title. Reinas Migrantes | Operative Mapping
date. 2025
team. MEATS Elisava Students
project. Traces of Trauma
roles. Researcher, Mapping, Video Editor.
The Operative Mapping project supported the NGO Las Reinas Pepiadas and its program Reinas Migrantes, dedicated to empowering women along displacement routes in Latin America and promoting systemic change to combat gender violence in migration contexts.
We developed three types of maps: big data visualizations, parametric real-time updatable maps, and maps based on direct experience feedback from women in movement collected through the Reinas Migrantes platform. These tools connect women’s lived experiences in transit with the geopolitical phenomenon of forced migration, helping to visualize and humanize the issue while enhancing communication, analysis, and decision-making.
TRACES OF TRAUMA
The Traces of Trauma map proposal is based on first-hand accounts from women on the move, collected through the Reinas Migrantes platform and interviews that reveal their migration journeys. These testimonies expose experiences of gender-based violence, exploitation, and systemic challenges encountered along the way. By geographically positioning these narratives, the project highlights the most dangerous routes and makes visible patterns of threat that often remain unseen.
To structure the narratives, five key themes were identified: emotional struggle, physical violence, psychological violence, the exploitation of migrants as a business, and journey-related hardships. Each statement was categorized, with recurring words quantified and events geographically located, creating a detailed system of layered testimonies on the map. The proposal envisions an interactive platform where users can navigate the stories by category and location while listening to the women’s voices, a crucial element in humanizing geolocated data. The result is a dense and impactful visualization that reveals patterns of vulnerability and transforms oral testimonies into tangible evidence, strengthening awareness, dialogue, and advocacy efforts.
