Residential Integration and Documentation

Access to housing is a fundamental element of citizenship (^{Marshall, 1950}) and one of the dimensions of access to social rights in the inclusion-exclusion model (^{Velázquez de la Parra, 1991}). The processes of residential integration of deportees in Mexico represent a vein of exploration and analysis to be expanded. The study by ^{Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013}) of populations from Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Jamaica states that a common difficulty in the processes of social reintegration of deported Central Americans is access to housing, which is related to the deterioration of their networks and the economic problems with which they return to their countries.

This dimension of citizenship positions deported individuals as subjects of the welfare system of a State. Housing, as a right, is one of the tasks for which governments work and constitutes one of the benefits of modern trade unions. In the northern border cities of Mexico, a housing infrastructure has been created that has gradually turned them into receiving cities for populations in transit and, more recently, for returned populations.

In Tijuana, there is an increasingly recognized range of organizations that provide services and support to migrants in various areas. These organizations have been created throughout the history of Tijuana as a receiving city of migrants in transit and, lately, of the population returned or deported from the United States. One of the most important services offered is temporary housing.

Accommodation is provided to individuals through two avenues: the first avenue is the shelter service offered as part of the Human Repatriation Program (Programa de Repatriación Humana, PRH)⁵ at the federal level that works in conjunction with local government offices responsible for dealing with deportees from the United States. This service is offered at the time of admission to the Repatriation Module, where some people take this benefit and are directed to the respective shelters. Those who have family or social networks in Tijuana or sufficient economic resources pay for the rent of a room or go to the home of their acquaintances in the city. The case study reports present cases of those who claim not to have received such information and others who say they decided not to take this option at the time of their arrival in Tijuana, but rather days after their arrival, provided that they have the certificate of deportation that is granted in the module.

The deportation certificate is what gives access to this social service. Those who benefit from this are directed in the following way: men are sent to the Casa del Migrante, women to the Casa Madre Asunta, and children or minors to the Casa YMCA. These organizations are part of what is called the “Migrant Care Coalition” (Coalición de Atención al Migrante) and work in conjunction and synergy with local government programs. The length of stay is only fifteen days. These organizations usually offer humanitarian assistance in various areas such as food, lodging, hot baths, clothing and footwear, basic medical service (first aid), and job placement. The latter is one of the services that have been incorporated to expand the scope of action of these organizations in the process of repatriation-reintegration in Mexico.

A second option is the provision of shelters that, in recent years, have transformed from places of passage to long-stay facilities. Shelters have been built mainly in the central area and surrounding sectors of the city. Information on this option is provided during the first days in the city. These are places created by civil organizations of Evangelical Christian origin and other secular organizations, the majority of which house migrants and deportees from the United States. However, they offer the accommodation service to the general public with a minimum payment that the people in charge call a “recovery fee,” which varies between 10 and 30 pesos per night. These have been created as short-stay accommodation, but they have gradually become the places of residence of the abovementioned population. The services offered vary from one to another: food, locker services to keep necessary belongings such as documents and some other items, and laundry service that is paid in addition to the recovery fee. In most of them, access is only allowed from 4:00 p.m.; in very few cases, an all-day stay is allowed, especially in extraordinary cases, for example, for people who have a physical disability that impedes their mobility. In other situations, with more flexible rules and policies of coexistence and lower quality of service, a 24-hour stay is allowed. However, these places usually remain empty during the day because individuals go out to look for work or resources to subsist. The dynamics of the accommodation spaces seem to push them to be itinerant.

In the last decade, the traditional shelters of the “Migrant Care Coalition” changed from sheltering mainly migrants in transit to people deported from the United States (^{Coubès et al., 2015}). In 2016, ^{Velasco et al. (2017}) documented the existence of 30 shelters⁶, most of them of ecclesiastical origin, which attended to 2 677 people per day. For many deportees, these shelters are a place to arrive and then go to another place, either the place of origin or to settle in the city. In order to rent or buy a home in Tijuana, it is necessary to present an identity card, as well as to have reliable networks and a more or less stable income (^{Pinillos, 2018}).

