Vidal-Ortiz, ‘Death at the Border: Traces of Central American Migrant Trans Women’s Lives. Critical Sociology’, 2025

Vidal-Ortiz, S. (2025). Death at the Border: Traces of Central American Migrant Trans Women’s Lives. Critical Sociology, 0(0).

Abstract

This article seeks to extend the limits that death appears to posit, by tracing the lives, journeys, and deaths of two Central American transgender migrant women (Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez and Johana Medina León) who entered legal ports of entry, requested asylum (in 2018 and 2019), and died under or immediately after being in U.S. custody. Extending Queer Necropolitics’ use, I rely on the Sociology of the Trace to unearth an archive from disparate sources (news coverage, social media, legal reports and cases, responses by activists, and government sources). I focus on their quest for becoming—to be read as women, and their migratory/racialized experiences to be understood—for them to reach spaces where they could live in peace and acceptance. Using absent presences, I trace their lives through superfluous records of their deaths in order to connect to a sociology of the trace’s intent to represent lived experience, as mediated through structural forces.