The Migrant Passage

Clandestine Journeys from Central America

Noelle Kateri Brigden

• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501730573
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Emigration & Immigration

At the crossroads between international relations and anthropology, The Migrant Passage analyzes how people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala navigate the dangerous and uncertain clandestine journey across Mexico to the United States. However much advance planning they do, they survive the journey through improvisation. Central American migrants improvise upon social roles and physical objects, leveraging them for new purposes along the way. Over time, the accumulation of individual journeys has cut a path across the socioeconomic and political landscape of Mexico, generating a social and material infrastructure that guides future passages and complicates borders.

Tracing the survival strategies of migrants during the journey to the North, The Migrant Passage shows how their mobility reshapes the social landscape of Mexico, and the book explores the implications for the future of sovereignty and the nation-state. To trace the continuous renewal of the transit corridor, Noelle Brigden draws upon over two years of in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork along human smuggling routes from Central America across Mexico and into the United States. In so doing, she shows the value of disciplinary and methodological border crossing between international relations and anthropology, to understand the relationships between human security, international borders, and clandestine transnationalism.

ACT 1

Exposition

Chapter 1

THE OPENING SCENE

A Journey Begins

Karla, who worked in a tourist café owned by gringos, prepared gourmet coffees for the international backpackers and surfers who flock to the coast of El Salvador.¹ She made friends with some of them on Facebook and so caught glimpses of their relatively glamorous lives and travels abroad. She had long imagined that someday she would join these friends and her older siblings in the United States. Karla was twenty years old, and life in rural El Salvador made her restless. She longed to leave her small town behind. One brother had been in the United States for a long time. A second brother had recently left and was followed by a sister the month before I met Karla in 2009. Her brothers had warned her that the journey was very difficult, but the second brother had a better coyote [human smuggler] than the first one, and they thought it was now safe enough for their sisters to follow. By March 2010, Karla had already begun to plan her journey, and she talked to me about it. When I asked her to imagine the route that would she would take north and to draw me a map of this route, she agreed without much hesitation (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Karla’s Map

The risks and the uncertainties of the journey, as understood by Karla before she left home.

Nevertheless, imagining the journey proved to be a daunting task for her. Karla delivered the map to me nearly a month later with an explanation that she had changed her mind; it was too dangerous to travel clandestinely. In her map, dangerous animals lined the trail, symbolizing the travel risks. A mountain looms ominously in the distance, obscuring the path forward. The journey is uncertain because the adventure cannot be foretold. Despite (or because of) her worldliness and the experiences of her family, Karla knew it would be preposterous to predict the route she would need to travel. Thus, the mountains in her map symbolized her uncertainty about the path she would take. Yet within a year of drawing the map, a frightened Karla braved the journey anyway; she suddenly left for reasons that she never explained to me. Perhaps the lure of adventure overcame the monotony of a rural woman’s life. Perhaps one of her siblings offered her a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel with an expensive coyote, and she seized the moment. Since such smuggling services could, at the time, cost $7,500 for a regular passage, it is easy to imagine that sponsorship for such pricey travel opportunities might be difficult to refuse.² I did not have the opportunity to ask Karla about the motives for her sudden flight. Instead, through the images Karla posted on Facebook, I have followed her from a distance for years, watching her create a new home in the United States and raise her daughter, who was born after her arrival and thus is a U.S. citizen. With a bit of luck, Karla will avoid deportation and will not have to travel the migrant passage through Mexico again.

The survival plays necessitated by the migrant passage can make heroes, victims, and villains out of Central Americans, such as Karla, who must brave it. These survival plays are the performances that structure encounters among strangers under violent conditions, and they become a source of cultural and territorial mobility within the migration corridor. Nevertheless, the State sets the stage by imposing borders and generating risk and uncertainty for migrants crossing Mexico. These everyday scenes of migration unfold within a larger political theater, in which the intensification of migration policing and migrant suffering play to a U.S. audience.³ Taken together, survival plays and policing scenes depict a tragedy rather than an epic, often closing with senseless sacrifice instead of happy endings. For this reason, I hope that Karla’s part in this spectacle is over.

To return to the image for a moment, the mountain motif in Karla’s map is not just background setting serving an aesthetic purpose. The image is critical for understanding the plot structure of a clandestine journey from Central America to the United States.⁴ In her map, the mountains obscure the way forward, because each journey is unique. She cannot know what may lurk beyond. The past offers little guide to the future. While Karla trusted her siblings, she had doubted her ability to learn from their experiences in the borderlands. The route north through Mexico changes dramatically from one journey to the next, limiting the capacity to predict whether migrants arrive successfully in the United States or not.

Using a theatrical metaphor, this book tells the story of how people like Karla navigate in shadow and cope with a double-edged micropolitics of information; it is this double-edged informational politics that animates the plot and creates unexpected twists, moving people in new trajectories as they grapple with unknowns. Karla is rational, but to imagine a journey to the United States, she must navigate an almost impossibly difficult problem of uncertainty. While risk is the probability of a danger and its potential harm, uncertainty characterizes a dangerous situation without a known probability.⁵ A dynamic strategic setting and the accompanying clandestinity—a necessity during the journey due to policing and criminal predation—exacerbate uncertainty. In this setting, information is both a resource and a curse; migrants must learn past practices and protocols for negotiating the journey, but the very availability of this information renders it suspect. The spread of information about how and where to go may lead migrants north, but it may also lead police and criminal predators to migrants. As police and criminals attempt to intercept them, migrants cannot rely on information about past practices without reservation, even if reliable sources like trusted loved ones relayed that information to them. In fact, with the intensification of Mexican policing and criminal violence occurring since the mid-2000s, even experienced migrants and guides express bewilderment about recent changes along the route through Mexico.

