In the Shadow of the Beast: Violence and Dignity along the Central American Migrant Trail

Abstract

This dissertation examines the social and material dimensions of undocumented migration through Mexico along freight railways commonly known as La Bestia, or “The Beast.” I draw on mobile ethnographic fieldwork in and around migrant shelters across Mexico between 2014 and 2016. Echoing “prevention through deterrence” tactics along the U.S.-Mexico border, this period was characterized by intensified policing along railways that pushed people away from well-trodden railway corridors and into more circuitous and uncertain routes—in other words, into the “shadow of the beast.” I show how, in addition to these policing operations, humanitarian mechanisms have also reconfigured migrant pathways as practitioners and migrants negotiate intersecting understandings of dignity in the face of pervasive violence. Migrant shelters proliferate what I refer to as shelter vision, the uncomfortable and often paradoxical practice of working to sustain clandestine pathways while also striving to remedy the route’s indignities by making them visible to state bureaucracies. This combination of secrecy and publicity, which is evident in the most mundane aspects of shelter work, illuminates the organizational and interpersonal dilemmas that unfold when people who are shot or beaten while hopping freight trains face a decision: heal and keep moving, try to hire a smuggler, or seek formal humanitarian recognition, something that tends to involve dialoguing with presumably corrupt bureaucrats. I also consider how these negotiations reverberate beyond shelter spaces by following a group of men and women as they come to live and work alongside each other in northern Mexico. Based on time spent in unassuming boarding houses and off-books welding workshops, I outline shifting dynamics of hospitality and camaraderie between citizens and non-citizens as Mexico increasingly becomes not only a space of transit for Central Americans, but also a space of tentative settlement. In this way, I show how tensions of mutuality and mistrust that are evident in migrant shelters also pervade migrants’ journeys well beyond these spaces as migrants who receive formal humanitarian recognition come to rely on the very networks of organized crime from which they flee. Ultimately, this dissertation examines how shelter workers and migrants strive to align seemingly incommensurate moral economies—humanitarianism and human smuggling—amid a transnational immigration enforcement apparatus that churns people through displacement, detention, and deportation. I argue that constructing dignified pathways for people migrating without authorization requires a pragmatic approach to idealized frameworks, one that is attentive to the implicit exclusions that underlie inclusive rhetoric.