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

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

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