Dr. Jorge Morales Cardiel

Q1. Who are you?

I´m from the working class of Guadalajara, Mexico. Since the primary education to my PhD, I have attended public schools and universities. It was thanks to my studies that I was able to get out of the increasingly violence settled in the streets of my neighbourhood. Another option would have been to migrate to the United States like several members of my family, something that in the end I did but thanks to the support received from different universities in Mexico, Spain, United States and Germany. Therefore, I continue to be a kind a wanderer who studies migration intrinsically from within.

Q2. What was your motivation for applying for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany?

The main motivation for apply for the FFVT, is because since the last workshop “Comparative Forced Migration and Refugee Studies – reflexive, postcolonial, international” I admired IMIS institution for their work, dedication and effort to comprehension towards the main issues to forced migrations and comparative studies of these communities of migrants. In addition, because Germany is one of the most respectful countries for the human’s rights of migrants. Something widely recognized in the first decades of this century with the arrival of forced migrants due to different armed conflicts in the peripheries of Europe, received with different degrees of protection corresponding to them.

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship?

I expect have a valuable exchange of the situation of the migrants around the world,  especially in the transit countries, go deeper into the political and economic changes, which are reflecting in the restrictive border controls of developing centres and in the growing network of human trafficking in these countries. In addition, to being able to share the experience gained in the empirical field, with my fieldwork done in migrant shelters in Mexico and in the last years, since the pandemic start, on the US-Mexican border. Without ruling out doing fieldwork in the new internal European transit countries.

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project?

My current FFVT project is focus in the differential experiences of forced displacement between two ethnic groups; garífuna and mestizo from Honduras. I think is innovate it because seeks to compare the differential migration strategies of two populations ethnically distinct but displaced from the same country. For it, I´ll identify forms of discrimination that put populations such as the Garifuna like a disadvantage or an advantage, compared to their mestizo fellow citizens. Highlighting the sociocultural resources that can benefit this Afro-American migrant population. In terms of reaching and assimilate faster their final destination United States, what I call "racial of bridges" or “ethnic bridges”.