C&J Professor publishes powerful book on migrant community building
January 30, 2024 - Savannah Peat
UNM Communication & Journalism Professor Michael Lechuga is not only paving the path for research on virtual reality, but an all too real one.
Lechuga has just co-authored and published the book Migrant World Making, a harrowing collection of anecdotes and theories of what happens when migrants settle into the U.S.
He and additional co-authors from Texas A&M University, Loyolay Marymont University,and Colorado State University dive into the idea of community building, and the challenges associated with such a critical sense of belonging.
“This project is a reflection of our vision for fixing how migrants are oftentimes just talked about but rarely get to represent themselves or talk about themselves. That was something that we wanted to really focus on in this book,” Lechuga said. “There's this sense that so much of the world, as it's constructed and produced, is against them, so they have to make their own worlds when they go places.”
By exploring different communication tools and strategies, Migrant World Making combines the individualistic and holistic approaches to navigating making a life in an already nationalistic society.
“We really try to focus on this idea that migration is characterized by lived tensions, by this pull and push of simultaneously having to live two existences at the same time. Even the way that we talk about migration from an internal versus external standpoint is a little bit weird, right? Those are, of course, based on national identities,” Lechuga said.
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