Film Screening: Expanding Sanctuary & The Search with director Melina Tupa, Dr. Xóchitl Bada, & Dr. Patrisia Macías-Rojas

Expanding Sanctuary (2023) follows grassroots efforts to oppose deportation systems in Philadelphia and reimagine the city as a true place of refuge.

The Search (2020) documents a grandmother's 37-year search for her missing grandchild, after her daughter was murdered under the dictatorship in Argentina.

A post-screening panel discussion with director Melina Tupa (who will join us virtually) along with UIC professors Dr. Xóchitl Bada and Dr. Patrisia Macías-Rojas (who will appear in person) will invite reflection on solidarity, community protection, and ongoing struggles for justice.

RSVP at go.uic.edu/Sanctuary_Search

MEET THE PANELISTS

Melina Tupa is an award-winning Argentine-Brazilian journalist and documentary filmmaker, and a 2025 BGDM (Brown Girls Doc Mafia) MafiaMind Fellow. She was the Series Producer for the Video Consortium SSP: Latin America. Melina produced and edited Miss Panama, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Al Jazeera. She was an additional editor on the Emmy-nominated documentary A La Calle. She holds a master’s from UC Berkeley, specializing in Documentary Filmmaking. Melina’s documentary The Search was a Student Academy Award finalist, and won Best Short Documentary at the Amnesty International Film Festival and an SPJ Excellence in Journalism Award.

Raised in a multicultural environment, Melina is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, and is currently learning French. She is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM), the Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE), BIPOC Doc Editors, the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA), and New Day Films.

Patrisia Macías-Rojas received her PhD in Sociology from The University of California, Berkeley. She is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Latin American and Latin Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Broadly, her research focuses on 1) race and immigration after the civil rights movement; 2) the global and racial politics of migration and border controls; 3) the merger of the immigration and criminal legal systems and the criminalization of long-term residents in US-Mexico border communities. 

Her first book, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, October 2016), draws on over a decade of archival and ethnographic research on the US-Mexico border to examine how immigration offenses became one of the leading charges sending people to prison. It is one of the first book-length monographs to analyze the socio-political origins of the punitive turn in immigration control, foregrounding the understudied role of race, civil rights, and mass incarceration in transforming the immigration system.  It also charts the transformation and fundamental restructuring of deportation and detention, marked by a post-civil rights enforcement terrain that blends “civil rights” and crime control approaches to justify more punitive approaches to migration and border controls. The book also captures how reorganizing immigration enforcement around crime control transformed the day-to-day practices of Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, civil and human rights advocates, migrants, and the predominantly Latina/o residents in border communities. From Deportation to Prison won the 2017 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.

Xóchitl Bada is a Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her areas of specialization include migrant access to political and social rights, migrant organizing strategies, violence and displacement, and transnational labor advocacy mobilization in Mexico and the United States. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Forced Migration Review, Population, Space, and Place, Latino Studies, and Labor Studies Journal. She is the author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement (Rutgers University Press, 2014) and coauthor with Shannon Gleeson of Scaling Migrant Worker Rights (University of California Press, 2023). This book won the 2024 American Political Science Association (APSA) Latin@x Caucus Best Book Award. She is co-editor of the books New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century (Palgrave, 2018), Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America (The University of Texas Press, 2019), the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, and The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration. She is the director of Lucha Por tus Derechos Chicago, a radio show & Podcast on 105.5 FM, Chicago’s Lumpen Radio.