At a shelter in Tijuana, a young man from Ghana told me he wished he had taken more photos.
He mentioned it when I asked if he had wisdom for others on the road. As we talked about the months it had taken him to reach the U.S./Mexico border — the buses, the boats, the walking and hitchhiking, the people he had met and then lost along the way, some to different routes, some to detention, some, he suspected, to death — he said he wished he had recorded the experience, to remember it, good, bad, and in-between.
He wanted to remember the faces. He wanted proof that others had existed alongside, that the journey had been shared rather than solitary. What he had instead of photos was memory — porous, softening at the edges — and the nagging sense that he should have documented more, captured more, held on to more, before the journey took it from him.
Since returning from the field, I’ve thought about that wisdom often. I was in Tijuana as part of research on Muslim migrants across the Caribbean and Latin America, in places like Bridgetown, Barbados, where small but resilient Muslim communities have grown out of decades of trade, marriage, and movement, and in the shifting, improvised landscapes of transit through Mexico, where Muslims from West Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere increasingly find themselves alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, and others on similar routes north.
These are not necessarily the geographies people expect when they picture Muslim life in movement. That story is usually told through Europe, through the Mediterranean, through more familiar maps of displacement in other places.
But the lives I have followed unsettle those maps. They show devotion practiced in borrowed rooms and courtyards, prayer times kept while waiting on buses, halal meals improvised from what is available, small communities of faith stitched together from people who share almost nothing except the road and the God they are praying to along it.
The stories people share with me during our interviews are rarely complete. They are fragments. A photo of a mosque in a city they passed through in Brazil, a voice note from a cousin left behind in West Africa, a name half-remembered because the person who introduced them is no longer reachable in detention in Arizona. People build and make sense of their lives in pieces, and they lose some of those pieces as they build them, and both things happen at once, for as long as the journey lasts – and beyond.
During this same period of fieldwork, I was carrying a fragment of the Museum for Islamic Art's dragon carpet — a small woven piece, cut from a handwoven doppelgänger of the museum's seventeenth-century Caucasian carpet, sent out into the world as one of a hundred such fragments meant to travel, gather stories, and eventually return to Berlin to be reassembled into a single whole again.
I photographed it constantly as I went: laid out on a guesthouse floor in Bridgetown, propped against the border wall, held up against the light in half a dozen cities across the region and along the way. Those photos were meant to be part of the record, my own small contribution to the fragment's journey, evidence of where it had been and who had seen it.
And then my phone was stolen, and a corrupted backup file meant that most of my photos were gone. What I was left with, in the end, was the carpet fragment itself and the things it had picked up along the way — discoloration from the sun, stains from its dip into the Caribbean Sea,
