Laughing about It: Emotional and Affective Spaces of Humour in the Geopolitics of Migration

ABSTRACT

Every day, migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras risk their lives attempting to reach the US. Accordingly, accounts of migration from Central America are often framed by tragedy and violence, as migrants increasingly confront new security and border control practices in Mexico and the US, in addition to other forms of brutality on their journeys. Though accurate, these descriptions grounded in tragedy obscure other everyday experiences of migrants in transit, which, as I show here, are punctuated not only by brutality and violence but also by play and laughter. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in migrant shelters across Mexico and the US, I argue that humour represents a crucial, yet neglected, detail in the geopolitics of international migration. I develop the shared and collective aspects of joking and laughter in migrants’ journeys by detailing how Central American migrants deploy humour as a shared mechanism to cope with their vulnerability while generating spaces of collective solidarity, as they join together in making light of their illegality and immobility in transit. Ultimately, I assert, attention to humour in the study of the geopolitics of migration reveals the complexity of migrants’ experiences along their journeys, experiences that transcend overly simplistic accounts of brutality and violence to better understand migrants’ everyday lives in transit.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• affect
• humour
• geopolitics
• migration
• securitization

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Jamie Winders, Lorraine Dowler, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful insights.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Latin American Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers and the Maxwell School Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.