The Stateless of Exception: Queering Mexican Medical Migration to the U.S. in the AIDS-Era Ethnography and Expert Witness of Carter Wilson – An Essay

1. Introduction

It is a harrowing feature of twenty-first-century modernity that only the most vulnerable populations—predominantly Black and Brown men, women, and children, and including persons embracing minoritized sexualities and genders—are systematically denied entry to first-world nations pending immigration hearings and legal due process [1, 2]. In the analysis that follows, I cite the career and work of author and scholar Carter Wilson, who has sought since the 1960s to give greater visibility to displaced, gay, and queer Mexican migrant communities. Typically unnamed in popular accounts, defined only abstractly or in aggregate, these displaced individuals, I argue here, constitute one contemporary instance of the “stateless of exception,” a term that evokes Giorgio Agamben’s critique [3] of Nazi-era philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose philosophy provided legal-juridical justification for the genocidal policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War Two.

Wilson’s career-long advocacy, by contrast, has sought to raise consciousness about and to ameliorate the conditions of queer and gay Mexican migrants to the U.S. who continue to live and work under precarious conditions of statelessness. Publishing initially within the fields of creative writing and cultural anthropology, Wilson’s focus subsequently spread out after 1990 to include representations of queer, Mexican laboring migrants during the HIV/AIDS crisis. In his novels, fieldwork, and more recent expert testimony in selected immigration court cases, Wilson puts names and histories to specific, displaced individuals in their contemporary context. Below, I focus on and cross-read the selected accounts of Horacio, Rafael, and Bernardo, whose testimonies Wilson curated for the California court case between 2000 and 2010. Wilson’s helping to achieve greater visibility for these individuals’ stories, including securing scholarly representation across different subfields, matters because the “stateless of exception” is doubly queered and marginalized: as sexually different and as displaced from normative legal and sovereign networks (typically nationalist) of belonging.

Additionally, Wilson’s shifting scholarly trajectory offers a clear indication of how increasing empathy and affective responsiveness in the scholarship can counter broader moves objectifying the “stateless of exception” in social scientific and other institutionalizing (medical and legal) discourses. Evolving over time, Wilson’s scholarship models how work in the humanities and social sciences may become more impactful and relevant, even therapeutic, as scholars navigate the “contact zones” [4] of intercultural, translational, and disciplinary discourses affecting displaced and queered communities.

In the following, I begin by providing a brief background to Wilson’s scholarship in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis, followed by a literature review and methodology. These aim to show how Wilson’s work extends existing scholarship on HIV/queer migration, the weaponization of borders, and ethical approaches. With these wider frames in place, I then stage the analysis and interpretation of Wilson’s scholarship presented in two sections. First, I place focus upon Wilson’s award-winning Hidden in the Blood [5], followed by, second, his interventions in three selected immigration court cases (Horacio, Rafael, and Bernardo).

I conclude the essay with brief observations concerning the significance of Wilson’s advocacy, having shifted across genres—ranging from fiction writing to cultural anthropology to expert witness in legal settings. Such career-long shifts exemplify both necessary and welcome changes in scholarly positionality in the direction of a more engaged activism, which the ongoing crisis facing the stateless, gay, and queer demands of contemporary scholars pursuing more ethical and socially relevant scholarship in support of the human good.

2. Background

By the early 1990s, journalistic, academic, and legal discourses were documenting cases of Mexican laborers’ attempts at border crossings to the U.S. for the purposes of seeking work and livelihood and, occasionally, treatment for HIV. Since the advent of cheaper and more widely accessible HIV therapies, such high-risk attempts to cross the border (including seeking access for other kinds of medical care) have not abated. Traversing hardened geopolitical borders as well as policed boundaries in cis-normative discourses, including ever-shifting government policy pronouncements, queer and gay Mexican working-class men in more recent decades have found precious few moments of safety and belonging, alongside their straight compatriots, as “forced migrants” facing conditions of tremendous precariousness ([6], pp. 121–22).¹

In the following, preliminary findings document the (re)discovery of queer and gay men’s sexuality in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, despite the weaponization of the wider cross-border culture, situated well beyond the original frame (pathology) of AIDS-era treatments [5] and uneven attempts since then, in U.S. courts, to assist the gay, queer, and stateless. The in situ translation of these migration stories into English, in the legal context of over 60 immigration hearings in which Wilson assisted as an expert witness, also highlights the significant role of crisis translation—as interpreters worked alongside attorneys and expert witnesses to frame legal outcomes other than incarceration and deportation. Intersecting discourses of the sexual and juridical in selected courtroom cases demonstrate ongoing attempts to protect Mexican gay men from the weaponization of popular anti-immigrant attitudes, given the “failure” of regular language justice, problems of language access, as well as the threat of violence and assault within the U.S. “carceral ecosystem” ([6], pp. 123; 126–127).²

