In September 2025, reports emerged of West African migrants shackled in straitjackets aboard a U.S.-organized deportation flight to Ghana, despite pending asylum claims. Just months earlier, an ICE raid in Camarillo, California detained more than 200 farmworkers, many with no criminal record, one of whom died while fleeing. Such events exemplify the binaries through which migrants are cast: humanitarian subjects of exclusion or criminal subjects of danger. Migration literature has long grappled with these binaries, often through testimonio, autobiography, and realist fiction that foreground narrative voice and documentary truth. While foundational, these genres risk narrowing the field’s understanding of how migration is represented, embodied, and circulated.

The “Material Lives, Migrant Worlds” panel builds on scholarship in multiethnic migrant literature that emphasizes how narratives of movement illuminate the racialized dynamics of U.S. empire, labor, and belonging (Saldívar; Lowe; Espiritu), while also responding to recent work in Central American, Latinx, Asian American, and refugee studies that foreground the embodied and material conditions of migration (Rodríguez; Arias; Abrego; Menjívar). Critics of aesthetics and embodiment show how migration is mediated, surveilled, and resisted, underscoring racial capitalism and affect (Brady; León; Guidotti-Hernández; Schmidt Camacho). In dialogue with these strands, our panel expands the archive of migration studies by centering cultural objects less frequently analyzed—graphic memoirs that foreground visuality and embodiment, eco-memoirs that situate migration within landscapes and foodways, and experimental refugee narratives that reimagine the city as a space of adaptation. These approaches move the field beyond narrative and testimony to emphasize the aesthetic, material, and ecological dimensions that structure migrant life.

Maite Urcaregui sets the terms of debate by examining how the visual representation of migrant children has become a paradoxical tool of public discourse. Images of children in cages at the U.S.–Mexico border circulated across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, raising awareness of inhumane policies. Yet while such images are mobilized for advocacy, children’s voices remain largely unacknowledged. Turning to graphic memoirs such as Alberto Ledesma’s Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017) and Pedro Martín’s Mexikid (2023), Urcaregui shows how these works embed scraps of paper, doodles, photographs, and family archives into their form. They reposition children as narrators and curators of lived experience. Building on Lara Saguisag’s account of comics and citizenship, Urcaregui shows how these memoirs make legible the material cultures of migrant childhood, expanding how we imagine belonging beyond reductive humanitarian or criminal frames.

Mary Xinyue Fu extends this focus on material life by turning to the eco-memoir to examine how diasporic belonging is rooted in food, plants, and urban space. Reading Ava Chin’s Eating Wildly as an Asian American eco-memoir that negotiates migration and resistance through urban foraging, Fu situates the text within exclusion from land ownership and legitimacy. She highlights the “double marginalization” whereby both migrants and urban natures are devalued, yet Chin reclaims New York’s parks, backyards, and vacant lots as dynamic spaces of ecological and cultural resilience. Salvaging plants dismissed as “weeds,” she recovers an Asian American eco-literacy marginalized by dominant environmental discourse and agribusiness logics. By centering foodways, plants, and urbanscapes as anchors of diasporic life, Fu reframes migration not as a disembodied condition but as a lived, material engagement with the world—an engagement that empowers both botanical agency and migrant communities to imagine resilient modes of dwelling.

Sofia Cavalcanti broadens the panel’s concern with materiality by examining how refugee literature reimagines the city as a site of adaptation and renewal. Reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), she notes that refugees are often cast as humanitarian subjects defined by exclusion or as disruptors marked for containment. Tan’s wordless graphic novel unsettles this binary by depicting a cityscape alien yet alive, populated with strange architectures, hybrid species, and affective bonds across difference. Drawing on material ecocriticism, Cavalcanti argues that animate and inanimate matter alike help tell the refugee’s story, opening an “alter-tale” of refugeedom as regenerative rather than solely traumatic. In Tan’s imagined city, intimacy with the nonhuman world allows the displaced subject to create new forms of home and relationality, shifting refugee literature from a discourse of loss to one of imaginative possibility.

Together, these papers bring into dialogue diverse voices—undocumented children, an Asian American eco-memoirist, and a refugee graphic novelist—to show how migrant narratives inscribe the textures of everyday life into their form. By centering the agency of children, women of color, and displaced communities, the panel challenges reductive frameworks of victimhood or criminality and highlights how literary and visual forms generate counter-narratives of belonging, resilience, and relationality across borders and ecologies.