Precarious Mobility in Central America and Southern

Published in Cecilia Menjívar, Marie Ruiz, and Immanuel Ness (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises Online Publication Date Sept 2018. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190856908.013.38

Precarious Mobility in Central America and Southern Mexico: Crises and the Struggle to Survive Martha Luz Rojas Wiesner and Ailsa Winton 1 Abstract and Keywords The widely reported increase in violence-based displacement from Central America to Mexico has been managed as a non-crisis by the Mexican government, which continues to try to assuage its powerful neighbours to the north and to control what has been termed the United States’ “third border” (Grayson 2006), between Mexico and Guatemala/Belize. This chapter is based on work that has sought to understand migration and displacement as lived experience, and argues that mobility is a deeply historical, personal, and conditioned process, in which the self—at the center of a complex web of shifting opportunities and oppressions—is itself in flux, at the apex of damage and possibility. Rather than crises, mobility is too often lived as protracted and contingent struggles. Keywords: displacement, forced migration, marginality, human security, border extension, North and Central America

Whose Crisis? While debates look set to continue over the so-called global migration crisis, and Central America experiences a prolonged spike in displacement linked to a surge in organized criminal violence and a complicated deterioration in human security, Mexico has carried on business as usual, in continuing to deal with migration in this historically extremely mobile region in terms of contention. 1 The Mexican government—keen to assuage its powerful neighbors to the north—seeks to control what has been termed the US’s “third border” (Grayson 2006) between Mexico and Guatemala/Belize, attempting to reduce the number of people able to cross Mexico and reach the US border from Central America. 2 Border extension and political pressure in this area from the United States has grown more acute since the ‘crisis’ stemming from the arrival and containment of an unprecedented number of unaccompanied Central American children at the US border in 2014–2015 (Serrano and Jaramillo 2017). An overriding interest in controlling the migration of Central Americans through Mexico has meant neither the United States nor Mexico is willing to recognize the scale of violence-based displacement in and from Central America and the associated need for protection. While in the last century Mexico was recognized as a country of refuge and asylum during the armed conflict in neighboring Guatemala, this is not the case in the present day. It has been suggested that the asylum process is complicated in Mexico given the historic migration flows in the region (Cobo and Fuerte 2012, 16). Yet it seems the government is also reluctant to recognize criminal violence as grounds for asylum per se, perhaps in part because it would tacitly mean that displacement within Mexico linked to criminal violence would also have to be acknowledged, something that has been strongly resisted

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El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Mexico. [email protected]; [email protected] 1


