Category: Uncategorized

Christine Byrd for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

In the last five years, more than a million people have crossed the Darién Gap, a roadless, mountainous swath of rainforest between Panama and Colombia that is partially controlled by a paramilitary group. The treacherous journey has been undertaken on foot by migrants from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America seeking a better life in North America. Maira Delgado Laurens, a fifth-year graduate student in global and international studies at UC Irvine, has twice traveled to Colombia to compare the realities on the ground to official statements and media coverage about the Darién region—a focal point for international migration from 2020-2024.

“Maira challenges conventional scholarship on migration by taking a global perspective, allowing her to analyze the mobility of people across borders, regions and continents that previously had not been studied,” says Eve Darian-Smith, Distinguished Professor and chair of global and international studies.

Delgado Laurens’ own story begins in Colombia, where she was born in the capital city of Bogotá. After migrating to join her mother in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005, Delgado Laurens learned English at a community college and, with the encouragement of school counselors, transferred to UC Davis to study sociology. She found herself seeking out classes about migration, she says, as a way to better understand her own evolving identity as an immigrant in the U.S.

After earning a bachelor’s degree, Delgado Laurens worked for programs that offered academic support services to underserved community college students. She cherishes her work and even now considers returning to community college some day to teach courses on international migration and immigration.

Delgado Laurens went on to complete a master’s in migration studies at the University of San Francisco before relocating to Los Angeles, where she wanted to continue her research on the ways in which global governance, human rights and immigration intersected. She soon realized she did not need to look any further than UC Irvine’s Department of Global and International Studies.

“I started learning about the department’s approach to study social phenomena by looking at its impacts beyond geographic boundaries. Understanding that events taking place within community and local spaces can have impacts at the global level,” Delgado Laurens explains. “When you think about (im)migration, it’s impossible not to think about boundaries, but a global perspective helped see its impacts on this local-global continuum.”

During her time in the program, Delgado Laurens’ research interests evolved. More than a half million people trekked across the Darién Gap in 2023—an all-time high—traveling through South and Central American countries. The majority at that time were from Venezuela, but migrants from Haiti, China, India, Afghanistan and African countries also traversed the route on their journeys to Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. The situation on the ground at the Darién Gap, and its role in a larger global migration phenomenon, fascinated Delgado Laurens.

“Maira is one of those scholars that as she reads and learns more about her project in the field, she is also constantly rethinking her project and asking new and insightful questions,” says Darian-Smith. “She is a delight to work with.”

In 2023, with funding from UC Irvine’s Miguel Velez Scholarship, Delgado Laurens expanded her research on the ground by traveling to Ipiales and Medellín, two of the Colombian cities that many migrants pass through on their journey north.

“The dominant narrative is that the Darién region is dangerous and you should not try to cross. But there’s also a narrative that the Colombian government protects migration as a human right, even if it doesn’t look like that’s the case on the ground,” says Delgado Laurens. “That’s the tension.”

In 2024, she once again received Velez scholarship funding, as well as a grant—with three other researchers—from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) to go to the Colombian side of the Darién Region. Delgado Laurens and her fellow researchers interviewed locals, government officials, humanitarian rights advocates, and church leaders. Traveling to the town of Necoclí from the city of Medellín, their bus got stranded for about 12 hours due to a miners’ strike road block. The unexpected delay was a gift to the researchers, providing a rare glimpse into the social ties that migrants forged before crossing the jungle.

“We had the opportunity to see how these individuals supported each other, provided information, and formed groups to take care of each other, all within that space of struggle and uncertainty,” Delgado Laurens says. “They also found ways to be hopeful about their journey through the jungle despite being aware of the difficulties they were going to face.”

When they finally arrived in the Colombian towns bordering the jungle, Delgado Laurens was surprised by how the residents helped and supported the migrants on the journey. Despite the fact that the locals had been displaced and experienced violence at the hands of the paramilitary group in the region, they chose to organize—often through their churches—meals for migrants, or offered a place to wash their clothes. They even planned recreational activities for children living at a beach encampment, on their journey north.

Already, she has begun sharing early findings. She and the other three research collaborators contributed a chapter to a book published by CLACSO in May 2025. Then this fall, Delgado Laurens spoke at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability’s 7th annual International Migration and Displacement Workshop in Bonn, Germany, on “Bottom-Up Solidarity vs. Top-Down Humanitarianism: Reshaping Social Cohesion in Colombian Towns Adjacent to the Darién Gap.” Later this year, she will participate in a workshop focused on the Darién Gap at the National Autonomous University of México Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas.

Her research at the outskirts of the Darien region, and ongoing interviews, form the foundation of Delgado Laurens’ dissertation—which will help shed light on the politically, economically, socially and environmentally complicated segment of rainforest that so many migrants have crossed.

“I love the global studies program at UC Irvine, and how diverse our faculty’s research projects and methodologies are – it’s knowledge you don’t get from every program,” Delgado Laurens says. “The idea of looking at social phenomena from this local-global perspective can really help create transdisciplinary projects.”