I have always lived with the rigidity of borders. Growing up in post-communist Bulgaria, borders were the places that we literally could not cross. Or some of us could not. I remember as a child, waiting at the airport with my mom, a bouquet of flowers in my hand, for our family friend to arrive for her biannual vacation in Bulgaria. She had immigrated during communism and established herself as a concert pianist in New York. With the luxury of a foreign passport, she was able to travel freely. This privilege was not extended to most of us–who were not. My mom and I, together with a big crowd, waited behind a heavy metal gate that was higher than me, placed near the arrivals area. I remember that I was so little then I could slip between the metal bars and walk a few steps into the forbidden territory. Thrilled and vulnerable, and I would run back, huddling in my mom’s legs for safety. Back then, that metal fence was the border of my world.
Over the course of my life, these borders slowly opened up. First with the fall of the Berlin wall and the flow of people and goods that came with it. Then through my infatuation with US liberal arts colleges, as I perused their mission statements on a dial up internet connection from my home in Bulgaria. Located beyond the borders of my country, they stood for purported values of education and justice that I longed for. They were welcoming and promising a society beyond borders, where people of different backgrounds could build communities and futures together. I believed, then, that if I worked hard enough to get a scholarship, I would be able to transcend the hard borders of Bulgaria and inhabit that dream-like space. And so I did. And it was dream-like. For a time.
My elite education somewhat softened my experience of national borders. A variety of short-term visas attached to each of my educational institutions got me through a decade or so in the US. Each new status felt like an accomplishment, like a privilege. Two decades later, these very discourses would be blatantly used to repress people.
When I accepted my more stable status in North America as a privilege, I invested my energies in pushing down borders, knocking on doors that were closed. This intense focus and curiosity about unfolding horizons distracted me from other feelings that were inevitably a part of immigration: missing home or tending to these parts of my identity that had been fragmented by such a long absence from my country, from my native language, my family. During Covid, my regular rhythm of crossing borders to visit Bulgaria was interrupted. For the first time in my life, the border was impermeable in both directions. I felt more homesick, more nostalgic, more full of longing for Bulgaria. “The attachment to one’s land and origins goes hand in hand with the necessity to free oneself, along with the need to leave but also, at the same time, to return” writes Silvia Sarta (in Jacobsen 2024:45). Sometimes the key to returning home first requires chasing an ever-receding horizon.
I experienced borders at ports of entry, where I was at the whim of border agents and their moods, in the thickets of intentionally opaque bureaucracy, aimed to exhaust, confuse, and ultimately force you to give up. I came to understand that borders were not only material. They could be felt in my accent and in the assumptions about me and my knowledge of English. They could be felt in the kind of car a fellow student drove, in where their parents took them on vacation. They could be felt in my inability to ask for and rely on help in a mainstream culture that valued self-sufficiency. They could be felt in other people’s awareness of their rights. They could be felt in the absence of intergenerational wealth, as my mom’s modest savings evaporated when transposed to the strong North American currency. They could be felt in how much of myself remained invisible when interacting with others, and in how the burden of translation, of bridging, usually fell exclusively onto me. They could be felt in having to build social networks from scratch. They would mainly be felt in the menacing expiration date of each visa, a firm future deadline that would force me out of the country I was building homes in.
It is from this point of embodied knowledge that I approach my ethnographic studies of Latinx artists in LA, some of them undocumented. They experience the menacing power of the border on a daily basis (see Anzaldua 1987): through fear of deportation, the gap between English and Spanish, the complexity of identity fragmented by immigration. What amazed me about the people I encountered was the extraordinary trust and hope they put in the power of community. In the absence of state and institutionally guaranteed protections, people took care of one another, what Dean Spade calls “mutual aid” (2020). Mutual aid are the efforts to support one another in community in times of need, filling a void left by states and institutions. Mutual aid is lending one’s energy to another in greater need. In LA, I observed mutual aid efforts surface in times of pronounced disaster: COVID-19, the LA fires of 2025, pro-Palestinian protests on LA college campuses. Mutual aid is practiced primarily by people on the peripheries–those discriminated against, those without enough money to secure privatized solutions to their needs (Benjamin 2024). I saw mutual aid in a small, queer and women-owned business that opened in East LA with the idea of supporting local farmers and providing good quality food to communities living in “food deserts.” It was also mutual aid when this business went bankrupt, and it offered the last of its produce to firefighters in the LA fires. People summoned mutual aid to stitch communities back together when violence tore them apart. While this violence was not directly traceable to the border, it was refracted through the logics of the border, in how it categorizes and differentiates between people.