by the State (see Rubio Díaz-Leal and Albuja 2014). In any case, the system is highly discretional, and the number of asylum applications granted in Mexico is dwarfed by its deportation figures. 3 This speaks to the seemingly contradictory dual function of national borders: as sites of humanitarian need or engagement or both (based on a logic of universal human rights which while individual, still have to be enacted in a national territory) and at once as key sites of national security enactment (protection of sovereignty at the same national scale) (Winton 2017). This apparent paradox is in fact two sides of the same geopolitical coin: the very fact that some borders are “becoming spaces of humanitarian engagement is only because border crossing has been made, for certain segments of the world’s migratory population, into a matter of life and death” (Walters 2011, 147). A stark example of this was the recent so-called crisis of unaccompanied minors arriving at the Mexico-US border. While this ‘crisis’ was labeled a humanitarian one by then President Obama, he was in fact referring specifically to the high numbers of children ‘stuck’ at the US border during 2014–2015 (see Heyman et al., forthcoming). As the crisis was constructed not as the children fleeing per se, but rather as the fact they were stuck, the problem was tackled through swift and massive deportations of children, many of whom were fleeing violence (see Orozco and Yansura 2015), and a vague commitment to tackle the causes of displacement. Borders create (rather than resolve) humanitarian crises (Walters 2011), and moreover “contention promotes attention, thus promoting the crisis discourse, and in turn the crisis discourse raises the level of excitement and engagement in contention” (Heyman et al., forthcoming). Mexico appears to play out this tension not just at its borders, but deeply within them. Physically and politically wedged between what nonstate actors have repeatedly called a humanitarian crisis in Central America to its south (crisis as a cause of displacement), and the panic-inducing migration ‘crisis’ to its north at the US border (displacement or migration itself constituting crisis), Mexico could in fact be seen as a country that acts as one big border. This push-back from Mexico’s southern border has been described as an “elastic border” (Ángeles 2003), and as a “vertical border” (Rigoni 2007) that reaches right through national territory. The control routes established throughout the country by migration authorities in turn have given rise to an “unofficial vertical border” of criminal groups, or the “bastard industry” of migration control (Basok et al. 2015), which operates as a direct result of migrants being pushed into new territories controlled by criminal gangs. The line between official and criminal migration controls is blurred since state agents sometimes collude with criminal groups (Yee and Torre 2016). The heightened dangers for people forced to move clandestinely and often with illegal assistance in Mexico-as-border as a result of increased official and unofficial controls is well-documented (e.g., REDODEM 2017). In this nationborder, humanitarianism barely reaches the “minimalist biopolitics” (Redfield 2005) of simply keeping people alive; rather it serves as a handy discourse to justify detention and expulsion strategies, evidenced by the official discourse of the ‘rescue’ of irregular migrants, who are really detained and deported (see Isacson et al. 2017), back to what for many are hostile and often highly dangerous situations. Humanitarianism thus morphs perversely into the (further) criminalization of migration as trafficking. In sum, in political terms migration and border control in Mexico are linked to the construction of crisis inasmuch as the US border crisis has extended south through Mexico. The migration controls demanded of Mexico by the United States amidst growing violence-based displacement from Central America, require denial of the scale and significance of this deterioration of security in Central America, sparking in turn what civil society groups have called a humanitarian crisis. Yet amid the growing body of work analyzing the political construction of such migration and humanitarian crises (that is, manufactured crises of control and care), there is much less attention given to the experiences of those directly involved. Through recent 2


work carried out in the region by the authors which has sought to understand migration and displacement as embodied, material experiences, the chapter explores the relationship between protracted crisis, displacement, and precarity, in which crisis is seen first through the personal lens, as a condition of perpetual uncertainty (see Lindley 2014). Yet we also engage with this political/personal binary in thinking through how ‘crisis’ as both political and personal is inseparable from marginality. We posit that a critical understanding of crisis as marginality (personal) and marginality as crisis (political) could help to unpack and question preconceptions about migration and borders.

From Crisis Migration to Precarious Mobility Both [crisis and migration] are often viewed as threatening: crisis as jeopardising social systems and human welfare; migration as undermining the integrity of the nation-state and bounded identities. At the same time, both are often described as characteristic of the contemporary world.(Lindley 2014, 1). Despite this heavy discursive baggage, the notion of crisis migration has gained currency in recent years, as part of an effort to rethink migration and mobility in the context of the many large-scale, complex (chronic and acute) threats to human security that have driven significant population movements in recent years. The emerging literature on crisis migration has directly and productively exposed its own caveats (for example, Lindley 2014; McAdams 2014; see introduction of this volume), but particularly pertinent here is Lindley’s (2014, 6) observation that while at times the construction of crises is politically expedient, at others it may be more convenient to promulgate a non-crisis discourse even in the face of objective, empirical indicators of severe threat or discontinuity (particularly when this threat is faced disproportionately by marginalized groups such as irregular migrants): thus crisis and non-crisis are political, not empirical, categories. Humanitarian crisis may be framed through a rhetoric of emergency, with its connotation of exceptionality and drama beyond ‘normal’ border management (Campesi 2012). Yet even if is explained that crisis is as much about the situation of immediate danger as people’s individual and collective capacity to deal with it (Betts 2010), and that exceptionality is not the same as crisis (exceptional circumstances may not equate to crisis, just as some ‘crises’ are not exceptional [McAdam 2014]), this very relativism means that the notion of crisis has no objective empirical significance. Moreover, it is argued here that if large-scale situations of extreme personal threat coexist with ‘non-crisis’ political discourse and praxis, such as in the current context, crisis does not exist independently of marginality. In terms of mobility crises, marginality—particularly as determined by class (see Castles 2011) and race (see de Genova 2013)—is central to political border and migration crises, as these are constructed to contain and repel the unwanted. In the personal sphere, mobility crises are lived through the intractable relationship between displacement and marginality. In this way, mobility becomes a problem – politically or personally – when it is associated with marginality (the rich are not displaced, rather they relocate). We are concerned here with exploring this relationship between crisis, marginality, and mobility particularly in terms of protracted, complicated, multi-scale spatial and social displacement. Such an approach speaks to a particular, critical understanding of mobility, which feeds into an increasingly established field of work on mobilities that is concerned not only with physical movement, but also potential movement, blocked movement, immobilization, and forms of dwelling and placemaking (Sheller 2011). Moving through space brings out differences between a subject and their surroundings: mobility is 3


