This panel offers an answer to these questions through a reexamination of migration and migration narratives. Instead of thinking about the experience of migration as fixed, static, or centered around the nation’s physical and imaginary boundaries, we underscore the liberatory potential migration makes available. Instead of thinking about migration narratives as a progression from illegality to citizenship or as a perpetual experience of struggle or social death, we turn our attention to the multiple rhythms of migrant life. Each paper highlights aesthetic, literary, and political innovations undocumented, migrant, queer, trans, and Black feminist writers have achieved. These papers range from an exploration of “pirated rivers” as a sonic and textual mode of undocumented knowledge, to an interrogation of the entanglements between Black feminist thought and migratory mobilities, to an analysis of the shifts away from the memoir and testimonio to document migrant lives; to an examination of the use of life narrative to document TransLatina survival.

Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera’s “(Un)documentedness in Black Feminist Political Autobiographies” examines how Black feminist thinkers have engaged the subject of migration in order to understand migration’s significance in the development of Black Feminist Thought. In this paper Arrizón-Palomera turns to Angela Y. Davis’ political autobiography and examines the various migrations Davis undertook in the 1950s and 1960s. She demonstrates the significance of migration in the development of a Black feminist consciousness and political agenda in Davis’ autobiography and begins to trace a strand in Black Feminist Thought that is largely unexplored.

José de la Garza Valenzuela’s “Queer Migrant Memorials: Queer Latinx Life Writing beyond Memoir and Testimonio”examines the recent turn away from the conventions of testimonio and memoir in Latinx autobiographical writing. De la Garza Valenzuela proposes that while texts like Edgar Gómez’s High-Risk Homosexual are presentend as autobiographies, they do not conform to the generic conventions of memoir used by contemporary queer Latinx authors to mourn and memorialize those living and whose lives have been taken around them by the institutional failures that foreclose the possibilities of dignified migrant lives and deaths.

Keish Kim’s “Pirated Rivers: 21st-century Undocumented Im/migrant Poetry” examines how queer undocumented immigrant writers bend genre and form in response to the legal disciplines of citizenship and the DREAM Act. Kim closereads Jan-Henry Gray’s “River Capture” in Documents (2019) as an example of a literary praxis that overflows from a written poem to form a new “pirated” short film. Kim argues that the unruly pirated river is part of a theoretical iteration of undocumented epistemology that articulates undocumented immigrant life beyond legality defined by the settler citizen.

Finally, Ruben Zecena’s, “TransLatina Power: Life Narrative, Survival, and the Glamour of it All” analyzes Alexandra DeRuiz’s crónica, Crucé la Frontera en Tacones, as a transgressive and transnational text that centers TransLatina life. When so many representations of trans women of color focus on death, Zecena considers how DeRuiz draws on narrative to posit life throughout her journey from Mexico to the U.S. as an undocumented migrant and community organizer. With vibrancy, vigor, and lots of ingenuity, her text indicates that survival is, indeed, a possibility for TransLatinas, especially when the world makes this impossible to imagine.

Together, these papers invite a rethinking of migration and the migration narrative and highlight the literary innovations of undocumented, migrant, queer, trans, and Black feminist writers.