Morning mediations: migration and controlsurveillance in pandemic times

Abstract

This article presents the political surveillance of migrant bodies, particularly Haitians, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Santiago de Chile through the ethnographic interpretation of two pieces of public television news programs broadcast in April 2020. The content of these notes shows discourses of social control, discrimination, and racism, as well as the construction of the threat that supposed forms of migrant habitation in the city would mean to the nationals, which should be exposed and mediatized as a mechanism of collective vigilance to contain the spread of the virus that, invisible, would lodge in the other, criminalized, and racialized bodies.