This article examines how embodied experience and the accompanying emotions help social movement allies to forge collective identity. The analysis is based on the Migrant Trail, an annual protest event in which allies of the border-justice movement spend a week walking seventy-five miles through the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to protest migrant deaths. Original data include four years of participant observation, interviews conducted during the 2011 Migrant Trail, and surveys conducted a year and a half after the event. Findings suggest that embodied and emotional experiences help allies overcome challenges such as social distance from beneficiaries, a lack of credibility in the movement, and no lineage of resistance. This study contributes to an understanding of collective identity formation among allies and offers an illustrative case for the important role embodiment plays in the emotions of collective action.

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The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is a quintessential structure of the US national security state and contemporary Empire. For such imperial formations to proceed as if they are ‘normal’ requires solidarity from various publics. This paper explores what it means to refuse such solidarity through an ethnographic examination of Witness Against Torture (WAT), a group of US citizens enacting solidarity with the men detained at Guantánamo. WAT’s tactical repertoire intervenes in three ways. The Guantánamo prison is not supposed to be seen, but WAT travels there to expose state secrets and the administration’s myth of transparency. The prisoners are not supposed to be heard, but WAT publicly amplifies their testimonies through affectively potent street performances. Indefinite detention and torture are meant to remain distant, but WAT links the plight of detainees to that of Black communities in the US interior. Through these acts, WAT simultaneously reveals and contests the culture of erasure and radical divisiveness upon which the US national security state depends.

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