The Rinus Penninx Best Paper Award of the 22nd Annual Conference 2025 in Paris–Aubervilliers was awarded to Fabio Santos for his paper “Decolonizing the Migration Archive: Haitian Refugees in Puerto Rico.” The jury's verdict on the paper highlights the reason why Santos's paper stands out. First, it speaks directly and most creatively to the theme of the 22nd IMISCOE Annual Conference: decentering and decolonizing migration studies. Second, it does so from an historical discipline, by excavating a “forgotten” historical episode and reframing a marginal site, the U.S. military base at Ford Allen in Puerto Rico, through a decolonial lens. In doing so, the paper makes several conceptual interventions into how migration studies can be done. Geographically, by recentering the Caribbean as a key site of imperial bordering practices; methodologically, by challenging presentist and nation-centered tendencies in migration studies, and epistemologically, by showing how migrant experiences are erased or made illegible in dominant archives. Thirdly, the originality of the paper lies not only in its empirical focus, but even more in its broader critique of the field’s assumptions, categories, and silences, particularly in historical research on migration. The author emphasised "fugitive" and unofficial archives (scattered traces, private collections, subaltern memory) as key evidence in migration research, which resonates with current efforts to decolonize the archives and broaden the scope of legitimate sources. Finally, rather than reinforcing the Caribbean as a space of emigration, the article reframes it as a central node in the architecture of U.S. imperial bordering, experimental governance, and humanitarian carcerality. This helps recast the region’s role in migration studies from peripheral to foundational — and it enables us to draw ideas and approaches for other regions and cases.