Housing Types after Deportation in Tijuana and Identity Documents

From the case studies on which this article is based, two types or residential groups can be identified. The first group consists of 13 individuals who live in houses or apartments rented by themselves, although most are supported financially by their relatives in the United States and to a lesser extent on the Mexican side, which makes it possible for them to keep the cross-border networks active. According to their accounts, they have documents and more formal jobs, such as at call centers or maquilas, and their own micro-businesses such as tattoo stores and fast food stores. Some share their residence with a family member or live alone.⁷

The second group of 10 people, three of whom live in small rented rooms, five in shelters, and two on the street, are engaged in informal and temporary work in markets and supply centers, and most of them have no documents. In the latter case, there seems to be no concrete margin between the forms of residence. In a very short period and, according to the resources available, in one week people can reside in a room, then in a shelter, and some days on the street. Life on the street is strongly related to drug and alcohol consumption and carries a strong stigma (^{Albicker & Velasco, 2016}), which turns them into objects of police persecution (^{Contreras Velasco, 2016}) and contributes to absenteeism at work.

When accessing a place to stay the night in Tijuana, both objective and subjective aspects come into play. On the objective side are the times and deadlines that are established as a framework for the provision of services and support, 15 days of accommodation in traditional organizations. Furthermore, migration law considers as a migrant a person who has not been in the city for more than six months. At the subjective level are the perceptions and preferences of the individuals. In the case studies, there is, for example, the consideration of the shelter as a safe and clean place. The story of Sergio illustrates this aspect:

(…) I prefer El Toro shelter because it is clean, the only bad thing is that they give the Word [religious service], it is like three hours, four hours, and at 10 at night those who give the Word arrive (...), it ends at like 1 in the morning, and they start dinner, sometimes it varies, at 7 at night. At El Grande [shelter], that is not the case; in El Grande, we sleep on the floor, with only a sheet, and it is cold (...) (Sergio, 2017).

The street is considered a site of vice and disorder, which can represent a risk. However, the opposite also occurs. A shelter is, for some, a place of repression, of discrimination, of coercion of their freedom, and in some cases, a dirty place: “it is a lie that they provide food, they give what they want and not to everyone, everything has to be paid for, when I want to drink I do not stay there because it is forbidden”(Ernesto, 2017).

In this way, shelter is a basic resource in the return and attempts at residential integration of deported individuals in Tijuana. If one thinks about the process, an initial point is the shelter service, which, as a social right, is established in the PRH as a temporary assistance measure, through local civil society organizations.

After the first steps to access a place to stay, other forms of residence grow and expand that will be associated with the other basic dimensions (work, leisure, expectations). The possibility of access to decent housing conditions will depend both on the possibility of the individual to recover their identity documents and the time in which this can occur. Moreover, the above depends on the resources and whether the person prefers to stay in the city and how they intend to do so. In these multiple forms of seeking residence, the shelter emerges again, now as the constitution of a type of housing for deportees, that is, the shelter goes from being conceived only as a “temporary” place, to the place where one lives. This level includes the shelters of religious and civil or private organizations that open their doors to all sectors of the population without fixed addresses.

Shelters as a Place to Live and the Street as an Expression of Resistance

The shelters in Tijuana have become the place of residence of a specific sector of the deported population. There, they carry out a good part of their daily and social activities: food, cleaning, leisure, and the establishment of interpersonal relationships, especially due to the prolongation of the time of stay. Among the cases interviewed and according to the accounts of the managers of ten shelters located in the northern zone of the city, there are people who, in May 2017, had periods of stay that exceeded five years (^{Pinillos, 2018}).

The prolonged stays in the shelters are the result of a set of factors or aspects, among which can be mentioned the absence or limitation of economic and material resources and stable family networks, and subjective elements such as the desire for freedom or security. In other words, the preferences and expectations of individuals will always be influenced by their status as deportees from the United States. Having lived in that country and the stigma of being a deportee, for example, will affect the possibilities of accessing local resources and services. All of this will correlate with whether or not they have documents. Although not all those who use shelters are without Mexican identity documents, the fact that it is not a requirement to have an identity document in order to benefit from the service contributes to making these places one of the main options for the undocumented deported population without the economic resources to rent housing.

The mobility between shelter and street is evident in individual stories. Olivo and Gabriel, deported from the United States, are men who switched between the shelters and the street in a space near the General Hospital of Tijuana (Hospital General de Tijuana). They say they prefer to sleep on the street for lack of resources to pay for a room, and because they do not want to put up with the ill treatment they say they receive in the shelters:

(…) the food is charged for in full. In fact, you pay more than you’re supposed to, and the food is bad, they rarely give good things; the servers are rude. In the Salvation Army, they have good food they could serve, but they do not want to give it. La Roca del Alfarero is good (Olivo & Gabriel, 2017).

