Community News submitted by: Lucia Capanema-Alvares, Universidade Federal Fluminense
Call for Papers: Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City
Special Issue: Latin America on the Move — The Right to Mobility, Migration, and to Stay
Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities across Latin America are navigating an era of profound spatial disruption. From the highland communities of the Andes and the forests of Amazonia to the urban peripheries of Mexico City, Lima, and São Paulo, indigenous peoples face intersecting pressures that simultaneously push them out of ancestral territories and deny them dignified belonging in urban spaces. This special issue invites scholars based in or working from Latin America to examine these dynamics through the lens of race, ethnicity, and urban life.
The last two decades have seen a dramatic acceleration of dispossession. Extractive industries, infrastructure megaprojects, tourism development, land speculation and climate-driven environmental change have displaced indigenous communities from rural territories they have inhabited for generations. At the same time, cities — long imagined as spaces of opportunity — have proven deeply ambivalent: sites of both refuge and exclusion, where indigenous migrants and Afrodiasporic communities confront racialized labor markets, linguistic barriers, inadequate housing, mobility restrictions and the erasure of cultural identity. More recently, the specter of gentrification has reached previously marginalized urban neighborhoods, displacing communities that had only recently built precarious roots in the city.
Yet these populations are not mere subjects of displacement. They are protagonists of resistance, negotiation, and claim-making. Movements for territorial autonomy, legal battles invoking the right to prior consultation, neighborhood collectives asserting the right to the city, and transnational migrant networks all testify to the political creativity with which communities respond to spatial injustice. This special issue seeks to honor that complexity.
We welcome contributions that engage, but are not limited to, the following themes concerning indigenous and Afrodiasporic populations:
- Territorial dispossession and the politics of staying
- Rural-to-urban and transnational migration
- Gentrification, urban displacement, and racialized housing markets
- Mobility, immobility, and the right to move freely and safely
- Bottom-up urbanism, place-making, and spatial belonging
- Legal and juridical frameworks around territorial rights
- Gender, generation, and the differential experiences of displacement
- Environmental displacement and climate mobility
- Intersections of indigeneity, race, and class in urban contexts
- Community-based and participatory methodologies in migration and urban research
This special issue prioritizes work produced by scholars and specialists on Latin America living anywhere in the world, affiliated with Latin American institutions or based in the region, and strongly encourages submissions that engage with community perspectives and decolonial/counter-colonial methodologies.
Please have your 300 words abstract sent to [email protected] and/or to [email protected]. no later than August 10, 2026. For formatting instructions, refer to
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=urec20
