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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses shelters in relation to the migration industry that shapes irregular migration from Central America to Mexico. Whereas the migration industry literature often separates migration facilitation from migration control, we instead position shelters at the intersection of the two domains. We use an assemblage approach to better understand how different institutions, policies, responsibilities, actors and discourses meet, clash and intertwine at shelters. Based on our ethnographic material, we distinguish three significant processes that characterise sheltering practices (attraction, multiple performativities, (dis)location) and analyse how these processes display different, sometimes contradictory, discourses and power relations. With these insights, we conclude that sheltering practices reinforce as well as destabilise migration management architecture in Mexico. They undermine the presupposed ‘rigidity’ of migration management, but they simultaneously attract violence and control, and incorporate state-like practices of administration and discipline. In particular, the notions of ‘humanitarian aid’ and ‘mobility control’ are floating signifiers in these practices in the sense that they are constantly open to different ascriptions of meaning. Following this observation, we consider the migration management architecture as a form of plasticity. Its shape and function might appear to be rigid, but it is able to bend, bow and change in forms rather easily.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes
1 All ethnographic vignettes in this article were translated from Spanish to English by the first author, and taken from his fieldwork experiences.
2 The names of migrant people, the shelters and the places mentioned in this paper are pseudonyms.
3 Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg-Sorensen (Citation2013) in fact distinguish a third domain that they call the ‘rescue industry’. We subsume this aspect under the notion of migration facilitation.
4 Monthly Bulletin of Migration Statistics, Migration Policy Unit (UPM), Mexico (Unidad de Política Migratoria, Citation2016), https://docplayer.es/53010202-Boletin-mensual-de-estadisticas-migratorias-2016.html
5 Mainly security corporations like the federal, state and municipal police, as well as the military, public prosecutors and National Migration Institute (INM) agents.
7 Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, from the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) party, promised before the 2018 elections to solve the ‘migratory crisis’, focusing on the protection of migrants’ human rights: https://lopezobrador.org.mx/temas/migrantes/; see also https://regeneracion.mx/la-prioridad-para-la-politica-de-amlo-sera-que-a-los-migrantes-se-les-respete-olga-sanchez-cordero/
Marcelo Ebrard, Secretary of External Relations, signed on December of the same year the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) on behalf of AMLO’s administration.
8 Casa para Todes is continuously engaging in activities with the local community to raise awareness about the violent context that migrants experience. There is also a project created by the shelter to provide a number of migrants with dignifying employment in farming activities.
9 It is worth mentioning that the first author did not obtain data regarding the amount and forms of payment for the base team workers. The minimum amount of time that a volunteer works at the shelter is one month. The first author met volunteers who had worked there for five months already. It is known that after a certain period of time a voluntary worker can become part of the base team, but the precise conditions and/or the time period for doing so are not known.
10 This shelter and other shelters collect data on migrants for statistical purposes; to denounce the violence experienced by the migrants on their journeys; to counter the state’s narrative of protection of migrants by the state institutions; and to document the violence and criminal practices that migrants are exposed to.
11 These are two different regularisation processes. In this article we focus on the humanitarian visa process. The migrants who do not apply for refugee status may obtain a regularisation of their legal status through the humanitarian visa process if they have been victims of a violent crime in the Mexican territory (article 52 of the Mexican Migration Law). See https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://legalzone.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/PDF-Ley-de-Migraci%C3%B3n-M%C3%A9xico.pdf&hl=es
12 The Fiscalía Especializada en Atención a Migrantes is the public prosecutor’s office, where irregular migrants can submit a report and obtain access to the Mexican judicial system.
13 This article refers to ethnographic experiences that occurred between January and April of 2018. The procedure for requesting the regularisation for humanitarian reasons and all the requirements can be found at http://www.inm.gob.mx/static/Tramites/regularizacion/Por_razones_humanitarias.pdf; see also https://www.gob.mx/tramites/ficha/regularizacion-migratoria-por-razones-humanitarias/INM791
14 Journalist Oscar Martínez explains how the Zetas Cartel have control over local ‘minor criminals’ by authorising their operation and punishing whoever acts outside their authorisation. These criminals are known as zetitas.
15 Article 76 of the Mexican Migration Law.
16 Decisions of expelling someone were taken by the shelter’s director, nevertheless, volunteers would have an active role on evaluating each situation.
17 The ‘guards’ are a group of migrants working voluntarily to uphold the conviviality rules, and to keep the flow of people in and out under control.
18 These were also gendered areas: only men could become guards, while women and men could become kitchen staff.
19 There is a 99% impunity regarding the crime reports made by irregular migrants at Mexican Public Prosecutor’s Offices between 2014 and 2016 (see report from WOLA 2017).
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Notes on contributors
Cesar E. Merlín-Escorza
Cesar E. Merlín-Escorza is a Social Anthropologist at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa in DF (Ciudad de México). He holds an MSc in Anthropology and Development Studies from Radboud University and is a PhD Candidate in the Geography Department (GPM) and the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen.
Tine Davids
Tine Davids is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She teaches and conducts research on gender, politics, globalisation, gender mainstreaming, feminist ethnography and (return) migration, and has published internationally on these research areas. Her recent publications include: Women, Gender and Remittances (co-edited with Ton van Naerssen, Lothar Smith and Marianne Marchand; Ashgate, 2015); “Narrating Marriage: Negotiating Practices and Politics of Belonging of Afghan Return Migrants” (with M. van Houte; in Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2018); and “Gendered Narrations of National Belonging and Motherhood in Sudan and Mexico” (with K. Willemse; in the book Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies, 2018).
Joris Schapendonk
Joris Schapendonk is an Assistant Professor in the Geography, Planning and Environment Department of Radboud University and an active member of theNijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR). His research concentrates on im/mobility trajectories and the role of migration industry actors in shaping migration processes. In 2014, he received a personal research grant from the Innovation Research Scheme of the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research. Additionally, he is attached to the Helping Hands Research Network that investigates everyday border work of European citizens in different European countries (funded by the Danish Research Council 2017–2019). Recently, he also became part of a HERA consortium (2019–2022) that investigates the role of mobile merchants in the production of marketplaces as inclusive public spaces.