Make your fear a prayer: Affective life in migratory processes (Fear and feeling of security)

Abstract

The historian Lucien Febvre asked oneself eighty years ago what was the process of the construction of historical knowledge about the present sensitivity in a certain time and place. To answer this question he approached the advances in Psychology of his time, mainly to the contributions of Charles Blondel and his reflections on affective life. From this approach, it is considered that sensitivity and emotions express the states of the spirit of a society, besides, it demonstrate the necessities that are reflected in social productions, such as rites and artifacts that are built around the religiosity, for example, in the prayers. Through this type of rites we can approach emotions such as love, fear, joy, etc. The research proposes to recover, through prayers, how a fear is represented: or how catholic believers make a prayer out of fear. The act of praying during the migratory process is the example of feelings and emotions. This rite can only be understood if we consider that migration of Central Americans and Mexicans has increased recently and that violence in their countries has forced them to flee. It seems that this fear is inherent to undocumented migration in our region.