The undocumented‐migrant journey across Mexico has become a site of intense violence, exploitation, and profit making within the logics of capitalism. While transnational migration is often conceptualized from the perspective of sending and receiving communities and borderlands, I suggest the liminal spaces between these zones are crucial sites for understanding how structural forms of violence are reconfigured in local settings. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in migrant shelters located along the journey, I trace how Central American migrants’ bodies, labor, and lives are transformed into commodities within economies of smuggling, extortion, and humanitarian aid. I argue that everyday violence along the journey is produced by historical trajectories of political and criminal violence and by local and global economies that profit from human mobility. As violence is rearticulated at the local level, new tensions and social dislocations emerge between and among social groups.

No abstract

This article examines the material and ideological dimensions of what I conceptualise as Mexico's 'arterial border'. Since the late 1980s, transit routes in Mexico's interior have increasingly become sites of a diffused migration enforcement strategy. Based on long-term ethnographic research along Central American transit routes, I examine how the arterial border has developed historically and is experienced by migrants in local contexts. I pay particular attention to the disjuncture between violent encounters with the state and discourses of security, human rights and humanitarianism that serve to legitimise bordering practices. Such an analysis moves beyond understandings of borders as spatially fixed entities to reimagine them as constantly shifting and dynamic sites of state violence, individual agency and contestation.

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism through the counterintuitive comparison of journeys travelled by US citizens as they enlist in the military and by unauthorized Central Americans as they migrate to the United States. We argue that, however different the context and content of their decisions and their lives, Central American migrants and US soldiers are both connected within a larger political economy. We complicate the idea of migrants and soldiers as purely rational economic actors, but we also reject the idea, imputed onto migrants and soldiers by neoliberal states, that they are naturally nationalistic actors. Migrants and soldiers embody a neoliberal subjectivity produced through processes of violence, capital accumulation and militarization. Yet, as we examine throughout this paper, their construction as homeland heroes within the national imaginary masks the ways their labor and their mobility serve the institutionalization of neoliberal statecraft. Resumen: Este documento examina la relación dinámica entre el neoliberalismo y el nacionalismo a través de la comparación contraintuitivo de viajes recorridos por los ciudadanos de EE.UU., que se alistan en el ejército y los centroamericanos no autorizados que emigran a los Estados Unidos. Nosotros sostenemos que los migrantes centroamericanos y los soldados estadounidenses están conectados dentro de una economía política más amplia, incluso a pesar de la diferencia en el contenido de sus decisiones, de sus vidas y de sus contextos. Nos complicamos la idea de los migrantes y los soldados como los actores económicos puramente racionales, pero también rechazamos la idea, imputada a los migrantes y los soldados de los Estados neoliberales, que son actores naturalmente nacionalistas. Los migrantes y los soldados encarnan una subjetividad neoliberal que se produce a través de procesos de violencia, la acumulación de capital y la militarización. A medida que examinamos en este documento, su construcción como héroes de la patria dentro de las máscaras de imaginarios nacionales las formas de su trabajo y su movilidad servir a la institucionalización del arte de gobernar neoliberal.

While Mexico has been openly critical of US immigration enforcement policies, it has also served as a strategic partner in US efforts to externalize its immigration enforcement strategy. In 2016, Mexico returned twice as many Central Americans as did the United States, calling many to criticize Mexico for doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Based on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, this article unpacks and complicates the idea that Mexico is simply doing the “dirty work” of the United States. It examines how, through the construction of “dirty others”—as vectors of disease, criminals, smugglers, and workers—Central Americans come to embody “matter out of place,” thus threatening order, security, and the nation itself. Dirt and dirtiness, in both symbolic and material forms, emerge as crucial organizing factors in the politics of Central American transit migration, providing an important case study in the dynamics between transit and destination states.