¡Qué mamada! (What a Joke!): Humor, Hostility, and Hospitality along the Central American Migrant Trail

Abstract

Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US-Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materially through everyday objects like pickup trucks, coke bottles, and welding torches, as rhetorical strategies that migrant guests rely on to negotiate the contradictions of welcome and trespass that anthropologists have largely discussed through the lens of humanitarianism. These dynamics illuminate how intersecting migrant communities reify and reconfigure ambiguities of solidarity and suspicion that surround transit migration as ethical-moral border regimes increasingly push migrant communities toward informal hospitality spaces at the margins of the West.[hospitality, humor, transit migration, border externalization, Mexico] R e s u m e n A través de su tránsito por México, los inmigrantes centroamericanos encuentran en las bromas y burlas una salida de un régimen transnacional fronterizo, definido tanto por la hospitalidad como por la hostilidad xenófoba. Basado en un trabajo de campo etnográfico en un taller de soldadura en Monterrey, ciudad al norte de México, donde es creciente el número de centroamericanos emboscados en su viaje a la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México, este artículo examina bromas burlonas y cargadas de contenido sexual, representadas a través de objetos cotidianos como camionetas, botellas de Coca Cola y antorchas de soldar, como estrategias retóricas con las que los huéspedes migrantes cuentan para negociar las contradicciones de la acogida y el traspaso, algo