Migration and the Americas Food as Infrastructure: Homemaking Practices Among (Transit) Migrants Across the Americas

In this presentation, Junior Professor Dr. Guevara González explores how food operates as a form of infrastructure in the everyday lives of (transit) migrants navigating displacement across the Americas. Moving beyond symbolic interpretations, she examines food as a material and affective medium through which migrants create temporary forms of stability, belonging, and care in conditions of uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico and Costa Rica—including shelters, (temporary) camps, hotels, and informal ‘kitchens’—she shows how practices such as cooking, sharing meals, and cultivating food-related knowledge function as homemaking strategies. These acts not only sustain life but also forge networks of support and resistance amid prolonged waiting and uncertainty. By approaching food as infrastructure, she foregrounds its capacity to enable relationality, agency, and situated forms of care within fragmented geographies of mobility.