Amarilys Estrella & Victoria Massie Awarded BRIDGE Grant

Amarilys Estrella & Victoria Massie

Dr. Amarilys Estrella and Dr. Victoria Massie were recently awarded a BRIDGE grant for their project, "Stressful Crossings: How Black Immigrants' Health is Immobilized in Houston." The three-year grant (2022-2025), in support of developing a colloquium series and community-engaged programming, seeks to facilitate better understanding on how Black immigrants experience stress as non-citizen subjects in the Houston metropolitan area. Dr. Estrella and Dr. Massie, combining their respective expertise on statelessness and chronicity, have envisioned this as an opportunity to find ways of better understanding how racial inequality becomes embodied in proximity to the U.S. border, with a focus on the following questions: (1) how does the stress of immigration to the United States through Texas contribute to health disparities amongst Black immigrants?; and (2) how can community engagement with Black immigrants help enhance their well-being as they seek to build a new life in Houston while facing different forms of bureaucratic dispossession?