impinged by inequality, and associated with justice and injustice (see Cresswell 2006), but at the same time it may be a crucial resource for many types of escape (Winton 2015). Rather than focusing on the fact of movement itself, this approach is broadly concerned with the production, practice, and representation of mobilities, considering “how particular modes of mobility are enabled, given licence, encouraged and facilitated while others are, conversely, forbidden, regulated, policed and prevented” (Cresswell 2006, 735). Work that bridges critical mobilities and migration research has highlighted in particular how legal frameworks that facilitate some mobilities while restricting others are themselves inseparably bound up with the embodied politics of difference (Blunt 2007; see for example Basok et al. 2015 on Mexico), and thus how it is that some mobilities are constructed as crises, while others are not. Similarly, others have explored how some movements are imposed upon populations that long for stillness, such that mobility— far from universally emancipatory—may itself may play a part in subjugating populations (Gill et al., 2011). This body of work has disrupted linear (neocolonial, heterosexist, etc.) assumptions about safety and mobility. Extending feminist and postcolonial perspectives on spatiality and subjectivity, mobility scholarship has highlighted the importance of movement in the lives of those who are ‘out of place,’ such that mobility produces a new sense of self precisely through experiences of anonymity, temporariness, and displacement (see Waitt and Gorman-Murray 2011 on heterosexism and mobility). At the same time, the self can be consciously remade as a way of confronting precarious mobility (Basok et al. 2015). Similarly, for Doná (2010, 3) the supposition that geographical dislocation (being ‘in’) is equated with psychological and social displacement (being ‘of’) does not capture the experiences or needs of forced migrants. In practical terms, she argues, there is nothing in the experience of territorial dislocation per se that makes a person healthy or unhealthy. When displacement is framed in terms of processes, geographical dislocation becomes a life event like any other. It is the way in which negotiations with this life event evolve that affects well-being (Doná, 2010, 11), such that policy should deal with being ‘of’ (social processes that influence well-being), rather than simply being ‘in’ (country of ‘refuge’). Viewed this way, it is easier to see the everyday (unjust), social world-making aspects of mobility. Life happens through movement; the fact of migration is not remarkable, but what is of concern here as we reflect on the situation in Mexico is how personal-political mobility regimes are related to precarity and damage. Moreover, the time and space of mobility morph and bend as conditions fluctuate. This means, as Schapendonk (2012) notes, that migrants may become stuck, stranded, or settled; trajectories turn into processes of shifting destinations, whereby periods of mobility may easily change into moments of immobility and vice versa. Developing new conceptual frameworks along these lines is not a mere academic exercise: dismantling rigid understandings of migration – both in terms of who moves (migrant or refugee) and how (origin, transit, destination or return) – and with them, damaging mobility regimes, is an urgent task in Mexico and beyond. This chapter draws from this emerging body of work as it seeks to sketch out some additional conceptual bridges. Mobility is approached here through the broad lens of precarity, whereby marginality is lived (as embodied and material) through dynamic (spatial and temporal) mobility. As is conceptually and empirically explored below, mobility is not just related to precarity as a cause or effect, but rather it is enacted through mobility.

