project argues for understanding deportation not as a rupture but rather as a continuum of exclusions and displacements, and asks what it means when deportation becomes an ordinary and traumatic experience, something at once routine and catastrophic. Clandestine migration and deportation are positioned not as exceptional, spectacular events in a life of otherwise stability, but are instead shown to be the extension of processes that happen within national borders: the marginalization, criminalization, and displaceability of people who are always already excluded and deportable, before ever leaving their country of citizenship.