Sin Fronteras

On an oppressively hot Texas afternoon, I rushed, disoriented and frazzled, toward the correct shelter location. It was the first day that my co-facilitator, Melissa, and I would lead a psychoanalytic process group for migrant families. Google Maps had directed us to the shelter’s administrative office on the opposite side of the city, dashing my grandiose hopes of arriving early. I had imagined a tour, an informative conversation with the staff, and enough time to arrange the chairs and settle ourselves before the residents arrived. I had hoped to establish a calm, deliberate frame, but instead I entered late and without the steadiness I had imagined bringing as an analyst.

Upon arrival, we were ushered by the staff into the only private space available to us, which happened to be the garage. Metal racks crowded the walls, stacked with dusty donated shoes: work boots, children’s sneakers, high heels, and sandals. Plastic crates of clothing were labeled by age and gender. A freezer hummed loudly against one wall, and shirts hung from a rolling rack near the open garage door. A small wooden table was sandwiched between the shoe racks and a small couch against the wall. We quickly created our group circle (which was more like an L-shaped oval) out of mismatched chairs, some upholstered in faded gold.

The garage bore little resemblance to a conventional therapy room, much less a psychoanalytic consulting room. It contained the practical labor of sheltering people. Residents could find food, clothing, and some of what they needed to prepare for the next stage of their journeys. Sitting among the racks of donated clothing, I thought of the blue bedazzled prom dress that became part of my own migration story. I had flown alone to join my father, who had immigrated a year earlier. Having insisted on attending my final high school dance the night before, I boarded the plane still wearing my prom dress. Gazing down at the unfamiliar Houston skyline from the airplane window, I had felt my bearings give way. Sitting in this garage years later, surrounded by clothing intended for lives in transition, I felt some of that disorientation return. 

The group met us almost immediately with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. Because Melissa and I are both white-passing, several group members expressed surprise that two women who looked like bolillas—white bread rolls, used here as slang for gringas—could speak Spanish so well.

During the group session, an older woman hid her face against the shoulder of a young man beside her. She then whispered something to him and left the room. He turned toward us apologetically and explained that she had to step out because she was not feeling well. I assumed that we had lost her. Perhaps the group had asked too much of her by inviting her to sit among strangers, remain present, and find words for experiences that might not yet be speakable. I wondered whether our wish to listen had become an impossible demand. I do not remember what we were discussing when she left. I remember assuming she would not return and feeling an immense sadness.  

The woman returned about twenty minutes later, carrying two enormous slices of watermelon. She handed one to Melissa and one to me, then left again without speaking. I was profoundly moved, although I could not have said exactly why. I still do not know what the offering meant to her. It may have carried a tentative permission for us to be there, an unconscious wish to repair the break in connection, or something I have yet to imagine. Whatever its meaning, the gesture placed her in the position of giving and us, briefly, in the position of receiving. Though the asymmetries remained, something in the field had shifted.

I founded Sin Fronteras to bring psychoanalytically informed care into migrant-serving communities. We offer Spanish-language groups and therapy, reflective spaces for shelter staff, and consultation for clinicians working with immigrants and asylum seekers. The project is an ongoing inquiry into what happens when psychoanalysis enters the community and allows itself to be changed by the encounter.

Migration law, racialization, poverty, language, and the threat of detention enter the room. They shape what can be spoken, who can be trusted, how time is experienced, and whether a future can be imagined. As I sat in the garage, I found myself thinking of psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici’s account of her work in a Puerto Rican barrio in Philadelphia, where people were often regarded as beyond the reach of psychoanalysis. “As though they were too poor to afford an unconscious,” she joked. 

Around the time we began the group, the political world surrounding it was becoming increasingly visible in my East Austin neighborhood. A neighbor posted that she had witnessed ICE agents removing a frightened man from his car near a local church. Local restaurants began sharing that relatives of staff members had been arrested by immigration authorities, leaving workers and their families in a state of acute anxiety. I also noticed fewer people working or gathering around the food trucks that usually animate the streets near my home. I could not know the reason for each absence, yet the neighborhood felt different. Fear had entered the rhythms of ordinary life, registering in the messages circulating among neighbors, in the anguish described by restaurant workers, and in the new quiet of familiar places.

Psychoanalytic work outside the consulting room asks us to listen for communication in unfamiliar registers: through bodies and gestures, through babies crawling beneath tables, through departures and returns, even through ripe fruit placed in our hands. A third language was taking shape in the room, created within the encounter and belonging fully to no one.

People seeking refuge are repeatedly required to tell their histories to immigration officials, attorneys, caseworkers, medical providers, and evaluators. Their safety may depend upon depicting their lives in a credible sequence of dates, places, threats, and departures. Yet traumatic memory rarely arrives in such an orderly form. Experiences may return as bodily sensations, images, fragments, contradictions, or stretches of silence, and the pressure to produce a coherent account can intensify the feeling of being examined. Large swaths of experience can remain suspended between the body and the word, felt before they can be narrated.  

In the group, alliances and fault lines appeared quickly. Members spoke of intense conflicts among shelters, within families, and across nationalities, and those tensions entered our circle through shifting identifications and moments of suspicion. Community psychoanalysis listens across these layers, asking what arises from an individual’s history, what takes shape among group members, and how institutional and political realities enter the room. The clinician is part of this field and is altered by listening, even as differences in role and power remain. The third language created within the group carries discord as well as connection; it can emerge through mistrust, withdrawal, and rupture alongside gestures of recognition.

I could feel how easily my wish to help could slip into a rescue fantasy and narrow my listening. I had arrived with precisely what Bion cautions analysts against: memory and desire. I carried an image of how a group should begin and a desire for what it might become, along with assumptions about what people at the shelter needed from us. In such an unfamiliar setting, I strained to establish the work as legitimately psychoanalytic by searching for signs of the analytic process I already knew how to recognize.  

The watermelon gesture asked me to loosen my ideas about what unconscious communication should look like. A person living under the threat of displacement also has desires, fantasies, defenses, ambivalence, humor, aggression, and a rich inner world. Community psychoanalysis asks us to remain attentive to this complexity, especially when the urgency of helping tempts us to believe that we already understand.

Sin Fronteras means without borders. Our work cannot abolish the borders enforced through laws, walls, surveillance, and armed authority. Yet other borders live within us, dividing what can be known from what cannot yet be thought. In the garage, the watermelon offered no explanation for the woman’s departure. It became part of a third language taking shape among us, making something available that had not yet become speech. We accepted the slices she placed in our hands and, for a moment, learned another way to listen.

_{Acknowledgment:} 

_{Funding has been provided by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation through the American Psychoanalytic Association.}

_{Some identifying details have been altered to protect the privacy of group participants.}

_Note: 

1. _{Patricia Gherovici’s remarks are quoted in Samantha Plasencia, “Professor Patricia Gherovici on Psychoanalysis,” Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 18, 2019.} 
2. ^{Bion, W. R. (1967). “Notes on Memory and Desire.” Psychoanalytic Forum, 2, 272–280.}