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Precarity as a concept in its broadest sense is similar in many ways to vulnerability: while there is no clear consensus on specific definitions, both deal with how structurally reproduced disadvantage is expressed and experienced. Butler (2009, ii), for example, posits precarity as: a politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection [. . .].

Alternatively, the terms have been used to explain different aspects of structural disadvantage, as conditions (precarity) and outcome (vulnerability) (see Rojas 2017). Building on the notion of mobility regimes (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013; Shamir 2005), we suggest that the notion of precarity—as distinct from vulnerability—is especially useful in thinking through the pernicious aspects of these regimes in that it incorporates instability and uncertainty (Anderson 2010): temporal aspects that are crucial to the experience of precarious mobility, and which have been given growing yet still relatively little attention in the literature on migration and mobility (for example Çağlar 2016; Griffiths 2014; Pascucci 2016). This field of work has as produced such evocative notions as “permanent temporariness” (Bailey et al. 2002), the simultaneous experience of “imminent change and endless waiting” (Griffiths 2014), and “time-suspension” (Conlon 2011). This chapter examines these insights in relation to lived, precarious mobility regimes. As Anderson (2010) has noted, precarity prevents people from anticipating the future; as a concept it alludes to instability, flux, and uncertainty associated with damaging mobility regimes. Temporality is also a crucial dimension of resistance and resilience, be that through migrants practicing forms of ‘irregular,’ ‘makeshift’ citizenship in the here and now; through ‘self-unmaking of citizenship’ (as opposed to citizenship-as-future) (Nyers 2013, cited in Pascucci 2016); or through explicitly temporal (mobile) self-making. It is argued here that time is therefore not only a key dimension of the control and management of movement, but is by definition a crucial aspect of precarious mobility. The remainder of the chapter explores these broad ideas through two personal accounts of mobility and survival in Central America-Mexico, highlighting the continuities and ruptures associated with mobility as people navigate situations of acute and chronic threat.

Unsettling Stories The factors underlying migration and displacement more broadly in the Central America-Mexico region have been amply documented and discussed: economic marginalization, a lack of labor market opportunities, food insecurity, continuing political instability, and widespread insecurity and myriad forms of violence (Alba and Castillo 2012; Albuja 2014; ; Castillo and Toussaint 2010; Orozco and Yansura 2015; Programa Estado de la Nación 2016; Rojas and Ángeles 2008). Recently, the effects of climate change and other environmental phenomena (flooding, landslides, drought, hurricanes) are seen as increasingly relevant particularly for their effect on subsistence farming in the region4 (CEPAL 2010; Programa Estado de la Nacion 2016; WFP et al. 2017). Seen another way, and for the purposes of this chapter, these are part of the broad contexts of individual mobility regimes (and at once, some of the structural aspects of precarity). As such, movement is not a break with some sedentary norm, nor is it a fleeting moment. The stories told here crisscross over some common ground, but each highlights particular, often prolonged struggles enacted 5


through different mobilities. The backdrop of migration and border policy is subsumed in complex personal stories of ongoing displacement and persistent precarity.

