A visible geography of invisible journeys: Central American migration and the politics of survival

Human rights groups have called undocumented Central American migrants the ‘invisible victims’ of criminal violence in Mexico. However, the geography of the unauthorised migration route through Mexico is highly visible; its location, protocols and violent practices constitute common knowledge in the communities through which it cuts its path. This paper examines the visual cues of the route. Images of places, such as the trailhead, the river at the borders, the migrant shelter and the train yard, provide focal points that orient migrants to the physical terrain. These images also orient activists, providing potent symbols for political contestation in favour of migrants’ rights. However, visibility attracts criminal gangs who rob, kidnap and rape migrants, and the gaze of state officials who detain and deport migrants. Thus, this paper traces how geographic icons become beacons to migrants, activists, criminal predators and state actors, and it examines the nature of information and representation under this strategic interaction. It examines how victims and perpetrators become visible to one another

Matryoshka journeys: im/mobility during migration

Acts of mobility require corresponding acts of immobility (or suspended mobility). Migrant journeys are not only about movement. Indeed, in the present policy context, this is ever more true. Whether a migrant is contained within a hidden compartment, detained by migration authorities, waiting for remittances to continue, or marooned within a drifting boat at sea, these moments of immobility have become an inherent part of migrant journeys especially as states have increased controls at and beyond their borders. Migrants themselves view this fragmentation – the stopping, waiting and containment – as part of the journey to be endured. Drawing on the authors’ fieldwork in Central America and Southern Europe, this paper destabilises the boundary between transit and settlement, speaking to a larger policy discourse that justifies detentions and deportations from the United States and countries on the periphery of Europe. We argue that migrants’ nested experiences of these ‘matryoshka journeys’ reveal how increased migration controls encourage them not only to take greater risks during the journey, but also to forfeit their agency at opportune moments. In turn, states exploit images of such im/mobility during the journey in order to emphasise the irrational risks migrants take in order to traverse seas and deserts and to cloak their own border policies in a humanitarian discourse of rescue

Underground Railroads and Coyote Conductors: Brokering Clandestine Passages, Then and Now

This article juxtaposes the Underground Railroad with contemporary Central American smuggling practices. Activists in the US Sanctuary Movement, seeking to provide safe passage to the USA for Central American refugees, summon the legacy of the Underground Railroad as a normative frame for understanding their mission. In the original Underground Railroad, a loose network of ‘conductors’ ushered escaped slaves north to freedom. In contrast to immigrant rights activists and slavery abolitionists, for-profit smugglers have been vilified as violent predators. Nevertheless, surprising similarities in social practices and relationships that underpin such dramatically different cases of migration brokerage point to the contingencies, complexities and ambiguous roles of smugglers. A counterintuitive comparison between the contemporary smuggling route and the historical freedom trail shows how normative imaginaries reshape social boundaries and territorial borders in North America

Subversive knowledge in times of global political crisis: a manifesto for ethnography in the study of international relations

This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using ethnographic methods to analyze global politics in turbulent times. Ethnography has not gone unnoticed by international relations (IR) scholars, but the method remains at the fringes of the discipline. While acknowledging more recent feminist and practice theorist contributions to ethnographic research in IR, this paper brings together contemporary research across diverse issue areas, ranging from humanitarian intervention to transnational migration, to ask about ethnography's larger contribution to understanding global politics: What kinds of knowledge does ethnography produce about IR? In what ways might ethnography, informed by local perspectives, challenge top-down approaches to the study of IR? We identify three primary justifications for ethnographic methods based on different, though overlapping, forms of knowledge that they can uncover: tacit knowledge, marginalized knowledge, and subversive knowledge. We acknowledge issues that complicate access, and we warn that ethnographers are far from immune to the imperialist arrogance of mainstream methodologies. Ultimately, we call for reflexive scholarship to navigate the international politics of a “post-truth” and post-Covid world

Beyond the border: clandestine migration journeys

No abstract available

Uncertain Odysseys: Migrant Journeys And Transnational Routes

How do people behave when confronted with uncertainty and violence? This dissertation examines how Central American migrants cope with escalating violence in transit and how these coping tactics reshape the social landscape of transnational routes. From villages in El Salvador into Mexico and through the United States, the sustained practice of migration informs behavior along a dangerous route, not only through social networks, but also by carving a transit political economy and transnational imaginary. Migration decisions are rational, but must be viewed as an ongoing process of learning constituted by information gathering, imagination and improvisation en route. As people move along these routes, migrants and citizens improvise new identities, shifting national, racial and gendered boundaries. The ethnographic framework of this dissertation elucidates the implications of this process for the governance of states through which transnational flows pass. The attempt to impede these flows within the territory of transit states, like Mexico, has not only thickened borders and policing; it has extended the social ambiguities and uncertainty of the borderlands, inviting the Hobbesian anarchy of the international system into the domestic domain of the state. Thus, this dissertation points to how migrants and citizens share the catastrophic human security consequences of migration policing

From La Monjita to La Hormiga: Reflections on Gender, Body and Power in Fieldwork

Ethnography is widely accepted to be an embodied and experiential form of knowledge production. Gender, in particular, shapes fieldwork, influencing relationships between participants and researchers, access, and observation, and intersecting with race, class, nationality, sexuality, and other identity categories. Building on a rich tradition of reflexive feminist scholarship that explores this intersectionality, this article discusses how my own corporeal transformation to a muscular powerlifter changed both the nature of my fieldwork relationships and my research strategies over the course of a decade of local engagement in El Salvador. Ultimately, I argue that the embodied consequences of fieldwork and their challenge to patriarchy must be undertaken alongside research participants. Together we are collectively re-imagining gender

The Politics of Data Access in Studying Violence across Methodological Boundaries: What We Can Learn from Each Other?

In this article, we investigate where the ethics of data collection and access of two widely disparate methodological approaches studying violence intersect, and we explore how these respective intellectual communities can learn from each other. We compare and contrast the research strategies and dilemmas confronted by researchers using quantitative methods to collect and analyze “big data” and those by researchers conducting interpretivist ethnography grounded in the method of participant observation. The shared context of participant vulnerability produces overlapping concerns about our work. With shifts in quantitative conflict research to examine the microdynamics of violence, quandaries of confidentiality and the ethics of exposure have become increasingly salient. At the same time, ethical dilemmas that arise in the large-scale collection of data offer important points of reflection regarding the ethics of participant observation as it is performed in ethnographic research. Instead of focusing on areas of disagreement, we suggest that interpretivist fieldworkers and quantitative researchers can learn from how the politics of information materialize across divergent research methods