While anthropological studies have warned about not reproducing the “pornographics
of violence”, this essay juxtaposes media and academic narratives of migrant death
prior to and during the global COVID-19 pandemic as examples of what I call the
fetish of migrant suffering. For scholars of the necropolitics of migration in the US,
one of the most surreal dimensions of the pandemic was to witness the mainstream
media’s rush to cover migrant Covid deaths and the difficulties that their loved ones
faced when attempting to repatriate their remains to their homelands, an issue that
diasporas have faced for generations. How does one ethically (and critically) gather,
render and do justice to these stories of Mexican migration? How might one politically
accompany migrants and their kin as they navigate the open wound that is their
state-imposed (im)mobility, without fetishizing migrant suffering in the process? And,
just as importantly, to what political end? In response to these polemics, I propose
“necro-ethnography” as an epistemological, ontological and politico-ethical framework
to theorize the experiences of migrants whose conditions of life and death have been
impinged upon and eroded by state power and its bureaucracies of migrant suffering.
I conclude by offering a final testimonio of migrant loss during the pandemic to
illustrate how necro-ethnography represents long-term (indeed lifelong), deeply
personal and political forms of accompaniment, witness and praxis based on my
fictive kin ties of compadrazgo with transnational migrant communities.