“One of us has to leave and see what else is out there” Now 40, Teresa grew up in Sonsonate, a municipality in the west of El Salvador. She recounted her story when she again found herself in Tapachula, Mexico in September 2012, attempting to embark on yet another journey north.5 Teresa first left El Salvador in 1993, when she was twenty-two years old. At that time, she had an 8-month-old daughter and a 5-year-old son. When her older brother (the eldest of her nine siblings), who was living in Miami, found out she was being abused by her husband, he paid for her to be brought across Mexico and over the border. The clandestine journey took almost two months. After a year of work, she sent money home for her children to come, but her mother only sent her son. Frustrated after years of being in legal limbo, in 2009 she tried to go with her son to Canada, but they were detained on the way and deported to El Salvador. Arriving back in El Salvador was traumatic for both Teresa and her son. For more than two years (2009– 2011) she tried to settle there, but she became “desperate, depressed, because [. . .] I didn’t adapt to life back in El Salvador”. Her son also became depressed because of all the problems they were facing. They had no money and were moving from house to house. Teresa had been sending money back for a house to be built for her, but when they arrived it was being lived in. She felt “like a beggar, asking my sister, my father, anyone to take in me and my children.” The tension grew between her and her family. Confronted with this critical situation, she asked her sister to take care of her daughter, while she and her son tried to get to the United States, by now in 2011. But they were caught by the migration authorities in Mexico, about 300 km north of the Mexico-Guatemala border. After being deported again to El Salvador, Teresa was finally able to take possession of her home, but their economic situation deteriorated further, which was made worse when the local gang started to demand ‘rent’ from her son. Despite attempts by Teresa’s mother to diffuse the problem with the gangs, the harassment did not stop. Teresa went to the human rights commission but was told they could not help as her son was not physically hurt, and also because their situation was so common: “If I help you, I would have to help so many families who are going through the same thing.” Faced with a dire lack of money, Teresa decided to set up a stall outside her house to sell things, but the gangs started to demand money. Feeling trapped by the constant harassment and threats, she decided to try and go back to the United States: I said to my son, “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but one of us has to leave and see what else is out there, see if we can’t survive somehow,” I said, “because here, you will end up dead, I will end up dead, and I can’t have that.”

She set off in August 2012. She took two days to reach Tapachula, but by the time of this interview she had been in there for eleven days, trying to get enough money to continue her journey. She had stayed at first in the migrant shelter for the maximum stay of three days; the rest of the time she slept in different places, and did not know where she would sleep in the coming days; she ate only sporadically. During the day, she went with another migrant to look for work. 6


Teresa was worried about her son who had stayed behind in El Salvador. She asked her brother and his wife to help her get him out of the country: [T]hat’s all I asked of them, I don’t care if I stay where I am, I said, but just help me get my son out, the gangs are really hassling him; he can’t go out on his own, he spends all his time shut up indoors, and he’s become depressed. Sometimes he says to me that it’s my fault he’s suffering. And I tell him, “even if I die on this journey, I’m going to do everything I can to get you out of there” [. . .]. But he’s still annoyed, and he says “no mum, not any more. Let’s just accept that we’re going to die here.” I said “no! I’m not going to give up. I’m going to see how I can help you to get out of there.”

She hoped to make her way gradually up to the US border, working along the way to subsist and keep moving. She was determined to carry on, and was hopeful that she would get there without being sent back: “this time they’re not going to deport me. I pray they won’t; I pray it won’t happen again [. . .]. They say, ‘third time lucky,’ and I’m at that third time now [. . .]. Even if I take a year to get there, god willing, I think I will make it.” Teresa’s narrative is permeated by shifting but persistent insecurity, uncertainty, and unease. Both she and her son feel trapped by their circumstances, by a long series of personal crises, each of which is a tipping point for yet another move or shift, when difficult circumstances become intolerable. These crises—which are at once economic, personal, and political—are revealed as such in the emotional experience of this precarious mobility, of frustration, desperation, determination. Teresa and her son have little familial, social, or state support with which to confront the hostile circumstances in their ‘homeland,’ which are marked by dislocation and economic and personal insecurity. Teresa’s protracted, precarious mobility in many ways seems to embody the notion of “permanent temporariness” mentioned by Bailey et al. (2002); in her case, this is not about extended periods of waiting, but rather a kind of continuous and deeply frustrating unsettling: she is unable to find a place to make her own. So, hers is also a story of the shifting otherness that accompanies and drives movement, here under the gaze of society at large when away from home, and then in turn under that of her own family as she tries to slip back into a space that no longer fits her. Precarious mobility is often about the inability to stay (see Winton, 2018). Her story moreover is not just about her many trips North, but also a very local kind of imposed wandering. These scales of mobility are deeply emotional for Teresa, inextricably tied up not just with the future of her children but also a reluctant and frustrated homecoming whose emotional effects seem more pronounced than the much longer, arduous movement North and back. Her displacement is both a consequence and cause of the crises she has had to overcome, and while her survival is fragile, her resolve to keep moving until she finds her destination is unshakable.