While seeming to grant greater visibility to the plight of gay workers from Mexico, such institutionalization of periodic medical and legal discourses in immigration legal contexts, reliant upon power asymmetries in language and representation, just as often erased the sexual histories of queer and gay Mexican migrant workers. Both strands in discourse, pathology becoming carceral, remain toxic for migrant, laboring Mexican men, women, and children, especially those with minoritized sexual orientations. Such legal definitions remain distinct from the reality of traveling individuals enjoying alternative sexual pleasures [7]. Elided in most official accounts, moreover, is the correlation joining “transnational” labor to sexual desire, with queer and gay laboring-desiring communities straddling national borders.

This approach further requires distinguishing period (Saidian) caricatures of the elite, literate, and urbane (usually white) gay traveler who can well afford “vacation cruises” [8] from the forced and precarious itineraries of Mexican gay men, lesbian women, and transgender persons of color whose exported labor, distinct from their declared sexual orientation(s), remains a key pillar of the American economy and who, accordingly, cannot currently afford not to travel to the U.S. for work. The presence of these gay and queer Mexican laboring communities has persisted despite U.S. state and federal agencies remaining studiously deaf to the possibility of there being queerness among the ranks of transnational Mexican labor as a whole.

That gay and lesbian men and women with HIV disease constituted a minority persecuted in their home country of origin, outside the U.S., was established by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as a procedural precedent for the granting of asylum in 1994. The procedural precedent was extended by action of the then Attorney General, Janet Reno, and implemented by the U.S. Department of Justice (the DOJ) to include all potential asylum seekers with the disease that same year.³

However, despite these procedural gains, the fact that undocumented migrants among Mexican sexual minorities could now apply for asylum based on their sexual identity or illness was not widely publicized beyond U.S. immigration legal circles. The new precedent was viewed as a practical exigency, which had the effect of occluding asylum applicants’ sexuality in favor of pursuing material grounds for success for an asylum bid on grounds, in individual cases, other than the by-now-downplayed appellant’s persecuted sexual minority status. In a circular logic, the U.S. Department of State promptly—and, as it was subsequently proven, hastily—then began producing sponsored “country condition” human rights reports indicating that persecution of gay men, including HIV patients, was on the decline in Mexico.⁴

As a rule, asylum in U.S. federal immigration courts is decided on a case-by-case basis. Court procedure, not adherence to case precedent, applies in most hearings except in the relatively rare instance where a distinct ruling from the DOJ’s Board of Immigration Appeals offers a strong path for the presiding judge to follow. There often followed the situation—ironic, were the outcomes not so potentially devastating—where DOJ immigration lawyers regularly contested asylum for gay or HIV-positive undocumented men before a hearing judge, claiming insufficient proof that they had suffered persecution or feared for their lives if returned to Mexico.

Wallace offers 2021 data indicating that 250,000 people were incarcerated in over 200 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails ([6], p. 121). In the context of great precarity and systemic vulnerability, LGBTQ+ individuals amount to an even more threatened subset. And at this writing, new powers afforded by U.S. executive order threaten these communities with unprecedented further harm following the widespread denial of due process.

In the first instance, academic, medical, and legal professionals have continued to attempt to serve these vulnerable would-be immigrant populations, case by case, irrespective of sexual orientation, on a pro bono or “need blind” basis. Equally, the U.S. MPP as well as Title 42 (“Remain in Mexico”) policies purportedly did not discriminate on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, even as they were expressly designed to keep migrants from entering. Negotiated between the U.S. and Mexico, MPP and Title 42 were enacted presumably to reduce the stress upon the Mexican government as gatekeeper of onward petitions for asylum in the U.S.⁵ It has also created new types of stresses facing migrant communities. For example:

Moreover, to the extent that they have been permitted at all, queer and gay crossings into the U.S. have proven to be even more deadly and acquire added urgency exacerbated by the differential treatment accorded to the “debility” of queer, gay, and transgender petitioners from Latin America, including Black, Afro-Caribbeans, minoritized sexual and gendered identities, and other non-cis-normative immigrants. De la Garza argues that “borderlands toxicity” is particularly virulent and deadly for these groups because the “victimization of transgender people [inhabits] the lacuna surrounding violence directed at disabled, stateless, and transgender people of color by the state” on both sides of the border ([9], p. 95). Wallace [6] concurs that the “particular vulnerability” LGBTQ+ immigrants face derives from compounding “intersectional” predicaments of forced migration, homophobia, and transphobia, making them “acutely susceptible to systemic and linguistic violence and harm” (pp. 123–24), a point to which I will return in the overview analysis of three of Wilson’s cases described later.

