Lectures on Tap - "Double Othering: The Extra Border for Disabled Migrants"

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🧠 Lecture: "Double Othering: The Extra Border for Disabled Migrants"

🎤 Speaker: Claudia Castillo

Every society runs on a sorting machine. It decides who belongs and who doesn’t, whose body “works” and whose is a problem. We treat these as neutral facts about people—but they’re really decisions made by systems, over and over, at every border crossing, clinic, and hiring desk.

This lecture brings together two groups we rarely think about side by side: migrants and disabled people. Claudia Castillo shows how both are sorted by the same hidden logic—seen as risks, burdens, or lives that need managing rather than supporting.

What happens when you’re marked as both foreign and broken at once? Along the Mexico–US corridor, migrants are hyper-visible when they’re being tracked and detained, and invisible when they need care. The journey and the systems on the other side can disable people through physical danger, trauma, detention, and everyday exclusion from work, healthcare, and safety.

Drawing on disability theory and over 15 years working with migrant communities, including at the Mexican Consulate in Chicago, Claudia unpacks “double othering” and offers insights from disability justice and migrant organizing on how to build systems that don’t break people in the first place.

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