Álvaro, who was deported in 2014, is single, and sleeps in the Casa del Aposento shelter,⁸ comments:

(…) many of us who were in El Bordo⁹ live here, I prefer to sleep in this place because it is more flexible like the entry and exit times, because they do not force anyone to hear the word of God, and because the other places are like prisons, and the servers mistreat you (…) (Álvaro, 2016).

There is thus awareness and objection regarding the treatment they receive and the conditions in which they find themselves. Subjective elements, such as dignity, are the resources left at the limits of precariousness. Moreover, the continuous comparison with the imagined life on “the other side” leads to a kind of permanent discontent about what one has or may have in the present. The reduction of consumption that, according to the subjects, could be had in a country like the United States, also becomes a permanent element of comparison that influences the decisions made in the present.

The possibility of choosing shelters or having a place to sleep in the conditions desired will depend in good part on the possibilities of work that the person finds during the day, but also on their desires and their priorities. The shelters and kitchens, in any case, function as devices or as mechanisms of subsidy for the social reproduction of this deported, destitute, and mobile population on the border, a population that mainly consists of men.

Daily, the organizations that provide support to this deported and itinerant population establish, in turn, inequalities and differentiation between their beneficiaries or users. For example, in one of the shelters with the largest capacity (180 people per night in the men’s section; there is also a section for twelve women), a bed (bunk) is offered for those who have a longer stay in the place and preference is given to those who pay by the week or for periods of several days. Those who arrive for the first time will probably have to sleep on mats located on the floor:

(…) the beds are given to those who have already gained the trust of the people in charge of the shelter and who are regulars there. There are sixty bunk beds, i.e., 120 beds, the capacity of the shelter is 180 (…) (Moisés, 2016).

Thus, the shelters seem to function in the formation of lifestyles that do not conform to the traditional ideal of normalized and standardized life, of “successful” life, of full integration, of the notion of home and family, of the construction of daily life. Shelters also take into consideration the issue of care, which deserves further analysis, since it expresses the profound complexity of the social processes that take place in the reconstruction of life in a particular border context such as Tijuana after deportation. It is important to establish a vision that questions the paradigm of the social inclusion-integration of deportees in times of complex mobilities in multiple directions.

All these conditions will lead to the disappearance of the dividing lines between life in the shelter and on the street since the street also represents a space to sleep that is prolonged in time for a portion of the population after being deported to Tijuana. This reality seems to be associated with processes of deterioration of physical and mental conditions that are triggered after prolonged periods of itinerancy, as well as breaks in personal and family ties.

These processes of deterioration, associated with itinerancy in the city, were observed in different individuals during field trips over a year, particularly in three of the interviewees:

In accordance with the above, residential integration, an aspect of the reproduction and the construction of the family as a social ordering institution of any kind (own or rented house, or shelter), in the case of the deported population in Tijuana will result in differentiated and unequal ways of life, and particular forms of sociability and reproduction.

These mobilities are complex in a border city. The traps in international mobility and the creation of high mobility circuits within the cities can be understood in the light of non-documentation and residential instability since the conjunction of these two elements leads to greater urban itinerancy, which in turn leads to increased surveillance by government security agents, particularly the Municipal Police. Although police surveillance is exercised in Tijuana on different sectors of the population, that is, not only on the street population, the surveillance that is deployed on people who are frequently on the move in the streets and without identity documents is legitimized and occurs more harshly and frequently, as has been shown by authors such as ^{Sayad (2011}), ^{Das and Poole (2004}), and ^{Contreras Velasco (2016}).

Intra-Urban Itinerancy and Documentation

The relationship between itinerancy and identity documents has several analytical aspects. On the one hand, this itinerancy may constitute part of the flexibility required by the type of precarious work to which a sector of the deportees has access (^{Pinillos, 2018}). On the other hand, this same condition of undocumented migrants constitutes part of their vulnerability as mobile residents of this border city, which subjects them to increased surveillance by police officers.

