Migrant Passage (original) (raw)

Book Review: The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America

International Migration Review, 2020

Against a backdrop of increasingly vitriolic migration policy and practice, The Migrant Passage reminds us with empirical grace that those fleeing Central America and Mexico may be squeezed by the state in different ways, but they will rarely be deterred. Brigden plumbs the ethnographic depths of the transit route from the perspective of the many who have experienced and enacted this sometimestreacherous geography. Composed of nearly 300 interviews with migrants, clergy, human-rights activists, community members, government officials, and family members, the author's method of performing ethnography seeks to mirror migration practice. Like the migrants themselves, Brigden uses improvisation to encounter strangers and rugged terrain ranging from Salvadoran sending communities to the Mexican transit corridor. The research comes to life visually through map-making workshops, which yield powerful pictorial depictions of the route. The Migrant Passage uses a theatrical metaphor to evince the tragedy of clandestine journeys and somewhat expectedly is divided into three acts: Exposition, Rising Action, and Climax. In spite of this choice, the survival plays are both heartwrenching and moving and they provide new insights into some of international migration's more overlooked dimensions. Foremost among the contributions is the importance of improvisation. Migration studies, so long focused on migrant destinations and sending communities, has spent less time on the micro-politics of the inbetween: those encounters along the dangerous and uncertain passage. Unpacking the scholarship beyond conventional points on a map allows for multiple nuanced observations. There is, for example, an acknowledgment of the importance of "the long-reaching shadow of the border for people who may never set foot in the US" (p. 7). Borders, and el norte more generally, figure prominently in Mexican and Central American imaginations, both colloquially and through the mediascape. We hear that longing tinged with hopefulness across nearly every story. Trekking north involves significant hardship and danger, a point adeptly International Migration Review 1-3 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions journals.sagepub.com/home/mrx

Borders re/make Bodies and Bodies are made to make Borders: Storying Migrant Trajectories

2017

The concept of borders continues to be notoriously obscure, due to its conceptual complexity, historicity and political situatedness. Equally contestable are concepts such as migrant and migration. Conceptually, I draw from Harsha Walia’s (2013) Border Imperialism and border studies that center on the context-particular histories of European colonialism and imperialism. Central to the article is the interlacing of geopolitics and the everyday in ways that show the explosion of borders and peculiar dissection of borders on particular migrants. Borders re/make bodies and bodies are made to make borders in the variety of ways across different sites. In the first half of the manuscript, I argue that these compelling conceptual and methodological approaches are pivotal to challenging Eurocentric representations of migrants and positivist research traditions, while in the second half I forge an understanding of the biopolitics of borders. My research findings are developed from 10 in-depth narratives mainly collected from Bangladeshi migrants in Madrid and Rome. Alongside participatory (action) research (P(A)R) methods and migrant narratives, I recall my own precarious work experiences and identity as a migrant, in Europe, which are parallel but quite distinct from the experiences of the participants. This research has deepened my understanding of migrants and borders and de-centered my conceptualizations prior to this field work. Notably, I strive to meet two challenges: provide a critical discussion on my use of feminist-informed methodology, and forward an analysis of the situation of migrants from the Global South in Europe through their voices by emphasizing the need for ethnographically-informed works to foreground significant aspects of migrant trajectories and their everyday lives.

Displaced lives in the Americas. A review of three cross-border ethnographies

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2020

This review essay discusses three recent cross-border ethnographies that in complementary ways analyse migration, smuggling, and insecurity in Central America and Mexico. The first two ethnographies, by Wendy Vogt and Noelle Brigden, focus on Central American migrants on the move in Mexico, whereas the third ethnography by Rebecca Galemba zooms in on a specific border crossing, its Guatemalan and Mexican residents and the ways in which these residents engage in the smuggling of commodities. All three ethnographies consider people, goods, and livelihoods on the move, the illegalization and violence this movement entails, and its implications for the places along Cen-tral American and Mexican transit routes. Although the works by Vogt and Brigden can be positioned in migration studies, and Galemba’s in border stud-ies, in this review I join and juxtapose them as ‘cross-border ethnographies’. Doing so enables me to bring out their collective strength in exploring dis-placed lives, more specifically, to highlight the interplay between experiences of displacement and the changing socio-material landscape through which these experiences take place.

Migrant Narratives and Ethnographic Tropes: Navigating Tragedy, Creating Possibilities

Tragic stories of border crossings are often central to accounts of migration, and as ethnographers we are privy to stories of clandestine crossings, painful separations, and unspeakable loss. In the process of writing, ethnographers make these stories central to their own arguments and in so doing, those crossings, separations, and losses become knowable, imaginable, and part of a larger story of global interconnectedness and inequality. Ethnographers of migration write about those who cross borders, who become stuck within borders, or who are forcibly moved across borders because of deportation. Ethnographers thus position themselves at the crossroads of being activists, storytellers, and academics, even as they also locate their informants' narratives along trajectories of tragedy and possibility.