A Working Group

Black. Migration. Houston. is a collaborative project - what we are calling a “working group” - focused on the unique issues faced by black LGBTQ+ migrants in Houston and the Gulf Coast region. It began in 2019 as a collaboration with the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project in support of their work nationally, exploring the possibilities of digital humanities and migration studies and circulating their national survey.. Today, we are a group of scholars, activists, and community members interested in learning with and from one another as we develop our own projects and create and design a resource and publish work online. As we share what we know we aim to educate ourselves further about the different experiences of black and queer migrants.

Some of us are migrants, some are not. Some of us are black, some are not. Some of us are queer, some are not. All of us share an interest in thinking about and responding to overlapping social issues around migration.

Our website will highlight university-based and community projects - including artists’ works - that are concerned with the identities and experiences of migrants to the region. We've been surprised to find that scholars doing research on migration often attempt to do so without an intersectional lens, rarely considering the needs and concerns of black LGBTQ+ migrants in the South. We’re starting this project blog to document all that we’re learning along the way. 

As a feminist project, B.M.H. leads us to ask better questions in our work and to hold one another to doing intersectional research. We’re able to share information and support one another in how to do research on sensitive topics and with communities that may or may not be our own. We’re also working to make our research and writing more accessible to the general public.

So far, just by meeting monthly on Zoom throughout the pandemic and sharing information and resources (via GoogleGroups, Notion, Teams, etc.), we’ve connected a lot of different people. We all come to the conversation from very different backgrounds, so with this process-oriented blog, w’ll share more about who we are as well. 

Who I am...

Rachel Afi Quinn with her father, Bernard K. Glover, in the Volta Region of Ghana.

I’m a first generation Ghanaian American of Jewish descent. I have many Ghanaian siblings who are migrants to the US and Canada, some are also in Texas.

I’m a black feminist cultural studies scholar based in Houston, Texas.

I’ve needed this space in which we center black and queer identity and experience, so I created it. B.M.H. has been a space for me to connect community members, artists, organizations and scholars in and across different campuses (UH, HCC, Rice) so that we can work together to better understand the impact of borders and detention centers on black queer migrants here in the Gulf Coast region. 

Because I believe that through education and black feminist collaborative work, we can create the society we want to live in, I have also been working across my university community to foster a culture of public scholarship through Imagining America @UH. You can find out more about the focus of my work at rachelafi.art. 

I leave you with a few of my favorite digital projects and archives:
Chicana Por Mi Raza
Dark Laboratory
Digital Schomburg
Feral Atlas
SNCC Digital Gateway