“Overnight I had nothing” An ex-police officer, and refugee in Mexico since 2011, Susana was living in Tapachula, Mexico with her aunt and three children at the time of this interview in September 2015. Her relatively stable life was interrupted in 1996 when her sister was killed, after which point changes in her circumstances and the decisions she has to make would set her on course for a much more precarious life:

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I was a housewife then, but when [my sister was killed] I joined the police academy. I knew who had killed my sister, and some colleagues and I went after them. They were arrested and put in prison, they got 30 years but in 2010 their sentence was reduced, and they were released. [. . .] It was her killers who were threatening me, harassing me, with extortions, doing all kinds of things. I had to move house four times, to different towns. I was all over the place, and they kept on at me: “we’re watching you,” “we know where you are.” I couldn’t cope with the threats any more, couldn’t cope. I wasn’t free to go out of the door. There were bags of blood by the front door, and a note that said “how would you like your head?” I couldn’t stand it. It was a real crisis for me, a terrible psychosis [. . .]. The police chief himself said to me “look, if you don’t go, whatever happens they’re going to kill you.” So, I started to look up about asylum on the internet, how I could ask for asylum in another country and I saw about COMAR [. . .]. I decided to leave my daughters [. . .] with their father, as I really didn’t have any money, and didn’t know what to expect. So just me and my aunt left.

After being robbed and extorted at the Guatemala-Mexico border, they crossed over to Mexico with nothing. I was now desperate, and went into the Catholic church that was there. The priest stared at us, and I explained what was happening to us, and he said “don’t worry, let me try and speak to someone in Tapachula, If she’s there, I can take you there right now.” Well, he spoke to this person, and he told us “we’re just going to pray that Migration don’t catch us, because that would be the end of it.” And so it was, the priest took us to the migrant shelter in Tapachula, and we were there almost a month while we applied for asylum and everything [. . .]. We left there and went to work for a woman who took us from the shelter to work at her botanero.6 We had to get up at 5am to start preparing everything, [and worked] right up to 10, 11, 12 o’clock at night, all for 50 pesos.7 And she would humiliate us [. . .]. She used to say to me “if you open your mouth, things will go badly for you.” So, I was scared, I didn’t say anything [. . .].

After a few months, her now ex-husband brought her daughters to her in Tapachula, but her older son had stayed behind alone: The maras were making him pay “rent,” and saying that if he didn’t pay he would have to sell drugs instead, or they would kill him. So, I was sending him money to pay them off for about a year and a half, until he was 18 and could migrate on his own [. . .]. So, then he came here to apply for asylum too. My heart rejoiced when I saw him, to have him with me, but at the same time it made me sad because we were living in even worse conditions than we are now. [. . .]8 I would have had no need to emigrate; my whole life changed, it was a terrible shock because I had it all, a house, a bed, food. A middle-class life, and overnight I had nothing, I was in another country, where you arrive and know nobody, where you don’t even know where to go to ask for a glass of water, I mean, it’s really dreadful. I just wanted a safe place where I could protect my life and the lives of my children, so it’s really hard because even though we’ve been here almost five years, we still suffer shortages of the most basic things [. . .]. I don’t have a steady job. Right now, I’m working handing out flyers, I get a bit of commission depending on how many I give out. But I’m basically on my own in this, I have to see that we have money to eat and pay the rent, and it’s really hard with the two girls in school. [. . .] But in the end, we do have the peace that people in El Salvador don’t, and that we certainly didn’t have. My mother [in El Salvador] has had to move house about seven times. So, I say thank God, I was accepted as a refugee, and I’ve been allowed to stay

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here, no? Believe me, the discrimination in Mexico is awful, and I’ve had some nasty things happen to me because of that, but I’m getting there.