Thus, in the shadow of Karla’s mountains, as I contemplated their meaning, I studied two interrelated questions about migrant journeys:

1. If the most experienced migrants and guides feel daunted by this uncertainty and violence, how do people attempt to move along the route with the barest of social or financial resources at their disposal?
2. How do these wanderers, many of whom never arrive at their intended destinations, interact with people and places along the way, and what are the consequences for the societies through which they travel?

I argue in my answer that people improvise encounters with strangers and with the terrain to survive a dangerous and uncertain passage. Migration studies, focused primarily on the role of social capital as a mobility resource, have missed the importance of encounters among strangers as a survival resource.⁶ These studies have also generally overlooked the physical encounter with terrain as a source of migration information. Much of this scholarship treats the journey from the homeland to a destination country as a black box.⁷ Scholars emphasize the preparations, resources, adaptations, politics, and the socioeconomic impact of migration before or after migrants take their trips. Academic work that does unpack the journey tends to focus myopically on the border rather than the long-distance corridors that most migrants must traverse.⁸ Nevertheless, during the journey, improvised performances of social scripts and improvised material practices become a resource for mobility. As we will see, migrants’ loose reenactments of these scripts and practices also potentially reinforce or destabilize identity and place markers. These reenactments generate social ambiguity. As a result, migrants’ encounters with people and places along the way restructure the route for the people that follow in their footsteps.

Importantly, this process unfolds whether migrants reach their intended destinations or not. Scholarship focused primarily on migrant destinations generally misses the story of the people who never reach them. A U.S.-only view of the migration process obscures the stories of people who never leave home, people who make failed journeys, and people who die or disappear en route. A view from the transit corridor, however, reveals the long-reaching shadow of the border for people who may never step foot in the United States.

Therefore, I analyze the journey and migrants’ improvised interaction with the transit corridor through which they pass. In this context, improvisation refers to an irreverent resourcefulness—a leveraging of conventions and codes for unanticipated purposes.⁹ As such, it is cultural mobility in action, and a theatrical metaphor spotlights this dimension of mobility.¹⁰ By tracing these improvisations along the transit corridor from Central America through Mexico and into the United States, I show how fluid migration practices reshape the social landscape. Thus, I argue that migrants’ responses to their uncertain passage transform the possibilities of the nation-state and the world around us, albeit with as yet undetermined outcomes for borders and humanity. This book, along with Karla’s map, is a portrait of underground globalization in action.

An Ethnographic Journey

Drawing on the accounts of people like Karla, I take the reader on an ethnographic journey, introducing the people, places, and practices that compose the borderlands within nation-states. You will meet the priests and hustlers, cops and criminals, smugglers and good Samaritans, and adventurers and refugees who inhabit the transnational space that connects Central America, Mexico, and the United States. You will meet migrants who never arrive at their destinations; some of these migrants will wander indefinitely and others disappear, presumably into hidden graves. You will meet people who leave home, and you will meet the people they leave behind. Following in their footsteps, we will discover how people survive a human security crisis with imagination and improvisation—not just planning. These everyday improvisations generate an emergent transnational space where material and social practices become unmoored.

Until now, however, much of the literature exploring the immigrant experience has largely ignored improvised journeys in favor of migration-specific resources and social ties accumulated in migrant home communities and destinations. A focus on established social networks misses the resources that emerge from anonymous, fleeting encounters with strangers and terrain. As a result, this focus also misses a dynamic process of engagement between migrants and the transit corridor through which they pass. Indeed, migration theories rooted in ideas of social capital and networks have a difficult time explaining how migrants cope with uncertainty.¹¹ As explained by Ċetta Mainwaring, “network theories often present migration systems as fully formed without investigating the agency required to initiate, transform, or weaken such systems.”¹² In other words, it misses the way migrants shape societies through which they pass and the reordering of geopolitics that occurs within and around these transnational spaces. These migrants reorder global politics simply by attempting to cross borders. Their attempted passage is reshaping the Americas, Eurasia, and the Mediterranean basin.

By exploring migration through the lens of the journey, this book responds to a recent call for international relations (IR) scholars to examine how ordinary people, sometimes unwittingly, impede the projects of nation-states and thus shape the world political economy.¹³ Even if they never reach their destination, people embark on journeys that effect personal, social, economic, and political transformations along the route they traverse. Scholars of international politics have overlooked the flesh and blood travails of migrants who undergo dangerous long-distance odysseys. Much of this scholarship therefore supplies an incomplete view of globalization—one that focuses almost exclusively on top-down, collective challenges to the nation-state. However, ethnographic methods, a lens that focuses on the level of practice, reveal a more complex transnational social process. Through an anthropological lens we can see how the paths blazed by migrants complicate the cultural markers that the State requires to distinguish between migrants and citizens. We also see how they reshape the physical and socioeconomic terrain of the nation-state, leveraging aboveground economies and social relations for underground activities.

While the State may impede individual journeys and enforce a territorial boundary, neither collective action nor novel technologies are necessary to complicate borders. To be clear, I do not argue that territorial borders or the State are disappearing. The interplay between migrants and the State creates unintended consequences that we can best understand at the analytical and methodological borders of IR and anthropology. Viewing globalization “from below” allows us to trace how migrants and citizens adapt to existing roles, protocols, and rituals for the purpose of their survival. They also improvise on the material resources at their disposal. A more humble, speculative position emerges from analytical engagement with everyday people such as Karla. On the one hand, IR scholarship benefits from this humility because we explore politics that matter to the survival of marginalize...