3. Methodology

The research methodology is genre-based and qualitative, involving the narrative analysis and comparison of Wilson’s participant-ethnography Hidden in the Blood [5] with the more recent discovery of selected immigration court case data Wilson gathered from the testimonies of queer and gay Mexican immigrants deposed in an institutional setting before 2010.

The cross-reading and interpretation of these different genres, the anthropological method having informed Wilson’s eventual shaping of legally actionable narratives as an expert witness, underscores how humanities and social science scholars can embrace a more socially impactful agency. Beyond documenting such shifts, Wilson’s example also brought greater visibility, scope of action, and hence institutional support to members of displaced and sexually minoritized communities.

4. Literature review

This longitudinal study, linking elements of Wilson’s work across a twenty-year period, benefits from the reframing of more recent advocacy scholarship in the fields of migration studies and crisis translation. These contemporary field specializations usefully sharpen and render more complex the prior (largely text-based and qualitative) approaches to participant-observer ethnography that Wilson has adopted and modified throughout his career. He was trained in this older tradition, even as he has consistently sought greater engagement and alignment with non-relativist approaches and truth-telling [10, 11] when documenting the everyday life of gay and queer Mexican men in the Yucatán and subsequently, their immigrant experiences in the U.S.

More recent scholarship in crisis translation and migration studies has documented how migrants (once subpoenaed, processed, or detained) face increasing challenges when managing perceived linguistic and translational deficits in institutional settings [12]. Minoritized immigrants often struggle to acquire (and to navigate) “multiplex” personas, both inside and outside privileged language discourses, including the need to manage specific online operations required by powerful institutional regimes [13].

This article seeks to correlate the text-based approaches of Wilson’s older participant-observer method with contemporary scholarship of crisis translation and migration studies. In so doing, I would extend existing work on translation studies, the weaponization of borders, and ethical approaches to migration in order to rebut, following Wilson’s example, the “experientially distancing” effects of medical, legal, and government policy discourse (a point to which I return in the conclusion). Expert witnesses, often de facto crisis translators themselves, are on the frontlines when seeking to mitigate the harmful effects of mistranslations in institutional contexts.

As required by federal law, U.S. immigration courts offer some translation services but have trouble finding adequate translators for the many languages spoken by today’s migrants.⁶ Distinct from practitioners, occasional translators such as Wilson have responded actively to address the significant language barriers similar to those faced by the asylum seekers in this study. More experienced community translators have likewise intervened to facilitate individual, family, and community migration journeys. In an influential study, Karpinski focused upon women migrants whose autobiographies, in subsequent translation, sought to “borrow tongues,” enabling “subject-positions that can be described as translative, transnational, border-crossing, migratory, fluid, and contradictory. […avoiding] the exclusionary logic of the binary, toward the spaces in-between where multiple transformations can and do take place” ([14], p. 5).

The deconstructive tone of Karpinski’s language from over a decade ago has ceded ground to the urgency of translational and interpreting work facing today’s border crisis. Human migrants are presently facing “cascading crises” of consequence and impact—such as war, inter-ethnic and inter-faith conflicts, and natural disasters—any of which require, according to Ciribuco et al. [15], “life and death” translational acts. In these contexts, effective crisis translation would seek to mitigate the harmful effects of miscommunication, to take down linguistic barriers to informational access, and to tackle language inequalities derived from monolingualism constructively—all of which impede the ready provision of support for minoritized language groups in disaster situations ([15], pp. 89–90).

Operating in border zones all over the globe, translator-advocate practitioners are not only seeking to uncover the stories of migration but also to facilitate their ready use and application in institutional contexts. For the purposes of our analysis, crisis translation and the migrating communities it serves are effectively (if unevenly) interoperable phenomena; they become more or less achievable in specific contexts (such as the U.S. immigration courtroom) depending upon the degree of vulnerability faced as well as the effectiveness of institutional response. Maher et al. [16] note that:

Respond Crisis Translation [17] duly provides translational services in 100 languages spoken by asylum seekers, including Indigenous languages. Added, however, to this welcome resourcing and supply of linguistic diversity—not the problem but the “solution” to uneven linguistic access attributed to structural monolingualism ([15], pp. 88, 91)—is an additional layer of complexity derived from translating everyday speech and words into what Wilson called “legalese,” affecting displaced persons without training yet needing to navigate confusing and difficult legal procedures anyway.

The lack of adequate translation services often leads to misunderstandings and wrongful denials of asylum claims. For instance, a recent study by Syracuse University [18] found that migrants are more likely to be denied asylum if they speak an uncommon language. Crisis translation first responders have also been working to mobilize interpreters to close these language gaps, including correlating to age-specific populations, so that asylum seekers can access basic legal and medical care while their cases await often-lengthy due process [19]. This approach underscores the importance of language support in the asylum process to prevent systemic disadvantages for non-English speakers.

