ABSTRACT
After crossing the borders of nations, migrants and refugees often encounter racialized and gendered institutional and social boundaries in the places where they seek refuge. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Brazil on displaced persons from the Iraq and Syrian Civil Wars, this chapter examines how Muslim migrants and refugees navigate and are navigated by public policies under which populations in flux are defined, categorized, and governed. It considers the fissures in these policies as they apply to elderly and infirm refugees, on the one hand, and younger migrants within structures of education on the other and elucidates the manner in which essentialist ideas about gender, culture, and place are utilized in “managing” migrants and refugees to combat institutional shortcomings. It also traces the ways in which these resettled persons creatively and strategically challenge these constructions and harness rights within humanitarian and human rights regimes in Latin America’s largest democracy.
