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How does exile feel, and how do such affective and embodied experiences shape political subjectivity and belonging? Politicalrefugees navigate complex emotional landscapes in which fear, hope, attachment, and exhaustion are not merely individual states but central to how political engagement is sustained, reworked, or disrupted in everyday life.

Based on interviews with democracy activists who have fled authoritarian regimes in different parts of Latin America and now live in exile in Mexico City, this paper explores how political subjectivity and senses of belonging are enacted, maintained, and reconfigured. We examine how these processes are shaped by gendered and classed political trajectories, as well as by structural conditions such as access to housing, employment, legal status, and the presence of civilsociety networks. Rather than treating these as external factors, the paper analyses how such conditions are lived, negotiated,and made meaningful through everyday practices and relationships.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and orientation (2007; 2017) and Judith Butler’s theorisation of political subject formation (2004; 2015), the analysis foregrounds how emotions structure orientations towards significant others, such asfamily members, friends and communities. Particular attention is paid to how proximity and distance—both spatial andaffective—to these others, as well as to countries of origin, shape how belonging is negotiated and how political engagementis sustained across borders and over time.

By focusing on the affective and relational dimensions of everyday life in exile, the paper contributes to migration research that examines structural conditions through lived experience. While empirically grounded in a Latin American context, the study speaks directly to debates within Nordic migration research on belonging, racialisation, and emotional dimensions of inclusion and migration control. In the context of increasingly restrictive migration regimes and intensified debates oninclusion in the Nordic region, our presentation offers a comparative perspective on how different socio-politicalenvironments shape migrants’ affective attachments, forms of belonging, and capacities for political action.