#ResisteGozando (joy as resistance): On the healing power of dance at the US–Mexico border

Abstract

This article explores the personal and political significance of dancing for migrants trapped at the US–Mexico border, waiting to apply for asylum in the United States. Past research has often framed waiting as empty, static, boring, or even violent. Nevertheless, an emergent literature shows how people in contexts of violence also exercise creativity and care as embodied paths to collective healing. Drawing on nearly three years of patchwork ethnography at Comunidades, a cultural center and migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, including participant observation in person and over Zoom as well as in-depth interviews with migrants and staff, we explore how dance affects migrants’ relationships to trauma and offers its own mode of politics. We show how forced waiting was affectively complex. On one hand, being stranded at the border left migrants vulnerable to state and cartel abuse. At the same time, dancing helped people ‘come home’ to themselves, practice solidarity, and refuse dominant narratives of their suffering. In short, migrants can use creative practices – including but not limited to dance – for embodied healing, community building, and resistance to larger regimes of violence.