Two outstanding transborder/transnational books illustrate the insights that gendered political-economic analysis from a sociologist and an anthropologist can provide to the narrower discipline of political science. Both analyses are based mainly in Oaxaca, a southern Mexican state situated between the states of Guerrero and Chiapas. (The latter state is the gateway from the Central American so-called violent triangle of countries from which people migrate to escape insecurity, poverty, and criminal gangs.) The substance of both books remains as timely today as when the field research was completed.
Wendy A. Vogt wrote Lives in Transit after learning and working primarily in one of two faith-based shelters (2008–09) that temporarily house people safely during their movement through the terrors of a journey checkered with police and gang brutality, including sexual violence. In Undocumented Politics, Abigail Leslie Andrews offers complicated analyses of migrants who activate contextual relationships from indigenous sending communities to Southern California receiving communities. Gendered analysis provides nuanced ways to understand the different ways in which realities are experienced depending on the intersection of class and place.
For Undocumented Politics, from 2009 to 2012, Andrews lived, observed, and interviewed hundreds of people in four places (two in Mexico and two in the United States) and the contexts from which they moved, worked, and re-moved: an indigenous community called Partido, from which people migrated to work in service jobs and factories in a more receptive Los Angeles, and another indigenous community called Retorno, from which people migrated to hostile northern San Diego County to work in agro-industrial jobs. From each community, women sought to escape routine domestic violence, although individual migration to LA made this more likely than family migration to northern San Diego County.
In each California location, migrants established cross-border nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) referred to as Hometown Associations (HTAs) with specific names, missions, and leaders. At the outset, through the eyes of two women she calls Carmen (from Partido) and Alma (from Retorno), Andrews shows women's complex interpretations of how they pursued “freedom” in mainstream and alternative globalization strategies. With the use of life-history interviews, Andrews reveals women's and men's “pathways to politics”—voices and agency—during an era of changing U.S. policies, from civil immigration enforcement to what some scholars call “crimmigration,” the criminalization of immigration, during an era of so-called free trade that undermined small-scale agriculture in Mexico. Local contexts exercise “modes of control,” well integrated into Andrews's analysis, and people perform gender in malleable ways based on the ways in which they navigate the contexts.
Andrews's argument contains multiple pathways and processes, widening the diverse voices beyond Carmen and Alma from her many interviews. Consider the contexts of early chapters. Although farm recruiters came to both villages, in the more egalitarian Partido, migrants sought urban jobs, whether in Mexico or the United States, while in Retorno, where elites had captured communal governance, heavily indebted migrants who had lost their land left for extremely exploitative agro-industrial jobs and squalid living conditions, whether in Mexico or the United States (northern San Diego County). In LA, women developed assimilationist strategies of belonging, with many believing that if they performed like “good” immigrants (unlike the “bad” ones in binary thinking), the wrath of the state would not befall them, while migrant men tended to suffer targeted police stereotyping. Indeed, women felt freer to report crimes such as wage theft and domestic violence to local authorities and apply for special U visas. In northern San Diego County, local police worked with border agents in work atmospheres of wage theft and verbal abuse to target whole families, even arbitrarily, alienating people and both isolating and endangering women. In a telling comment, one man said, “nos pescan” (“they fish for us,” 81). Fear was rampant and constant.
In later chapters, we learn how migrants in both U.S. contexts developed different relations with their hometowns, the Oaxacan communities undergoing change themselves with the shroud of a changing Mexican state toward competitive politics (including a leftist party option), new laws, and programs offering matching local, state, and federal grants to HTA funds (e.g., the “3 x 1” program), to village infrastructure, and to women (e.g., the Oportunidades conditional cash-transfer program). Cross-border NGO actions and their considerable fund-raising capabilities through HTAs varied; they produced backlashed reactions within those sometimes authoritarian strategies to protect communal governance (especially in Partido). Andrews's analysis is fascinating for those readers who long to understand both gendered moral politics and “realpolitik,” village style. In Retorno, women who returned negotiated a different reception in a more democratic communal environment with male allies. Andrews calls Partido “anti-globalization” (returned migrants threaten local traditions) and Retorno “alternative globalization” (returned migrants negotiate, with indigenous governance, new processes and demands on Mexico).
I commend Andrews for her brilliant contextual detail, depth, and long-term relational analysis. However, I offer two challenges. First, the references to “globalization” have more to do with governance and new binational interaction between migrants and those in Oaxaca rather than what I originally thought (challenges to a global neoliberal economy with new economic processes). After all, the indigenous communities are part of Mexico and the neoliberal North American trade zone, so this is no idealized Zapatista vision that spread from neighboring Chiapas. Second, I finished wondering whether and when domestic violence will end, though certainly it diminished as a result of women's increasingly powerful political voices and actions.
