A crisis of rights and responsibility: feminist geopolitical perspectives on Latin American refugees and migrants

Abstract

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S. policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included: outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon examples from two research projects, informed by personal experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and hospitality towards newcomers.

Keywords:

• Central America
• courtroom
• feminist geopolitics
• Mexico
• migration
• unaccompanied children

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to have presented the 2017 Gender, Place, and Culture (GPC) Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture in honor of Jan and her tireless and transformative work on behalf of women, gender studies, feminism, and action-oriented research and service, among so many other contributions. I wish to thank Jan for providing leadership and mentorship to generations of feminist scholars, and for her legacy of an ethic of care and humanity in geographical scholarship and praxis. The University of Arizona - Tucson School of Geography and Development and Southwest Institute for Research on Women, the AAG Geographic Perspectives on Women Specialty Group, and GPC provided much appreciated support so that I was able to present earlier versions of this article in both Tucson and Boston (AAG 2017). Thanks are due to the students and faculty for their hospitality during my visit to Arizona– especially Jan Monk, Stephanie Buechler, and Orhon Myadar. I am indebted to the women and children who shared their intimate migration stories, or permitted us to observe their immigration hearings – as well as their attorneys and the judges. Also, I appreciate COLEF (Colegio de la Frontera Norte) Matamoros for providing our U.S. researchers with a home in Mexico and the shelters in Mexico for granting access to study sites and participants. I wish to acknowledge my colleagues Sarah Blue, Paul Flynn, Alfonso Gonzales, Oscar Hernández Hernández, Kate Swanson, and Amy Thompson for permitting me to share examples from our respective studies. This research was made possible through the hard work of our lead field research assistant, Tamara Segura, and also assistant Daniela Garcia. Thanks to Caroline Faria, Kate Swanson, Amy Thompson, Paul Flynn, Sarah Blue, and Jennifer Devine and for providing helpful feedback on the original talk and/or subsequent drafts. Finally, this manuscript was improved through GPC Editor Pamela Moss’ thoughtful guidance and insightful feedback from blind peer reviewers. All mistakes and short-comings are my own.