Similar to Teresa, a sense of ongoing precarity permeates Susana’s experience, but here there was a clear ‘tipping point,’ a moment of crisis that meant Susana had no choice but to flee. Yet, it was not the murder of her sister per se, or indeed her subsequent decisions that brought her to that point, but rather a stark lack of state protection: first, she was impelled to become the law to bring her sisters killers to justice, and then forced to flee in the face of threats from criminal groups from which she had no protection. How this violence-based displacement is experienced depends very much the amount and kind of resources available to those moving. Susana was living a relatively comfortable life in El Salvador, but fleeing home not only has an emotional cost, but also a very real material one. For those who get by economically—that is, maintain a reasonable standard of living, but without significant capital—the resources they have available are often place-based (local family and social ties, emergency support networks, local sources of income). Leaving that place without the economic, social, or political capital needed to prosper in another country exposes them to a new crisis: one of acute precarity that is associated not to further displacement, but rather stuckedness (Hage 2009), and of being ‘in’ without being ‘of’ place (Doná 2010). So the nature of Susana’s struggle has shifted as she passed through different moments in her displacement: leaving (fleeing direct threats of violence and associated trauma), arriving (managing to cross the border and reach Tapachula), and staying (providing for her family, and negotiating confounding bureaucracy to obtain papers for her and her children). The continuous nature of her struggle is alluded to in the tense of her experiences: she recounts arriving in Mexico and telling the priest not what had happened to them (why they were fleeing), but rather what was happening to them (an ongoing and far more pressing predicament). Susana is one of the ‘lucky’ very few of those fleeing violence in Central America who has some legal protection in the form of refugee status in Mexico, but this has given her little terms of creating conditions for her to be able to rebuild her life. She is simply unable to get back on her feet, and is stuck. The tipping point for Susana was when she simply could not stand the threats against her life anymore. She left to save her life, but at the cost of her stability. Time and circumstances will tell if in the future she once again feels she has more to lose by staying than by moving on from her precarious existence in Tapachula.

Final Reflections This chapter has been an attempt to critically engage with the notion of crisis as this relates to migration and displacement in the Central America-Mexico region. Politically, Mexico is caught up in a migration ‘crisis’ not strictly its own, but which certainly is a convenient means for the government to carry on business as usual in continued containment and increasing criminalization of Central American migration, despite serious deterioration of security in that region and important increases in national and international violence-based displacement. Asylum policy in Mexico is a tokenistic minimum through which the government complies with international ‘humanitarian’ commitments, but which in no way fits the scale of the need for protection in the region, nor with the needs of the people themselves. In this context, the chapter has explored the notion of crisis in relation to mobility and particularly displacement, not in terms of how a ‘crisis’ is discursively constructed and materially enacted as migration and border policy, but rather looking at the complex experiences of those caught up in this damaging 9