If successful, medical asylum cases interact with crisis translation procedurally, typically involving the granting of asylum based on the health conditions of the asylum seekers. This approach recognizes that individuals with serious medical conditions may face persecution or lack adequate healthcare in their home countries. A report by the National Immigration Forum [20] discusses Mexico’s asylum system, noting that while the legal framework strives to be inclusive, the current system faces challenges such as underfunding and a growing number of asylum applications, no doubt exacerbated by the U.S. MPP as well as the Title 42 (“Remain in Mexico”) agreement. The report also highlights that refugees in Mexico, once legally recognized, may be eligible to apply for the right to work, healthcare, education, and family reunification. However, the system is overwhelmed by the recent U.S. policy changes detailed above, leading to long wait times and poor-quality decision-making by individuals and the institutions designed to serve them.

This contemporary crisis—including stories of migration, its justification based upon medical need, and the uneven access to institutional care and support for displaced persons—has much older origins in the gay and queer community dating from the HIV crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as documented by Wilson’s ethnography, Hidden in the Blood.

Documenting this shift in scholarly discourse, from ethnographic anecdote in Hidden in the Blood to found legal artifacts in three asylum court cases—Horacio, Rafael, and Bernardo—was a key outcome of the ensuing analysis. The juxtaposition of the three selected court cases, making up an everyday anthropology of migrant Mexican gay and queer life, allowed the charting of findings in one narrative arc linking different experiences and outcomes over time. Once brought together, individual court cases revealed commonalities in affect and story, which highlighted new vulnerabilities for these men and their communities facing the bright glare of state power long after the perceived arrival of HIV/AIDS in the Yucatán decades earlier.

5. 1990–1995: Hidden in the blood

Well south of the U.S. border, on the Yucatán peninsula, HIV cases were appearing before doctors in the provincial capital, Mérida, in ever greater numbers beginning in the late 1980s. The first author of this essay, Carter Wilson, observed the emergence of the disease among rural Mexican men, gay, bisexual, and straight, by avoiding the amplified effect of pathology, hysteria, or projected deviance among mainstream, straight North Americans. (Most early newspaper stories about migrants from Mexico and those returning home were “scare journalism” and heavily uninformed.) Instead, in his Hidden in the Blood [5], Wilson wrote of the shifting status of the affected men, like the perspective of their North American observer, as mobile signifiers (as yet little understood) of hope, loss, and transgression in search of health and recovery: “Alejandro always introduces me as Carter, but Russell also notices that I sometimes refer to myself as Carlos, so he opts for calling me Charlie.” (16)

The diffidence of the narrator, like the shifting nomenclature, is suggestive. His own voice and agency in telling the story of AIDS south of the border will slip in and out in the telling, precisely because HIV, also, cannot discriminate in the direction of so-called normalcy or deviance. It simply kills its randomized target if left unprevented and untreated. Wilson’s voice is delicate, negotiating multiple signs of identity in order to cross different fields of cultural inquiry—social, cultural, ethnographic, statistical, and political. His witness must be as motile as his traveling subjects if he is to present SIDA/AIDS capably as a pressing issue on both sides of the border. Such multiplicity and mobility of AIDS-era discourse cues the significance, also, of the period forces that sought to isolate and contain its perceived threats as “external”—by denying access to Mexican men with the disease to the American health care system and its then-inaccessible therapies.

Hence, Wilson’s presence, in detailing the clinical consultations at the Mérida clinic, is, at one remove, both observant and comforting. His ethnography triangulates the doctor-patient relationship by offering a different “bedside manner,” a different doctoring in discourse for the transnational AIDS era at the height of the ravages of the disease and its devastating impacts—largely, although hardly exclusively, on gay and queer men.

Wilson is mindful of his own intrusion upon the intimacy of the doctor-patient relationship. Proposing a metaphor, Wilson describes it to the clinician, Alejandro Guerrero Flores: “More or less, I’d imagine, the same way a good physician conducts the interview with a patient” (28). “Not always,” the doctor replies and proceeds to tell Wilson about a client, Roberto, who denied having sex with other men and claimed to have been exposed to HIV through a “needle stick” (29). Guerrero tells Roberto that he would, in such a case, be one of the few people in the world to have been so infected. Wilson queries Guerrero further:

Wilson recounts a second anecdote from another clinician who tells him, “In this job you always have to forgive people. Otherwise the next time they screw up they’ll hide it from you which can only make things worse.” (13)

Forgiving sexuality: priest-like, the Mérida doctors and clinicians do not only offer treatment for HIV but also the support of a caring interlocutor and momentary absolution—if not from illness or death, then from shame. And, for his part, Wilson duly records the doctor’s recollections, conveying them onward to the reader. Beyond this brief glimpse, this description of the doctor-patient-anthropologist relationship does not bear heavy scrutiny in the text, because the HIV Social Security clinic in Mérida exists in the midst of an ideologically conservative medical community based upon hierarchy (to which, Wilson asserts, Guerrero Flores remains a remarkable exception). Within this framework, the clinic promotes the grassroots deputization of all reasonably well-qualified individuals in the effort against HIV: other doctors at the clinic, Wilson himself, former salesclerks, revisionist Roman Catholic priests, and, of course, the (often still sexually active) patients themselves.

