The Categorized and Invisible: The Effects of the ‘Border’ on Women Migrant Transit Flows in Mexico

Abstract

In an increasingly globalized world, border control is continuously changing. Nation-states grapple with ‘migration management’ and maintain secure borders against ‘illegal’ flows. In Mexico, borders are elusive; internal and external security is blurred, and policies create legal categories of people whether it is a ‘trusted’ tourist or an ‘unauthorized’ migrant. For the ‘unauthorized’ Central American woman migrant trying to achieve safe passage to the United States (U.S.), the ‘border’ is no longer only a physical line to be crossed but a category placed on an individual body, which exists throughout her migration journey producing vulnerability as soon as the Mexico–Guatemala boundary is crossed. Based on policy analysis and fieldwork, this article argues that rather than protecting ‘unauthorized’ migrants, which the Mexican government narrative claims to do, border policies imposed by the state legally categorize female bodies in clandestine terms and construct violent relationships. This embodied illegality creates forced invisibility, further marginalizing women with respect to finding work, and experiences of sexual violence and abuses by migration actors. The analysis focuses on three areas: the changing definition of ‘borders’; the effects of categorization and multiple vulnerabilities on Central American women; and the dangers caused by forced invisibility.

Emergency Care for Women Irregular Migrants Who Arrive in Spain by Small Boat: A Qualitative Study

“…As in other studies [33], for WIMs the category of being ‘unauthorised’ or ‘irregular’ forces them to remain hidden and also exposes them to greater danger and risk. Our study confirms that when women and children cross borders and they use illegal routes, they are generally afraid to give too much information [34].…”

A stage of limbo: A meta‐synthesis of refugees' liminality

“…Their behaviour is normally passive or humble, and their position is marked by ambiguity and indetermination. The concepts of limbo and liminality have been used widely in the contemporary research literature, including, for example, that considering life crises and illness spectra (e.g., Cayless et al, 2010;Cronfalk et al, 2017;Lerum et al, 2015;Rodgers, 2014;Young et al, 1999), families of missing people (Parr & Stevenson, 2015), or research on physical spaces such as borders and borderlands (e.g., Andersson, 2014;Angulo-Pasel, 2019), prison meeting rooms (Moran, 2013) and abandoned sites in urban landscapes (Martinez & Laviolette, 2016). Coutin (2005) explores 'clandestinity' as a hidden, yet unknown, dimension of social reality.…”

“…223; Menjivar, 2006). From texts aiming to reproduce images of this reality (see, e.g., Angulo‐Pasel, 2019; Bauman, 2002; BBC, 2020; Fazel et al, 2005; Finch, 2015; Ramsay, 2020; Horst & Grabska, 2015; UNHCR, 2021a), it can be interpreted that the asylum process produces a survival system encompassing a relatively large population of socially heterogeneous individuals (Agier, 2002, pp. 322).…”

“…It is important to observe the phenomenon of forced migration through the lens of liminality, since refugees and asylum seekers exist ‘outside the natural order of things’ (Malkki, 1995), intrinsically connected to sovereign power in legal, technological, and political terms (Puumala, 2013, p. 950). Even though there are subtle differences between conditions in transit (e.g., Angulo‐Pasel, 2019; Coutin, 2005), in camps and reception centres (e.g., Agier, 2002; Rainbird, 2014), and, for example, in city outskirts (e.g., Sargent & Larchanché‐Kim, 2006), legal liminality is a shared attribute of them all. Any justification of their presence makes them, from a humanitarian standpoint, nameless, homo sacer (Agamben, 1998); individuals excluded from society, existing outside the law, in a state of exception, and deprived of basic rights and functions (Agamben, 1998).…”

The Politics of Temporary Protection Schemes: The Role of Mexico’s TVRH in Reproducing Precarity among Central American Migrants

“…Indeed, the implementation of the PFS “emphasised an approach to migration from the perspective of national security and control of migration flows,” including the “further militarization of the southern border by armed forces [and] the redeployment of over 300 additional agents” (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [IACHR], 2015: 128). This border enforcement logic, especially with the collaboration of multiple governance levels of security forces, served to further criminalise migrants by treating these operations as security processes rather than viewing migrants through a humanitarian lens (Angulo-Pasel, 2019). For example, this period saw a consistent rise in detentions and deportations without due process (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [IACHR], 2015; WOLA, 2015), where according to the Observatorio de Legislación y Política Migratoria, (Castañeda, 2016) there were 93,613 detentions on the Southern border of Mexico between July 2014 and June 2015, compared to only 46,969 from July 2013 to June 2014, which is close to a 100 per cent increase in one year.…”