“WALKING DEAD" EN LA ERA DIGITAL: NECROPOLÍTICA Y TESTIMONIOS DE MIGRACIÓN EN TIKTOK (2021-2024)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the audiovisual testimonies produced by forcibly displacedmigrants—primarily from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—who document and share their journeys to the United States on TikTok. Through the lens of necropolitics and digital humanities, it explores how a selection of videos on TikTok—mediated by smartphones, algorithms, and platform politics—serves as an assertion of existence and collective memory. While the routes traversed and captured on the videos—through the Darién Gap, across Mexico, and into the waters of the Río Bravo—are shaped by state-sanctioned violence and border regimes, they are also marked by solidarity, friendship, and an enduring will to survive. Rather than focusing solely on death or despair, this research foregrounds the agency of migrants as self-archivists. Their recordings, raw and immediate, carve space for visibility in a digital landscape that often erases or distorts their presence. TikTok, while enabling this documentation, also subjects these narratives to the fleeting rhythms of virality and algorithmic bias. In response, this dissertation is also accompanied by a living digital archive (website) titled Voices Across Borders, which preserves fragments of testimonies and resists their disappearance into the scroll. This work is a gesture of witnessing. It asks what it means to document life at the edge of death, and how storytelling, no matter how pixelated or precarious, can affirm dignity. It is, moreover, a meditation on the power of hope that keeps migrants walking.