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Smallholders worldwide continue to experience processes of displacement from their lands under neoliberal political-economic governance. This displacement is often experienced as "slow", driven by decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes that favor input-intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction and export projects at the expense of traditional agrarian practices, markets, and producers. Smallholders struggle to remain viable in the face of these forces, yet they often experience hunger. To persist on the land, often on small parcels, families supplement and finance farm production with family members engaging in labor migration, a form of displacement. Outcomes, however, are uneven and reflect differences in migration processes as well as national and local political economic processes around land. To demonstrate "slow displacement", we assess the prolonged confluence of land access, hunger, and labor migration that undermine smallholder viability in two separate research sites in Nicaragua and Guatemala. We draw on evidence from in-depth interviews and focus groups carried out from 2013 to 2015, together with a survey of 317 households, to demonstrate how smallholders use international labor migration to address persistent hunger, with the two cases illuminating the centrality of underlying land distribution questions in labor migration from rural spaces of Central America. We argue that smallholder farming family migration has a dual nature: migration is at once evidence of displacement, as well as a strategy for families to prolong remaining on the land in order to produce food.

Governments, civil society, and policymakers assert the potential of international migration to foster development and alleviate poverty. Often such claims are rooted in macroscale geopolitical analyses of migration and development, which mask the localized, uneven, and embodied ways family members “left behind” bear the costs and subsidize the U.S./Mexico (inter)national integration project. Informed by feminist geopolitics, this article demonstrates how the left behind disproportionately bear the hidden costs of neoliberal restructuring and migration. We draw upon Mexican Migration Project (MMP) ethnosurvey data to frame the narratives of migrant family members left behind. Narratives were constructed through in‐depth interviews conducted in rural Veracruz. We conclude that in the absence of geographically specific examinations of the hidden costs associated with neoliberal development and migration it is possible that “migration for development” programs and policies may exacerbate inequities that will perpetuate migration and further weaken Mexican origin communities.

Human migration plays a critical role in numerous contemporary environmental concerns including global climate change and environmental justice. This review characterizes the ways migration is critical to contemporary humanenvironment geography. We delineate four themes from the literature based on (a) how migration affects the environment; (b) how the environment and/or environmental events affect migration; (c) how migration produces uneven environmental benefits and burdens; and (d) how environmental displacement/dispossession produces migration and vice versa. We articulate five recommendations for a research agenda that integrates migration processes, recognizes migration as a heterogeneous process, and approaches human-environment interactions holistically and non-deterministically.

Media coverage and emerging scholarship have brought increasing international attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis facing Central American transmigrants as they navigate landscapes of violence in Mexico. While stories of Central American immigrants who remain in Mexico are largely absent from this coverage, there is arguably a “Central Americanization” occurring on the southern border through this permanent settlement. Central Americans choosing to establish themselves in the border state of Chiapas do so in a socio‐spatial and political context defined by the introduction of “progressive” state‐ and national‐level migration policies on the one hand and the persistence of discrimination and violence on the other. We know little about the implementation of these policies on the ground, namely how they are applied and the impacts they have on the immigrant experience in Mexico. To begin to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the experiences of Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico‐Guatemala border city of Tapachula. Employing a feminist geopolitical lens, which encourages conducting research and analysis at diverse scales, it examines their everyday interactions with low‐ to mid‐level representatives of the Mexican state as they seek to avail themselves of their legal and social citizenship rights, and the impacts of these interactions on their livelihoods. This article argues that low‐ to mid‐level officials’ actions reveal the importance of a form of extra‐official, subtle, yet pervasive regulation through which immigrant women are denied rights they are entitled to, inducing negative impacts to their livelihoods, which I term everyday restriction.

This article argues for a 'participatory turn' in migration researchone that incorporates participatory methods as a complementary or principal means for examining transnational migration. We make the case for using participatory appraisal (PA) in migration studies by presenting illustrative examples of how this approach enriched research we conducted in Veracruz, Mexico, on neoliberalism, agrarian transformation and migration. We facilitated workshops with 23 adults, 57 elementary school children and 45 secondary school youths employing a range of participatory 'tools' that are highly visual and interactive, including, community histories, diagramming, matrix rankings and 'photovoice'. We provide concrete examples from this experience to illustrate the potential power of PA in migration research to elucidate the connections between neoliberal rural restructuring and migration, to facilitate fruitful contrast of community typologies and to include underrepresented and marginalised voices such as those of children and youths who are often silent in migration research. Through the workshops we gained grounded, multi-scalar and diverse understandings of 'actually existing neoliberalism' as participants untangled the complex relationships between neoliberal practice, rural and agrarian restructuring, and migration. This allows richer and more nuanced understandings and theorisation of diverse factors shaping migration and its effects across multiple scales, while also empowering local people as co-producers of knowledge with the possibility of envisaging alternative futures.