Counter-mapping migration: irregular migrants’ stories through cognitive mapping

Abstract

Map-making has played a crucial role in the politics of bordering and ordering. Irregular migrants challenge these politics of confinement on a regular basis; despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, their stories are hidden in state-centric discourses. Through a counter-mapping approach, this paper focuses on our understanding of how irregular migrants experience their journey. Specifically, an analysis of cognitive maps created by Central American irregular migrants in transit through Mexico on their journey to the US is presented. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the scenarios and practices veiled by the macronarratives of the securitisation of migration. At the same time, it underscores the fact that for irregular transmigrants border control is widespread through their entire journey, thus challenging the border’s notion of fixity. This paper aims to contribute to methodologies used in the study of mobilities and to the broader understanding of how bordering processes are lived and defied by migrants.

Keywords:

• Irregular migration
• counter-mapping
• cognitive maps
• transit migration
• border control

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented during my stay as a Visiting Researcher at The Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud University. I thank Henk van Houtum and Rodrigo Bueno Lacy for their questions and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Cathal McCall, Jacobo Ramirez, Jessica Campos, Matthew Kirk, Allison Aylward and Matthew O’Neill for their comments on the preliminary versions of the manuscript. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. I owe this observation to Rodrigo Bueno Lacy.

2. Since 2011, shelters are officially classified in Mexican migration law as ‘spaces of exception’ – where officials cannot enter to verify the migratory status of the population.

3. In order to protect participants’ anonymity, pseudonyms are used for all participants.

4. Central American transmigrants use the term coyote only to define the person who has networks to pay the fees of criminal organizations and bribes of officials. In contrast, the term guías is used to name a person who, based on their familiarity with the area, help them to avoid checkpoints without asking for a fee, but a ‘help’, this person can be a local or another migrant. Nevertheless, the key to this distinction is that the coyotes provide a specialized service; they have a specialized knowledge on how to handle the risks and dangers during the journey and, especially, they have the connections to be able to operate successfully across the territory.

5. It could be interesting to compare how this is portrayed in different scenarios: high levels of infrastructures of control; no natural features that support demarcation; natural features beyond the demarcation of a national territories – e.g. in the Sonora-Arizona desert.

6. The fate of transmigrants in cases of detention by the Mexican authorities has been analysed by civil society organizations (see: González Nuñez 2014).