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

This presentation 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, I examine 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’—I show 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, I foreground its capacity to enable relationality, agency, and situated forms of care within fragmented geographies of mobility. The presentation contributes to current debates in migration and infrastructure studies, emphasizing the entanglements of care, mobility, and materiality in transit contexts.