Nor is Wilson’s access to the intimacy of the Mérida clinic, its patients, and their doctors to be taken for granted. His anthropological data-gathering will need to be deputized. In an interesting credentialing process, Wilson’s bona fides are rehearsed and then sent upstairs through to the top of the clinic’s hierarchy:

Guerrero and Wilson then go upstairs to meet the jefe:

Here we have the American anthropologist’s access secured under the doctor’s orders.

A decade later, Wilson’s own bona fides as an expert witness would also be queried in U.S. immigration hearings—often less sympathetically—by DOJ prosecutors arguing against asylum for petitioners. Back in Mérida, on the front lines of the Mexican AIDS crisis, Wilson’s anthropological distance from the crisis, including the local nuances that (for all his local expertise) he cannot upon a moment actually read or understand, affords and extends its own shelter; the humility he posits makes him trustworthy—not only to the doctors and patients at the T-I clinic but to the foreign (largely Anglophone) readership of Hidden in the Blood.⁷

Wilson politely demurs in the face of rendering the clinic’s patients’ sexual stories as spectacular or pathetic. He carefully avoids representations of non-Western cultures in the elegiac mode (such as Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques). Wilson’s is accordingly an epistemologically compensatory text that reveals the shortcomings and “slippages” of the anthropological discipline:

Constituting a “major way,” a means of egress or outlet distinct from formal anthropology, such “slippage” invests the other players in Wilson’s narrative—Guerrero, the T-I clinic, the second doctor Russell, and the many SIDA [HIV/AIDS] patients—as agents of their own proper account. Wilson’s patient-centered advocacy clearly presents a model for discursive rehabilitation within any institution—a point to which, as in the immigration courtroom, we will return—as precisely that which is needed to translate discourses of official ignorance and toxicity into effective cultural and institutional support for minoritized, transnational gay and queer communities in need of support.

The stakes could not be any higher; yet they always have been for HIV/AIDS patients and asylum seekers, citing AIDS as justification for the medical care they are seeking. Interestingly, in Hidden in the Blood, Wilson captures testimonios of AIDS patients grappling with the disease at its source, prior to the moment of their catchment in the English language, prior to their objectification in a legal discourse, and prior to their saying the difficult goodbyes before heading north.

Wilson’s work is just as notable for its clear-sightedness, its refusal to engage in off-putting sympathy at a distance. Although set mostly in an AIDS clinic, Wilson never adopts the clinical tone, not even that of his fellow academician friend, the eminent cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo: “Rather than speaking of death in general, one must consider the subject’s position within a field of social relations in order to grasp one’s emotional experience” (Rosaldo 2). In Hidden in the Blood, sorrow for the dying is commuted into rage on behalf of gay and queer survival, and emotion emerges as a legitimate marker of cultural and anthropological relevance.

Death, emotions, and rage, followed by an incurable sadness: Wilson’s anthropological method documents all of these, largely in the absence of judgment. But his anthropological anti-method is reliably attended by professionally trained discernment. As we have seen, Hidden in the Blood consists primarily of the ethnography of a clinical situation. Yet the work struggles capably against its own moral and ethical urge to be redemptive, to (over)dramatize the life-and-death scene of the AIDS patient as both more and less than “an anthropology.” It is in the negotiation with (and ultimate rejection of) narrative authority that Wilson’s text most clearly gestures at his engagement with those around him, his making contact with the cultural and language differences in his midst. Where he finds power, he circumscribes it with rehabilitative sympathy and love.

Wilson’s work also translates the Mérida-based idiom of SIDA [HIV/AIDS] into English for an American readership. Consequently, Wilson’s first-person narrative and modest self-presentation nicely stage the ebb and flow of AIDS cultural production in México, off-stage for most readers of English, without unduly privileging American hegemony. In early Mexican accounts, AIDS was proclaimed a foreign thing brought by U.S. gay tourists. Subsequent accounts stigmatized migrants returning home for infecting their neighbors. In Wilson’s narrative, HIV cannot be seen as an “alien” import from the States. Both nations must duly acknowledge a shared complicity for the spread of the disease, a collective admission that builds not from regret or shame but from the acknowledgment of different readings and enjoyments of passion and pleasure for everyone and their consequences.

