Fugitive Kindness and the Joy of the Migrants

Author’s note: As I begin my work this year as a Heartland Journalism Fellow, this is the kind of story I want to tell. Stories that do not begin and end with the struggle of migrant life, but that linger on the acts of resistance, care, and joy that happen in between the cracks. Stories where community is built on dancefloors. Where defiance sounds like a song sung in a mother tongue. Where survival looks like a shared meal in a corner restaurant far from home.

Because in times like these, to exist fully is itself a radical act.

A couple of weeks ago, I went clubbing with friends at a dingy underground bar in the Central West End of St. Louis. It was a Saturday night, hot and humid, and the air was thick with the smell of a rain that would never fall. The atmosphere held the kind of restless charge you feel in cities that have not exhaled all day. Above ground, the city was quiet, its storefronts already shuttered. But below, in that cramped bar, it was chaos—the good kind. Bodies moving in and out of the dancefloor, passing drinks, bumping shoulders, exchanging smiles like currency.

The music was loud, unapologetic. In the center of the room, a group of jolly-looking fellas—men and women— paired in twos, their smiles wide and robust, swaying and sashaying to a rhythm that bent genres: Afrobeats, reggaeton, old highlife riffs sliced into the DJ’s set. It was a beautiful scene. It was joyful. And yet, it belied the evidence of our lives. It belied the truths we all carried as members of this community of in-betweeners, people suspended between belonging and exclusion, always negotiating the right to exist fully in a country that prefers us silent, invisible.

I stood in a corner of the room, gently nursing a drink, watching it unfold. For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway. When the song faded into another and the bodies dispersed toward the bar, I stepped outside for air. The club’s upstairs section spilled into Euclid Avenue, where the breeze, though still heavy, felt easier to bear. The city was quieter here, just the hum of passing cars and the distant echo of music leaking through brick walls.

That is where I met Juan.

He was leaning against the wall, smoking a long cigarette with the ease of a man who had nowhere else to be. We exchanged nods, the universal greeting of strangers who are not really strangers. He was Black and Hispanic. His accent was a thick braid of Spanish and Midwestern English. He introduced himself like someone who did not expect to be remembered.

We struck up a conversation. Small talk at first, about the music, about how nights like this felt like borrowed time. But in liminal spaces, conversations rarely stay shallow. Soon, Juan was telling me about his years as a line cook at a downtown restaurant in Dallas that boasted farm-to-table cuisine but paid its immigrant staff barely enough to survive. When ICE raids became frequent in the past months, the restaurant quietly let go of anyone who could not show papers. “Quietly,” Juan said, “like we never existed.”

Now, in St. Louis, he hustled however he could. Some nights he worked door security for clubs like this one. Other nights, he did delivery runs, cash-only gigs, anything that kept his head down and his body moving. “You keep moving, you stay visible in the ways you choose,” he said, flicking ash into the humid air. “But you disappear when they come looking for you.”

There was no self-pity in his voice. Just the clarity of a man who had outlived his own illusions. I thought of the people still inside: dancing, laughing, swaying as if they had nothing to fear. I thought of how every step on that dancefloor was an act of refusal. A refusal to shrink. A refusal to let the weight of policies, border patrols, and economic chokeholds dictate how we breathe, how we move, how we inhabit joy.

That night stayed with me. Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was not. Because for so many of us, these small, fleeting spaces—bars, nightclubs, backrooms—become the only places where we can exist fully, even if only for a few hours. They are fugitive spaces, yes, but they are also sanctuaries where the burden of translation and explanation is momentarily suspended. Here, we are not immigrants, not case files or labor statistics. We are simply people: dancing, laughing, and living.