Waterproofing the State: Migration, River-Borders, and Ecologies of Control

ABSTRACT

Transboundary waters serve critical bordering functions and are often obstacles for migrants transiting throughout the globe. This article focuses on migrant encounters with Mesoamerican river-borders, as highlighted in recent media images of river crossings – from individuals to migrant caravans – that show how people use waterbodies to evade state capture. Analysing widely circulated images of migrant death at the Rio Grande (US–Mexico) and the caravan spectacle at the Suchiate River (Mexico-Guatemala), I attend to contemporary migrations taking place at the intersection of securitisation, border-making, and ecology. Reflecting on historical events such as the Río Sumpul Massacre in El Salvador, recent Central American caravan migrations across Mexico-Guatemala, to the widely circulated river death of migrants Óscar and Valeria Martínez Ramírez in mid-2019, I consider the environmental relations, cultural practices, and social forms that emerge around river-borders. I highlight ongoing processes of terraforming that are shaping borderland biomes and that are subsequently disrupting boundary dynamics linked to popular mobility, informal economies, and ecosystem health. Juxtaposing migrant sociality at river-borders with contemporary border-formation, I show how migrant movement is discouraged and repelled in service of sealing borders through the making of ecologies of control.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• river
• border
• caravan
• Central America
• ecology
• sociality
• climate
• border control
• Suchiate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Jorge E. Cuéllar

Jorge E. Cuéllar is Mellon Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Cuéllar is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on the politics and daily life of modern Central America. Informed by social theory, his research emphasises the life affirming initiatives taking place in worlds characterised by social fragmentation, generalised insecurity, and environmental degradation by highlighting struggles that interrupt the violent logics that produce precarity, displacement, dispossession, and everyday death.