Faculty fellow researches root causes of migration from El Salvador
Political Science professor Dr. Noelle Brigden brings years of experience to her classroom as a field researcher on human security and migration in Central America and Mexico. Last summer, she received a Rynne Research Fellowship to conduct preliminary research for her latest project on borders.
Dr. Brigden’s project goes beyond just country borders; she explores the informal, socially constructed borders of street gangs and gated communities in urban Central America. Part of her interest stems from the region’s dramatic increase in violence from street gangs and police in recent years. She explains this “has played a major role in pushing people out of the region as refugees.” The increasing violence limits people’s movements within their communities.
For Dr. Brigden, the Rynne fellowship served as a springboard for her multi-year book project on borders and allowed her to develop a new course at Marquette called The Politics of Street Gangs.
The new course incorporates many stories and findings from her fellowship. To start the project, she held map-making workshops with young people in two communities on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador. One community she worked with sits at the border of a street gang, and the other is a gated community.
Through the workshops, the participants produced maps of what they perceive and experience as their community boundaries. Now Brigden is using these maps to understand how people know where the borders are, the consequences of them, their legitimacy, and whether they move over time or are stable.
The map-making exercise examines issues such as threats of violence, spaces of belonging, and feelings of security and insecurity. It also provides Dr. Brigden with a wealth of content for her courses.
Claire Guinta and Audrey Lodes — two of Dr. Brigden’s former students — remember benefiting when she shared examples from her field research. Two examples in particular helped them understand the impact of socially constructed borders.
During a lecture, she recalled that some parents she met in El Salvador refused to send their kids to school due to the gang borders that make the trek too dangerous. In another example, other individuals she met with did not feel safe traveling through the city they live in to look for work.
The borders of street gangs have become so repressive and rigid that it is sometimes safer to take the very dangerous and traumatic journey of migrating across country borders than to navigate the informal, socially constructed borders around their homes.
The Politics of Street Gangs dives deep into the root causes of migration. One underlying theme of the class is the intersection between the lived experience of violence on the streets and domestic, international, and transnational politics. By contextualizing violence historically and globally, the class provides students with knowledge to challenge xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric.
With your support, Dr. Brigden’s research is changing the way we understand and conceive borders and community mobility. Her teaching is inspiring students to work to address the root causes of migration.
