Abstract

RUIZ LAGIER, Verónica  and  VARELA HUERTA, Amarela. Migrant and refugee caravans in transit through Mexico. The exodus of young Hondurans migrating to preserve life. Entrediversidades rev. cienc. soc. humanid. [online]. 2020, vol.7, n.1, pp.92-129.  Epub June 30, 2021. ISSN 2007-7610.  https://doi.org/10.31644/ed.v7.n1.2020.a04.

This ethnography represents an exercise of the “socio-anthropology of emergencies”. It draws on the first results of an ongoing investigation into migrant subjectivities and self-organization, which are, for us, the ultimate meaning of the caravans that originated in Central America and crossed Mexico in the fall of 2018 and until the spring of 2019. We use the methodological tool of life histories in order to illuminate the emerging subjectivities and political agency produced and sustained by the caravans; more specifically, we share young Hondurans’ biographies involving their unsuccessful attempts to reach the United States, as well as some of the strategies to preserve their own life or the one of their families. We include the biographies of four young people we met when, as researchers of asylum and migrant struggles, we took part of the humanitarian bridge that sheltered the caravans transiting through Mexico City. Drawing from these life histories, we analyze processes of collective becoming, as well as the individual strategies of those displaced by poverty or violence who, trapped in transience (Fernández, 2017), attempt to build a viable life in this “bottleneck country” (Varela, 2019). Through these cases, we seek to reflect on contemporary Mexico and its ways of managing transmigration, as well as the way in which it has become a “hosting country”.

Keywords : migrants; Central American exodus; migrant caravans; “hosting country”.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )