Leave if You're Able: Migration, Survival, and the Everydayness of Deportation in Honduras

Abstract

Drawing from 21 months of fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Leave if You’re Able focuses on the experiences of young men deported back to neighborhoods labeled as among the world’s most violent. I argue for understanding deportation not as rupture but, rather, I place it within a continuum of exclusions and displacements, examining what it means when deportation becomes an ordinary and traumatic experience, routine and catastrophic. Clandestine migration and deportation are positioned here not as exceptional, spectacular events in a life of otherwise stability but are instead shown to be the extension across national boundaries of the marginalization, criminalization, and displaceability of a population who is always already excluded, deportable, before ever leaving their country of citizenship. From 2015 to 2019, Honduras saw nearly 400,000 people deported – mostly from Mexico and the United States. With a population of just over 9 million, this means that more than four percent of Hondurans were deported over just five years. Through stories of deportation and displacement, I trace the legal violences employed to detain young Hondurans, the legal and illegal violences poised to harm them in their home country, and the circulation of violence through circuits of clandestine migration and re-migration. The first generation of deportation studies literature revealed deportation to be a process of rending, exiling people back to countries of citizenship that are unfamiliar and do not feel like home. This was a crucial turn, but a study of Honduran deportation today tells a different story than most of the existing deportation-as-exile centered ethnographies. While there is a small percentage of Hondurans who are deported after growing up in the United States, the majority of Honduran deportees were caught and deported before ever settling into life in the United States, many after having a claim for asylum denied, many before they ever reached the U.S.-Mexico border. Understanding post-deportation life in these circumstances is crucial, as this kind of engagement with migration and deportation is likely to become increasingly common, as borders harden even further while many people all over the world find life in their country of citizenship to be too hard to survive.