geopolitical game (mobility is both a political and personal problem when it is associated with marginality). Moreover, it has been important to remember and demonstrate that these personal experiences do not begin and end at borders, nor do they suddenly emerge alongside a political crisis. While as Kaiser (2014) rightly observes, crisis is not just about mobility, likewise mobility is not just about crisis; we argue that in the personal sphere, mobility ‘crises’ are lived as part of the ongoing and shifting but intractable relationship between displacement and marginality. The stories shared come from different periods of the recent past, in order to show that what are contemporary concerns about displacement, violence, and control in the region are not new phenomena, and really are not a break from a non-crisis ‘norm.’ It goes without saying that the stories recounted here do not tell the story about migration and mobility in the region. For every person who seeks asylum, there are many more who flee into Mexico unnoticed by everyone except those who prey on them, and many more who are detained and deported back to the country they are fleeing from. For all those who find some safety in Mexico, there are many who have to keep running from the same gangs or from precarity itself. For everyone who has to stay put even in the face of imminent danger, and who manages to keep a low profile and survive, there are others for whom the price of staying is their forced cooperation with the local gang and possibly their life. Yet the stories portray something of how complicated and intractable the relationship between mobility, marginality, and survival is, and how the very fact of this association has such profound effects on increasingly precarious lives. Furthermore, it is important to stress that mere survival is too often achieved in spite of government action in Central America, Mexico and the United States (both in terms of a lack of adequate protection, and excessive, selective repression). The narratives shared are unsettling not just in an immediate sense for the conditions and hardships they describe, but also in the sense that they open up alternative ways of reading ‘crises’ as part of protracted struggles for survival. Lived mobility is a deeply historical, personal, and conditioned process, in which the self—at the center of a complex web of shifting opportunities and oppressions—is itself in flux, at the apex of damage and possibility. Precarious mobility is peppered with moments of crisis or rupture: tipping points at which crucial decisions are made. These ruptures—which are economic, personal, and political at their core—are lived as emotional experiences, of frustration, uncertainty, desperation, and of resolve. As political crises are created to contain and repel perceived threats (objectively, regional or global-level solutions to any sudden population movement are relatively straightforward), the harm associated with the protracted struggles to survive of many people on the move is going largely unnoticed.

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Notes (1) This increase can be partially inferred from emigration census data: between 2000 and 2015, the total number of international emigrants from the seven Central American countries increased from 2.2 to 4.1 million (Canales and Rojas 2017). Over the past two decades, northern Central American countries (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) have consistently represented around 95 percent of all migrants moving through Mexico to the United States (see data at SEGOB, Boletines Estadísticos, http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Boletines_Estadisticos). (2) Much has been made of the increase in deportations as a result of the implementation of the Integral Southern Border Program in 2014, in particular as this has been associated with a sharp increase in migration control measures (see Isacson et al. 2017). Deportations from Mexico (of which a steady 95 percent are from northern Central America) have increased gradually but they are nothing new. In the 1990s the average number of deportations carried out by Mexican authorities each year was 115,000, increasing in the 2000s to a yearly average of 147,000 deportations, and increasing again between 2000 and 2016 with 14


an average of 180,000 deportations each year (see SEGOB, http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Boletines_Estadisticos). (3) Official statistics relating to deportations from Mexico are available at: SEGOB, http://www.politicamigratoria.gob.mx/es_mx/SEGOB/Boletines_Estadisticos (4) In 2014 for example, in an area called the “dry corridor” that stretches across all countries in the region, drought had a serious impact on subsistence farming, particularly in coffee-producing areas that had already been affected by the roya disease: while the drought lasted, 512,000 families suffered losses in production, in their ability to feed their families, and in their access to safe water, all of which generated water-based conflicts and increased emigration (Programa Estado de la Nación 2016, 208). (5) The two interviews cited here were conducted as part of two projects: “Mobility in Transnational Zones of Precarity: A View from the Guatemala-Mexico Border,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and coordinated by Tanya Basok and Daniele Belanger, in which Martha Luz Rojas Wiesner was co-researcher (see Basok et al., 2015). Researchers participating in this project have given their consent for the use of material presented here; “The Mobility ‘Crisis’ in Central America and Mexico,” coordinated by Ailsa Winton, funded by IOM and carried out in collaboration with UNHCR Mexico (see Winton 2018). The chapter was written in the context of the multidisciplinary project “Perspectives on Vulnerability in the Southeast of Mexico: Megadiversity and Alternative Practices for Wellbeing” funded by ECOSUR. (6) A kind of restaurant/bar that serves alcoholic drinks and bar snacks. (7) Just under $3 USD. (8) A particular kind of youth gang with presence throughout the region, and one of the main violent criminal groups whose actions are causing continued displacement (see Winton 2018).

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