https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0631-8816
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
The Mexico–Guatemala border is the site of significant movement of people whose principal destination is the USA. The first step, to cross Mexico, is considered as one of the most dangerous routes in the world for undocumented migrants. For some male migrants and displaced persons from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, initiating sex work in the Mexican border city of Tapachula has become a way to earn money to survive during the trip northward – providing funds to keep traveling and decrease the danger of being killed or kidnaped by organized crime groups. Non-injected drug use during sex work with men and/or women is a common praxis for this purpose, and is linked to HIV risk activities such as unprotected sex. Our study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with observation and interviews and within a relational approach understanding the processes subject/structure, sociopolitical/cultural and global/local, not as oppositions, rather as linkages visible through actors’ points of view and praxis. The productions of politics and cultures related to structural vulnerability to HIV infection are embedded in local and global borderization processes where legal and illegal transnational forces, states’ frameworks and social groups play a linked role. The economies of structural, symbolic and direct violence affect migratory patterns, institutional interactions and social and cultural relations with the local population. In this context, social representations and praxis about unprotected sex and drug use are the locus of struggling bodies at the border.
Ethical approval
All interviews were conducted after obtaining participants’ informed consent provided in Spanish, with approval of the institutional review boards at the University of California San Diego, the Instituto de Salud del Estado de Chiapas and the Universidad del Valle Guatemala.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
3 Freight train network used by undocumented migrants to avoid border patrol control while crossing Mexico from Arriaga (Chiapas) to the US borders cities of Tijuana, Juarez and Matamoros.
4 The African-Mexican population is still little recognized in Mexico (Velázquez and Iturralde Citation2012).
5 ‘Mexican Commission of Help to Refugees’.
6 The US provides migratory control resources, such as land and air patrols and training of security forces among other stimuli, to detect and deport undocumented Central Americans in Mexico (PCS Citation2015).