Yet simply to underscore the humanity of AIDS treatments in clinical situations risks understatement of the substantial difficulties that face those who would embrace a gay-friendly cultural politics as of international scope and urgency. This cathartic process, the rendering clean of the social body via the excision of the toxic or diseased, has, at least since Socrates, been used against gays, the transgendered, and other different communities in the wars and programs that enforced the discursively acceptable within a cis-normative society.⁸

Al otro lado de la frontera, back in the “first world” of the U.S., recourse to a legal-juridical system committed to its own impartial statutory authority resulted in uneven outcomes—both for and against gay and queer applicants. On one hand, clients’ success or failure at gaining asylum can be seen as evidence of a sensitive, living, and probing deliberative process—presiding immigration judges who weighed the merits case by case and acted accordingly without prejudice. On the other hand, in some cases, judges’ personal prejudices showed in their questioning and in their decisions. With reference to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” however, the cases Wilson worked on also demonstrated the arbitrariness of legal-juridical decisions affecting the lives and destinies of differently sexual and gendered persons I call (adding a suffix to the fascist jurist Carl Schmitt’s term) the “stateless of exception.”⁹ In the cases sampled here, court rulings prioritized procedure over and against the dignity and difference of petitioning clients.

6. 2000–2010: Judging medical migration in three U.S. asylum court cases

Describing the emergence of “medicalization” and “legalization” discourses in a legal setting is a key outcome for the second part of this essay. Doing so required, first, prioritizing clients’ stories as, at origin, inclusive and personal in nature, and requiring specific rendering in statements for the court. Such statements, once deemed admissible, documented the kinds of persecution the petitioning clients had experienced as gay men or as people with HIV disease from Mexico, as well as their fears for themselves should they be returned to their home country.

In the 60 or more cases in which Carter Wilson served as an expert witness, deposed to report on conditions for sexual minorities in Mexico, the client often learned about the possibility of asylum from counselors at a free, local HIV-disease clinic, stress over being deported clearly having its effect on his health. Connected by clinic staff to legal representation, individual clients were encouraged to come out of the shadow world of migrants without papers and to declare themselves to the U.S. government in order to take the chance they could gain asylum. Virtually from the beginning of what inevitably became a lengthy delay awaiting due process (cases often decided more than 5 years after their initial submission), many clients entered a new world marked at the same time not only by their “medicalization” but also by their “legalization” in the sense of their becoming subject to a legal process in a country where they lacked “status.”¹⁰

In cases where asylum as a member of a persecuted minority in one’s home country is the issue, the petitioner’s personal history statement becomes a critical document. These accounts are usually framed by attorneys based on interviews with the client. Lawyers Wilson worked with reported that the process was often psychologically very hard on clients. They were being asked to bring forth memories of degrading incidents from throughout their lives, repressed memories, and things they never told others, now given over to virtual strangers in a law office conference room against a future hearing in a federal system clearly prejudiced against them. At times, clients could not complete the deposition process in a single session, and additional interviews were required once clients had composed themselves and could continue. Critics of this process claim that lawyers sometimes fabricate aspects of their clients’ statements in order to bring them into conformity with the requisites for asylum eligibility.

A number of times when the language of the history became “legalese,” Wilson had to ask attorneys to return to a (translated) version of the client’s own speech. However, a review of over 60 personal histories revealed a strongly consistent pattern of abuse and degradation, often beginning in childhood, when the client first exhibited interest in things not considered “macho” by conventional Mexican standards—boys not liking sports, having more friendships with girls than other boys, and being mandilones (tied to their mothers’ aprons). Outside the home, teachers and priests, whom you would hope could be looked to for approval or guidance, were instead generally disapproving and censorious. Sexual experience for the child often began early—at seven or eight—at the hands of male relatives, brothers, cousins, and uncles in situations that were rape by any legal definition. Once discovered, the clients were routinely blamed by their families for instigating such “abnormal” behaviors. In a country such as Mexico, where employment is difficult to find and very often gained through family connections, the child who would become gay was rejected and often felt the need to flee the family entirely early in adolescence.

Street violence against gays—being beaten up opportunistically because you were perceived to be homosexual—only began to be documented officially in Mexico after the ¹¹establishment of the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission) in 1990.¹² But even then, it was Alejandro Brito, editor of the AIDS supplement “Letra S” of the daily La Jornada, and other gay activists who were responsible for reckoning the number of gay murders nationally by one-by-one examination of regional newspaper accounts. Non-mortal crimes against homosexuals went completely unrecorded. Eventually, the CNDH asked the public to report crimes against gays, but there were few submissions. In U.S. immigration courts, judges sometimes opined that the petitioner had failed to meet the standard for asylum because he had no record of having reported crimes against him to police. What gay men would uniformly tell you was that police were among the worst abusers, and to single yourself out to them was a sure way to increase your serious risk of bodily harm, including rape.

