Amelia Frank-Vitale
Amelia Frank-Vitale
An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Amelia Frank-Vitale has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions on movement. Her current book project, Leave, If You Can: Honduran Migration and a New Era of Deportation examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of mobility control - and the creative ways people challenge them - across scale and space.
PhD, Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2021
MA, Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2017
MA, Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs, American University, 2011
BA, Anthropology, Yale University, 2005
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Coyotes, Caravans, and the Central American Migrant Smuggling Continuum.” Trends in Organized Crime 26, no. 1 (2023): 64–79. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09480-z.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Writer’s Block.” Taking Note: Complexities and Ambiguities in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. American Ethnologist (Website), August 26, 2022. https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/taking-note/writers-block/.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Particular Social Group Trouble: Producing Categories of ‘Unworthy’ Asylum Seekers.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 46, no. 1 (2022): 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12181.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Rolling the Windows Up: On (Not) Researching Violence and Strategic Distance.” Geopolitics 26, no. 1 (January 5, 2021): 139–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1662396.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia, and Margarita Nuñez Chaim. “‘Lady Frijoles’: Las Caravanas Centroamericanas y El Poder de La Hípervisibilidad de La Migración Indocumentada.” EntreDiversidades. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 7, no. 1 (14) (2020): 37–61. https://doi.org/10.31644/ED.V7.N1.2020.A02.
Frank-Vitale, Amelia. “Stuck in Motion: Inhabiting the Space of Transit in Central American Migration.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2020): 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12465.