The conditions of being itinerant and undocumented feed off each other because being in constant movement exposes a person to the possibility of losing the documents they manage to obtain, while not having documents forces them to be in constant movement, fleeing from the police or trying to go unnoticed in hiding, which places them in a highly precarious situation. The case studies constantly reiterate the experience of arbitrary detention by the municipal police. The reasons given are for not having documents and for their physical appearance. The above coincides with other studies such as those by ^{Velasco and Coubès (2013}, p. 22, 25), in which it was found that for the inhabitants of El Bordo, 91% said that they had returned from the United States (91.5% for deportation), while 93.5% declared that they had been detained by the police in the city of Tijuana in the last 15 days, of which 19% reported they had been detained three times or more, that is, more than once a week.

These findings have to be analyzed in relation to the thesis by ^{Torpey (1998}) on free mobility as a condition of citizenship. In the Mexican Constitution, free transit is enshrined as a fundamental right. However, local regulations condition this free transit to domicilization. For example, the regulation called Bando de Policía y Gobierno del Municipio de Tijuana considers as inhabitants only those who have a domicile, either temporary or permanent, and considers it an infraction to sleep in public spaces.¹⁰

The city of Tijuana has an intense multi-directional population flow (50 000 regular international crossings per day). At these crossings, the flows of returnees, as the Northern Border Migration Survey (Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte, EMIF)¹¹ labels the population involuntarily returning from the United States to Mexico, have become increasingly visible.¹² In a way, the Mexican border is the prototype of the scenario presented by ^{Torpey (1998}) when talking about the exaggerated importance that passports and identity documents have taken in the model of the State, producing bureaucracies and systems of intense control and surveillance.

Control over internal mobility has been exacerbated by the crisis of violence associated with organized crime, which legitimizes the strategies of the State to deal with it.¹³ The detentions and the violence that law enforcement agencies exercise over the bodies of people in public spaces, particularly those who are on the street, are part, as mentioned by ^{Bloch and Schuster (2005}), of a symbolic representation that legitimizes fear and the high expenditure in terms of public resources involved in deploying police units and agents in different parts of the city.

However, this control has severe consequences for the safety of the population and even more for deportees on this border. Not having identity documents, even if they are Mexican, turns them into objects of suspicion over which constant vigilance is exercised, as was the case during their stay as undocumented migrants in the United States. The story of Sergio highlights the police as an important element in the dynamics and life itineraries of the sector of the population that arrives in search of work in this city because they act as an agent of control and exclusion, limiting the mobility of individuals within the city and reinforcing the cycle of labor and social precariousness they face.

I always pay the rent a month in advance, because sometimes you do not know, sometimes there is no work or anything. I try to live well, and not look so filthy because here, if the police see you filthy, they detain you (...) And then the police will beat you in your cell, and as I am gay, there is a policeman who always brings me in, and whenever he catches me, he gives me 36 hours, I do not see the judge and the policeman inside starts beating me, I do not (...) I do not even put in a report with human rights [organizations] because they are going to bring the same policeman. The judge bases his decisions on the way you are dressed (Sergio, 2017).

The case of Sergio shows how the processes of stigmatization are intertwined with the mechanisms of control of intra-urban mobility. State agents of public security share prejudices about the deportees based on their appearance and the idea of failure that is created by the media and the programs run by government institutions where discourses and actions that discriminate against the deportees are created. This surveillance is accompanied by abuse and the extraction of the few economic resources they may have. The stories of those who live in shelters, in rooms, and on the street coincide in reporting the theft of their money and belongings in every arrest by the police. Thus they enter a kind of spiral of precariousness, from which it is difficult to get out.

In short, the possession of identity documents, not just passports, is a source of inequality among the deported population, which is intertwined with other absences of capital such as schooling and language skills that limit their internal and international mobility. Even those deportees who have the proper documents face this surveillance, but with other social and cultural capital. In these cases, it is not only the documents but also their human capital and knowledge of their rights that make it possible to deal with the abuse of authority differently.

In the practices of the police, the constitution of the State itself is also responsible, as noted by ^{Contreras Velasco (2016}), when documenting the violence that the municipal police exert on those living on the streets of the city of Tijuana. In other words, the police is the institution through which the State has dominion in public spaces. However, in the street, its capacity for action is limited (Contreras Velasco, 2016). This condition of permanent surveillance over the deported individuals worsens their precariousness, increasing the marginality that has been consolidated in a related process of “movement-confinement” (^{Núñez & Heyman, 2007}) both in Mexico and in the United States.