Trauma is increasingly experienced by people in transit as border militarization increases migrants’ exposure to violence and forces them into more precarious situations. For queer migrants, this includes situations where they are more likely to experience persecution and sexual violence. This paper explores the availability of care for queer undocumented migrants in the United States after surviving a precarious and potentially deadly journey from their country of origin to the US, as well as forms of alternative care developed by the undocuqueer community. In particular, it focuses on access to care for LGBT migrants, who face stigmatization on multiple levels and as a result are more likely than their straight counterparts to experience extreme mental health consequences pre-, in-, and post-transit. Faced with a number of obstacles that prevent them from receiving appropriate mental health care, the undocuqueer community utilizes various strategies to ensure that the health and needs of the community are supported. I argue that in spite of facing traumatic experiences and being unable to fully access healthcare to alleviate these problems in the US, LGBT migrants demonstrate extreme resilience and resist the mechanisms that otherwise threaten their mental well-being.

This Barrett thesis is a praxis-oriented research project designed to address issues that women face in hip hop and to give voice to female artists in the Arizona hip hop community specifically. In creating this project, I sought to encourage women in my community to create a conversation about their roles in the hip hop scene, to listen to and unite with other female artists in the valley, and to help create the networks and spaces that center the diverse narratives female hip hop artists express which the industry at large currently fails to represent. This paper examines similar research done in the field of hip hop sexism and hip hop feminism across the world, with an emphasis on US hip hop culture, to identify what many hip hop scholars and feminists point to as the sources of sexism in hip hop and the systems that maintain it, focusing on (1) the rap industry’s favoring of sexist lyrics and disfavoring of womxn’s points of view throughout the commercialization of hip hop culture and music, (2) the media’s discrimination against female hip hop artists in their coverage, and (3) the unequal distribution of space and resources allocated to women of color in hip hop resulting from black men’s need for those spaces and resources in order to reassert their masculinity in the face of their exclusion from the widley accepted white hegemonic masculinity they have been barred from. Combining the methods of successful activists in the US with findings from a series of interviews with women from the Arizona hip hop scene, I make recommendations on actions to take in the Arizona scene in order to combat the sexism found in hip hop while maintaining a pro-hip-hop stance throughout.