In the case of persecution of people with HIV disease, there is a fairly early account of brutal attacks on those with SIDA (HIV/AIDS) or on men thought to be ill [21]. These encounters, some of them deadly, were fueled by twin factors: deep fear of a malady still not under control and homophobia. The virulence of the attacks and the rejections—loss of employment, friends, family, and support—were not much different from the same kinds of responses to AIDS in the U.S. a few years earlier.

Most gay clients crossed the border illegally in order to find work, be with a partner, and/or live as “out” gay men in a more conducive social atmosphere. If they discovered they were HIV-positive, it generally came as a surprise to them that the free clinics (established mostly by gays and lesbians in large U.S. cities) provided health services, including expensive medications, without cost, and that they were open to all, no requirement of citizenship needed (unlike some hospitals, which used threats of exposure to “la Migra,” immigration enforcement officers, as a way to keep from having to treat uninsured undocumented workers). Toward the end of the 1990s, a U.S. public health official estimated that a third of HIV-positive clients being treated in free clinics in Los Angeles, California, were without papers.

The following analysis treats three court cases—Horacio, Rafael, and Bernardo—individually. However, our intention is to view them integrally—as a complex of potential features and outcomes, which reflect the affordances (and just as often the constraints) the “conditioning” of U.S. federal legal process required of these personal testimonies as a unique corpus, a genre, making gay and queer migrant narratives cohere as legal discovery.

To preserve the anonymity of clients, names and certain facts not pertinent to an understanding of the case have been changed.

7. Conclusion

In a journal review covering 10 years of books about HIV/AIDS, medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer turns from public policy work to Wilson’s Hidden in the Blood:

Farmer’s phrase “experience-distant” is poignant. Juxtaposing both contexts for Wilson’s work documented in this essay, the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s alongside the more recent immigration hearings of ICE detainees, highlights the key centrality of discourse discovery at an everyday level distinct from “experientially distant” academic or policy pronouncements. Capturing the immediacy and integrity of gay and queer Mexican detainees’ stories—distinct from incarcerating their bodies—remains critically important work for scholars, especially in legal and medical contexts, on behalf of those whose words are regularly misunderstood (and, sometimes, invidiously misconstrued) backed by the projection of otherwise blind institutional power.

In this context, Wilson asked me a series of compelling and troubling questions as I approached him about writing this article: How often are we aware of how a person’s actual words are what matter? And how often do the professional discourses—medical, legal, academic—obscure what is actually happening?

Thanks to the career-long efforts of Carter Wilson, we have been made more aware of “what is actually happening” to those gay and queer Mexican migrants, making up only one small segment of those migrating individuals worldwide—the “stateless of exception”—and years prior to the maximal weaponization of anti-immigrant hostility during the second Trump administration, which has only multiplied the stresses placed upon them in our contemporary moment.

Despite apparent differences, the cases of Horacio, Bernardo, and Bernardo all demonstrate aspects in common: the variability (often scarcity) of adequate medical treatment in Mexico, which created push factors for life-saving treatment in the U.S. (Horacio); abusive back-stories, including family neglect and sexual violence, perpetrated against gay and queer Mexican men compelling them to flee (Rafael, Bernardo); the danger of actual border crossings, and the likelihood of deportation, in an increasingly hostile environment (Horacio, Rafael, Bernardo); the invasiveness and dehumanizing treatment of the carceral regime prior to, and during, legal proceedings on U.S. soil (Rafael, Bernardo); the emotional precarity and fright of these experiences for all.

Taken together, these data gathered by Wilson all describe the extreme vulnerability of an asylum petitioner in the arms of a legal system of which he or she (or they) has virtually zero previous knowledge. The job of detainees’ attorneys, their translators, and the detainees themselves as witnesses is persuasion. But, again, Wilson asked me, which is more enlightening in this contemporary context of border-crossing crisis: how people conceive of things at the policy-implementation level or how they actually speak through and respond to them? What happens when migrants and detainees may not even be listened to at all? Given all the borrowing of culture, food, and language from both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, Wilson remains alternately angered and amused by the lack of translational sensitivity accorded to queer and gay Mexican migrants on the U.S. side of the border.¹³

One defining example Wilson reported to me:

Wilson’s experiences in two separate arenas—an AIDS clinic in Yucatán and as an expert witness in U.S. immigration courts—indicate a strong prejudice in favor of the value of ordinary and actually employed language in critical situations where one’s health or life is at stake.

