Meet Zelma

I am not a traditional academic. That almost seems like a silly thing to say because I think many people feel they are different from everyone else. What I mean is that my path to becoming a professor and a researcher was filled with twists, turns, and bumps that many others didn’t face. I read somewhere that most academics had a parent who was an academic. Well neither of my parents were. In fact, I am a first generation college student and the only academic in my family. I am also a formerly undocumented immigrant who has experienced the deportation of a parent, homelessness and language barriers. All these experiences have had a significant impact on who I am as a person and a researcher. 

As I started publishing my research, I kept seeing the difficulties in how data and information is not only made but also shared-or rather not shared. One of my goals in contributing to this project is to provide easier access to information about migrants and their experiences. Unfortunately, there are so many roadblocks in making that happen. For example, it starts with the type of data we do, and more importantly don’t, collect. On our “Data” tab on the website I highlight some of these difficulties-especially for sexual minority migrants. As a country we do a terrible job of collecting information about sexual minority people and an even worse job collecting information about sexual minority migrants. This problem is particularly evident for Black LGBTQ+ migrants in the South. With this project we hope to not only highlight this problem but also create a space for community members, academics and migrants themselves to have access to and share information about anti-blackness, migration and sexuality.