This lecture examines contemporary diasporas in Asia and Europe, their formation and transformation through transnational mobility, mediated connections, and changing forms of belonging. Situating Peru within the broader context of Latin American diasporas, it explores migration trajectories that challenge conventional South–North frameworks and reveal Peru as part of interconnected Pacific and Atlantic circuits of migration. Drawing on fieldwork on migration, diasporas, transnationalism, and media in Japan, Spain, and France, the lecture compares two interconnected geographical and historical scenarios. The first traces transpacific migrations, from early migration from Japan to Peru in the late nineteenth century to the dekasegi movement from Peru to Japan during the 1980s and 1990s and its reconfigurations in the 2020s. The second examines transatlantic migrations from Latin America to Europe, with particular attention to migration from Peru to Spain in the 1980s onward and France since the 2010s, highlighting changing patterns of labor, family formation, citizenship, return, and belonging. Across these cases, the lecture considers how Peruvian diasporas are produced and sustained through intersecting Pacific and Atlantic routes rather than through a single, linear trajectory of migration. Particular attention is given to media and social networking apps as digital infrastructures of contemporary diasporas: means through which migrants maintain connections with home countries while simultaneously creating communities, identities, and forms of belonging abroad. These geographical and historical trajectories offer a comparative and longitudinal understanding of Peruvian migration as an ongoing process of circulation, connection, and negotiation of belonging in transnational contexts.
Speaker: Jessica Retis is Director of the Bilingual Journalism M.A. at the University of Arizona, where she also served as Director of the School of Journalism through June 2025. She holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of Lima, an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a Ph.D. in Contemporary Latin America from the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2021, she was named a CUES Distinguished Fellow in recognition of her research on bilingual journalism education in the United States. In 2025, she received the AEJMC Barrow Award for Distinguished Achievement in Diversity Research and Education. Recent books include Narratives of Migration, Relocation and Belonging: Latin Americans in London (Palgrave), The Handbook on Diasporas, Media, and Culture (Routledge), Communicative Spaces in Bilingual Contexts: Discourses, Synergies and Counterflows in Spanish and English (Routledge), among other books, monographs as well as nearly one hundred academic publications in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Her scholarship is internationally recognized for its contributions to the study of migration, contemporary diasporas, media and communication across Europe, North America, and the transpacific region, as well as bilingual journalism and journalism for social change.