About Us Yaatsil Guevara González
Junior Professor of “Migration and the Americas”
Affiliation: Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies - HCIAS
Co-operation: Faculty of Chemistry and Earth Sciences, Institute of Geography, Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA)
Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19326
Email: yaatsil.guevara(at)uni-heidelberg.de
Dr. Yaatsil Guevara González studied historical anthropology (Universidad Veracruzana) and regional studies (Instituto Mora) in Mexico. In 2022, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld.
From 2019 until 2021, she was the coordinator of the project “Misrecognition of Minorities in Europe”, funded by the VW Foundation and based at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Conflict and Violence Research (IKG) at Bielefeld University. From 2021 until 2022, she was the coordinator of the project “African Trajectories across Central America,” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and based at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (ifeas) at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. She is a board member of the German Network for Forced Migration Studies (Netzwerk Fluchtforschung e.V.). Since April 2023, she is the Junior Professor for “Migration and the Americas” at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS).
Research
Yaatsil Guevara González is an anthropologist and an ethnographer. Through her academic training, she has worked in diverse disciplines such as area studies, sociology of migration, and anthropology of everyday life. Her research focuses on forced migration flows across the Americas. She is interested in exploring how migratory regimes affect and are echoed in the everyday lives of migrants, as well as understanding the spatial connotations of irregularized migration. In her research, she studies migratory corridors as geopolitical connectors that help to better understand the south-north interdependencies across the Americas. She also investigates the social processes happening in the ‘in-between’ of irregularized cross-border mobility. The regional focus of her work is Ibero-America, particularly Central America, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S.
As junior professor at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies she is interested in developing and deepening three lines of research:
- Infrastructures and care economies
Where the main research question is what kind of care economies can be identified around irregular migration processes? How infrastructure development project affect migratory routes? How do (emerging) infrastructures entangle with migratory routes? What processes of racialization can be identified due to (im)mobility phenomena? - Geographies of intimacies and emotions
In this research line she explores the emerging social and affective relations that migrants create while being on the move to understand:
1) how social relations are experienced and organized, but also supported and managed
2) which roles such social relations play for migrants’ trajectories. - Place-making on the move
In this research line, she focuses on understanding how places are reshaped at local contexts through migrants’ temporary emplacements. Here, she wants to identify what kind of local conflicts or new kind of solidarities emerge from temporal emplacements while people are en route?
Research in Progress
Kinning-Practices among Chinese Migrants en route across the Americas
This collaborative project with Zhenwei Wang is funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Art within the frame of the “Margarete von Wrangell-Juniorprofessorinnen-Programm.” This research project primarily aims to examine new forms of ‘doing family’ through kinning and care practices along migration routes. The research will be implemented qualitatively for the first time and will involve the use of multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography.
GRACE (Growing and ageing in the shadows). Undocumented children and elderly migrants in European cities
The goal of this project is to explore health needs and access to care of undocumented children and elderly migrnats in Europan cities. It is comprised by 6 academic partners (Universities from Heidelberg, Geneva, Milano, Copenhagen, Prague and Paris Sorbonne). It is coordinated by the Geneva University and it is funded from July 2025 to June 2026 by the 4EU+ Initiative. A final conference will take place in May 2026 during the Geneva Health Forum. The team of Heidelberg University: Prof. Dr. Kayvan Bozorgmehr, Dr. Veronika Wiemker, Shasha Lin, and Manuela Orjuela-Grimm.
Sobreviviendo a la necropolítica del refugio: La espera como estrategia de fuga y desaliento en las personas migrantes en tránsito por México y Costa Rica
This collaborative project with Carmen Fernández-Casanueva (CIESAS-Sureste, Mexico) is funded by the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS) as part of its “Transatlantic Tandem” program. The project is run in Mexico and Costa Rica and parts from two central assumptions: a) The asylum policy in Mexico and Costa Rica has become a necropolitical mechanism, beyond a policy to “safeguard lives,” and b) Consequently, the uncertain and prolonged conditions of waiting to which asylum seekers are suppressed have an ambivalent nature: On one hand, waiting creates platforms and strategies of flight, and, on the other hand, it generates strategies of discouragement.
- Activities within the framework of this research project (online): CALAS Conference. March 21, 2023. Location: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central. Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica.
Recent Publications
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Recent Presentations and Media Contributions
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Participation in an online dialogue, organized by the Universidad de Costa Rica and the HCIAS. April 3, 2025. |
Yaatsil Guevara González' Team
Research Associates
- Zhenwei Wang: „Kinning-Practices among Chinese Migrants en route across the Americas.“ With funding by the “Margerete von Wrangell-Juniorprofessorinnen-Programms” of the Ministry of Science, Research and Art of the state of Baden-Württemberg (MWK).
Supervision of Doctoral Dissertation Projects
- Anthony Meluso: “Impacts of Entrepreneurial Development on Wellbeing - A case study in Alamosa, Colorado (USA)”. Heidelberg University (Fakulty of Chemistry and Geosciences). Graduiertenkolleg “Authority & Trust” (HCA).
- Blas de la Jara Plaza: On dynamics of political coalitions and memory endeavors within non-cisgender activisms in Peru. Heidelberg University (Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences).
- Marcial Marín: “Sequels of Decentralisation: An Interdisciplinary Study on the Effects of Deconcentration of Power on Governance and Citizen Participation in Iberoamerica”. Heidelberg University (Faculty of Chemistry and Geosciences).
Teaching
Summer Semester 2025
- Anthropologies of Care
- Gender, Food, Migration: An intersectional approach
- Introduction to qualitative methods
Contact
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yaatsil Guevara
Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies | HCIAS
Brunnengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg
Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19326
Email: yaatsil.guevara(at)uni-heidelberg.de
Visiting address:
Brunnengasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg
Room 107 (3012.01.107)
Office Hours
By appointment only