The contemporary impact of Wilson’s career-long example upon practitioners and academics alike amounts to modeling how the handling and treatment of the personal migration narratives of queer and gay Mexican migrants can effectively motivate the personalization of otherwise dehumanizing and objectifying institutional discourses. In practice, such a methodology is not only recuperative but therapeutic—as the work of cultural anthropologists, crisis translators, and analysts of human migration aligns in the “contact zone” and when seeking to alleviate the suffering of named individuals with unique stories distinct from statistical aggregates. If successful, these findings should not only be portable for scholars working in other academic disciplines; they should be made useful for others in the courtrooms, one case at a time.

Notes

¹ Trump-era policies, left largely intact by the Biden administration, off-shored legal proceedings for asylum seekers, either by mandating commencement of legal process in Mexico prior to entry (Migrant Protection Protocols [MPP] of December 2018, also known informally as “Remain in Mexico”) or by denying outright immigration applications of all persons seeking to enter the US from third-party nations (Asylum Ban 2.0 of July 2019). See [22, 23, 24].

² For the purposes of this article, our selected data involved court advocacy on behalf of queer and gay men petitioners prior to 2015. The notorious and paradigmatic case of statelessness, injustice, and “debility” under the current carceral regime, however, involved the plight, incarceration, reported abuse, and eventual death (in ICE custody on 25 May 2018) of an HIV-positive, transgender woman from Honduras, Roxsana Hernández. As unjust and unacceptable as the current situation remains for Mexican and other Latin American asylum seekers, it is that much more precarious and fraught for women and children. See [9].

³ See the finding in the “Matter of Toboso-Alfonso” (20 I&N Dec. 819). First argued in 1990 and designated as precedent in 1994, the case established sexual orientation as “membership in a particular social group” and paved the way for asylum based on sexual orientation. Toboso-Alfonso was a gay man from Cuba who suffered various abuses at the hands of his government, including being forced to participate in a labor camp. Also, “Ruling Backs Homosexuals on Asylum,” New York Times, 17 June 1994. See also Ref. [25].

⁴ See Ref. [26].

⁵ According to David Wilson, MPP and Title 42 are “completely different policy” although they have the same effect. (Personal communication, 8 March 2025). Ever larger numbers of Latin American medical asylum seekers have likewise been displaced along the U.S.-Mexico border (housed in temporary migrant camps, such as Matamoros), where they have received clinical attention as far as the provision allows while awaiting immigration due process indefinitely via the Mexican and U.S. authorities. See C. W. Reynolds et al. [27] and Cadwell et al. [28].

⁶ See Jaafari, “Immigration Courts Getting Lost in Translation.”

⁷Hidden in the Blood won the Ruth Benedict Prize, given annually by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists of the American Anthropology Association, in 1996. This award acknowledges excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.

⁸ Paula Treichler highlights the “epidemic of signification” in biomedical discourses: “So long as AIDS was seen as a battle for the body of the gay male… the biomedical establishment was not tremendously interested in it” (60) [29]. For a classical account of the longue durée of such destructive excisions of the mad, the diseased, and the deviant, see Foucault, Sexuality 144–50 [30].

⁹ See Agamben, Homo Sacer. Agamben’s critique of the “bare life,” formulated in the wake of the global government roll-back of human rights in response to the 2001 9/11 attacks, repurposed (so as to criticize) a key tenet of Nazi-era jurist Carl Schmitt: the “state of exception.” Schmitt used the “state of exception” concept to justify absolute (executive) authority wielded by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party over those deemed lacking sovereignty, hence inalienable rights to basic dignity and state protection. Schmitt’s concept provided key, juridical cover for the technocratic rulings that resulted in the Holocaust (shoah).

¹⁰ “Status” is defined as permission to dwell in a country. Types of U.S. status include “permanent resident,” “temporary resident,” “withholding of removal” (a stopgap measure), and citizenship itself. Acceptance of an asylum petition for review by the Citizenship and Immigration Services gives the petitioner “temporary visa” status.

¹¹ Interior Ministry, “Decreto por el que se crea la Comision Nacional de Derechos Humanos como un organo desconcentrado de la Secretaria de Gobernacion” [Decree by which the National Commission on Human Rights is created as a deconcentrated agency of the Interior Ministry], June 5, 1990

¹² Personal communication, Alejandro Brito Lemus. 6 March 2025.

¹³ Wilson reports that the gay HIV clinic workers at the T-1 Hospital in Mérida was very interested in the sexual proclivities of a handsome young volunteer but concluded sorrowfully that he “ni piche, ni cache, ni deja al bate” (i.e., “he does not pitch, does not catch, does not come up to bat”), almost entirely English-language borrowed words.