In many ways, the LA I got to know felt like home. I was raised in the spirit of mutual aid, where friends and families supported one another. This system of support was born during communism and continued in its wake. The muscles it’s built on remain to this day, and habits of reciprocity and care continue to sustain us, compensating for broken medical, legal, social, and educational systems. When I brought my baby to LA for the first time and friends had a crib, toys, and food ready for me, I felt like I had arrived in Bulgaria. What does it mean to feel at home when you are on the other side of the world? What does it mean for people of vastly different backgrounds to share in each other’s joy, music, dance, art, politics? How might this gently dissolve the boundaries of strict identities and open points of connection between people?
Mutual aid generated and was sustained by what people in East LA described as “a politics of joy.” Joy not as the erasure of suffering and injury but as the obstinate refusal to be reduced to it (see also Hage 2025). Joy as the recognition of the beauty of a community. Joy as people who are “not supposed to exist” (Gumbs 2016) taking up space in a city ravaged by the forces of gentrification, discrimination, and inequality. Joy, like mutual aid, is a refusal of institutional state divisions. Joy is an orientation to life, a perception of self and community.
I saw joy in the care people put in their plots in a community garden–a spot they had protected with organizing and protests against city plans to build a highway right through it. Some, who had experience with farming, were able to use the little plot of land to help feed families. Others were just starting out. Still others were cultivating plants important in indigenous Latin American cuisine, seeking their roots through roots. On weekends, the garden was open to the public. It was used to host events as varied as healing workshops, dance lessons, meditation, and sharing information about housing rights.
I saw joy in weekly Son Jarocho workshops, a traditional music genre from the Mexican state of Veracruz, which grew into fandangos: large community celebrations of song and dance. People of varying music skillsets were brought together by their love of the music. Joy was found in learning from and with others, in the sharing of skills and mistakes, in allowing others to help out. In learning how to play and dance together, tunes that for some were familiar from childhood, people found themselves in a sonorous embrace.
I saw joy in how young women in East LA started their own small businesses, acquiring a visibility that others in their families, mainly employed as domestic workers or in the service industry, had not enjoyed. Small businesses also became a way for these women to secure spaces where their communities could gather in the urban, car-centric sprawl of Los Angeles. These became gatherings of communal joy.
I saw joy in Cumbiaton, a monthly party used as a “vessel to heal and uplift marginalized communities” (Cumbiatón). Centering “womxn, trans, and queer people of color both on the dance floor and in the Dj booth,” the party aimed to provide a safe space where people subjected to multiple forms of injury were able to relax and have fun. In the wake of recent threatening deportation policies, one of the Cumbiaton DJs posted an Instagram story on her account. Shot in Oakland, California, the video featured a group of people dancing on the street a kind of “perreo” (lowering one’s body while swinging side to side, dancing in a squat). One of the dancers is the DJ’s mother. “Entenderas las FOCKN VIBRAS? [Do you get the vibe?] One thing about immigrants; we gon HAVE A GOOD TIME no matter fckn what. They will NEVER steal our joy [emoji of polished fingernails].” Joy was this refusal to shrivel up, to disappear, to surrender power to intimidation and fear.
Borders are experienced on the body: as violence, fear, hope, curtailed dreams, suspended futures. People with embodied knowledge of this violence build communities based on shared vulnerabilities. These people are not reducible to their injuries: they build communities of joy and mutual aid that do not comply with the severing logics of the border that divide them into us versus them. Nor do they position themselves in accordance with the border, respecting its boundaries. They fold the border into themselves, encompassing both sides of it into a community. The border then lives, defanged, bringing difference together without erasing it. As people come together in joy and care, the boundaries between them soften, a counterforce to the fragmenting and individualizing effects of the border.