Boza! Diaries from the frontier

Boza! is an expression that often recurs along migrant routes. It is a cry of victory - when you manage to “burn the border” and make it to the other side - but it is at the same time an exhortation to act, to go further despite failures. It is, in its own way, a celebration of stubbornness that has become a distinctive characteristic for those traveling without the right documents today.

A diary is usually an intimate place for reflection and the ethnographic ones are no exception: they are the first tool to keep track of the encounter with the field of research, documenting the developments of one’s own reflection, but also doubts, bewilderments and contradictions. To publish them is, on the one hand, to reveal a fundamental junction of theoretical production and, on the other, to bet on the literary and public value that writing in the social sciences can take on. Through a work of narrative editing and thanks to the illustration’s evocative capacity, these field diaries explore the necropolitical fallout of the production and consolidation of European Union’s external and internal borders. At the same time, the individual and collective stories that surface here - from the fields of Borgo Mezzanone to the Brianzonese passes, from Tunisian olive groves to Lampedusa, from Moroccan metropolises, from which harraga depart, to the Canary Islands - return the transgressive power of solidarity as an informal and rhizomatic practice, capable of sustaining what states sanction as inappropriate mobility.