Vogt's book, Lives in Transit, which might be considered somewhat dated given that the fieldwork took place in 2008–09, takes an economic approach to analyze various migration industries that profit from gendered bodies as commodities in local to global perspectives. These industries include militarized securitization forces in the United States and Mexico, criminals, police, traffickers (guides, smugglers, or, more ominously, coyotes), vendors, bar owners, and even compassion staff in shelters. Racism, sexism, and nationality allow the profiteers behind various forces to exploit people in migration journeys inside Mexico and its internal bordered checkpoints (which Vogt analyzes as “arterial borders” in Chapter 2).
Vogt uses her year in the shelter in well-documented ethnography doing “intake” interviews, making conversations, and providing various forms of help to hundreds of mostly Central Americans at a faith-based shelter she calls Casa Guadalupe, with visits to Albergue Nazaret, both in Oaxaca, to capture stories of migrants’ life journeys. She did summer follow-up visits in 2010 and 2013. From the analysis, it seems that most migrants had been robbed, extorted, attacked, kidnapped, smuggled, and/or assaulted, including sexually, on their journeys. Some migrants remained stuck with limited resources in southern Mexico and had to develop survival strategies, exercising agency in the process.
Central American migrants’ journeys are fraught with fear and violence on everyday bases that prey on them as vulnerable people. They are called cachucos, a derogatory term. In roads and on railroads, they encounter hypermasculinized predators, blurring lines between official and unofficial. As Vogt says, “It is often difficult to tell if perpetrators of violence are state agents, organized criminals, or a combination of both” (63). Perceptual blurs even occur as people relay stories about attacks by the notorious Los Zetas “or those who claimed to be Zetas” (88). At various points, Vogt hints at skillful coordination between police and criminals.
The book, with sections named after interviewees, reads like one horror story after another among resilient survivors. Vogt cites estimates from a Mexico City NGO that 77,000 Central Americans have disappeared (83–84), more than twice as many Mexicans as have disappeared since 2006. Alas, it is doubtful that U.S. political appointees and Department of Homeland Security staff will ever read migrants’ stories in books like these, although officials in both countries surely share moral complicity in deaths, attacks, and disappearances.
Shelters also became magnets for profiteering. In an interview with a Catholic priest who ran the shelter, whom she calls Padre José, Vogt learned that he had been kidnapped but left alive because smugglers would have greater difficulty recruiting customers, bar workers, or comrades in arms if he was gone and the shelter closed.
The details in Vogt's book no doubt surpass those of most migration scholars. Vogt gives voice to migrants dismembered in train accidents, awaiting prosthetic legs, and calls attention to women's reproductive health needs on long journeys. Menstruation is problematic in transit, but weeks of stress-related vaginal bleeding can go untreated. Depo Provera injections (which migrants “dubbed the ‘anti-Mexico’ shot,” 115), taken to avoid pregnancy during journeys of likely sexual assault, temporarily stop periods. Men are also strip-searched and/or raped, especially LGBTQ persons who hide their trauma. Thankfully, health clinics served migrants, augmented with Mexico's 2011 migration law that humanized unauthorized migrants but was counteracted by more vigorous enforcement from the southern border (Frontera Sur) program in 2014 and thereafter. The chapter titled “Intimate Crossings” lays bare occasional male-female partnerships for instrumental purposes: male protection in exchange for sex and care work.
Vogt contributes to new ways of understanding the economics of migrant journeys through thick description rather than a complex argument. Although she seeks to avoid sensationalist analyses of migrants as victims, one can hardly come away from reading the book without thinking this, complete with the negative characterization of Mexico and Mexicans.
Juxtaposing the two books, readers will notice contrasting characterizations of southern Mexico. In Vogt's account, it is lawless and chaotic, while in Andrews's, it is intentionally organized in problematic but understandable political transitions in urban areas and in nonromanticized indigenous communities, long practicing usos y costumbres (male communal governance strategies based on “complementarity” between men and women that normalizes violence against women). Of course, one book focuses on places and the other more on roads, but people travel to places mostly on roads. Although each book has a different focus, if read together, readers can decide which picture of reality is more credible then and now. I lean toward Andrews, who does not mention violence in transit as constant and omnipresent. Yet for Central American migrants to the United States in 2018, their caravans to Mexico's northern border occurred because of the dangers of travel as individuals or in smaller groups.
Together, both authors of these beautifully written books complicate older versions of migration analysis and offer treasure troves of bibliographies (14 pages in Vogt; 28 pages in Andrews). The authors are careful to caution against overgeneralization beyond the eras and places of their field research, but one cannot help but wonder whether replicative studies beyond 2016, with the broadened and harsh U.S. xenophobic enforcement policies, might yield different findings. Alas, both authors avoided drawing on border studies, so they missed opportunities to tap insights in this 40-year-old interdisciplinary field with its focus on not only physical international borderlines and borderlands but also bordering practices inside the state and across identities with their checkpoints and othering practices, long part of the field. Here in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, in-transit migrants move: sometimes stuck in border cities, other times passing through Border Patrol checkpoints on all major state and inter-state highways. As Andrews points out in her final chapter, returned migrants attempt to democratize Mexico and the “right to stay home” (198). We shall see whether this becomes more possible with Mexico's election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018.
