With rigorous extended fieldwork in migrant shelters across Mexico, interviewing both humanitarian aid workers and migrants/refugees—I use these words interchangeably here since a major point raised by this work is that the displacement caused by poverty is also intricately tied to multiple forms of direct and structural violence—Priscilla Solano argues that the politicized space of shelters challenges the securitization and criminalization of migration. In her book, Shelter on the Journey, she shows how these shelters provide temporary refuge and urgent humanitarian resources to people in passage across Mexico, and how shelters also engage in human rights advocacy on behalf of migrants. Given their role in both clandestine mobility and politics, shelters have often been targeted for government repression. In this context, both shelter staff and migrants offer an important alternative reading of peace, sovereignty, and the relationship between free movement and dignity in a time of increasingly securitized borders.

With this analysis, Solano makes several key empirical and theoretical contributions to multiple literature studies, both within migration studies and beyond it in the fields of political theory and sociology, including to broader debates over globalization, humanitarianism, and human rights. First, she contextualizes these spaces within the broader political and economic processes of neoliberal globalization and the informalization of the global proletariat. Solano traces the production of migrant illegality to mechanisms of racialization and poverty-producing policies, including the structural adjustment, trade opening and austerity programs popularized across the Americas in the 1990s. Such policies generate displacement and violence. The ultimate result has been a vulnerable global workforce forced into transit along migratory routes under extraordinarily precarious conditions. Thus, while acknowledging the role of race in border policing and anti-immigrant policies, Solano brings the analysis back to the ways that socioeconomic class and the material basis of capitalism also shape migration journeys. In doing so, she contributes to our understanding of violence against migrant populations by re-integrating an analysis of class back into discussions of racialized border policing and global apartheid.

Solano also appreciates how the view from the ground can help us challenge power asymmetries, noting that humanitarianism and human rights activism often emerge from bottom-up, grassroots struggles for dignity. Nevertheless, as she artfully acknowledges, such grassroots efforts can also become entangled in structures of power from above, leading at times to contradictions and complicities. Solano thereby contributes to our understanding of humanitarianism and human rights by showing how the key concepts that underpin these global politics are not simply abstractions, imposed from above or exported in an uncomplicated trajectory from Global North to Global South. Instead, everyday actors reinterpret and reshape the concepts that underpin demands for human rights across Mexico and Central America.

Specifically, shelter staff and migrants claim dignity. In other words, they struggle for political recognition, “humanize” migrants by telling the stories of their experiences, resist injustice by denouncing violations of their rights, create spaces of relative safety, and practice an ethics of hospitality. For example, Solano explains how when a coalition of migrants, humanitarian workers, and human rights defenders advocated for transit visas to cross Mexico more safely, they enacted their dignity as political agents and they demanded dignified treatment for migrants from the Mexican government. While such advocacy did not solve the precarity and violence that people crossing Mexico encounter, the mobilization effort nevertheless clearly articulated the human value of migrants and offered a coherent critique of an unjust global economic system. In doing so, migrants and shelter workers provide an important counternarrative to public discourse by challenging the hostile anti-immigrant sentiment spreading across the region. Actions to demand justice for migrants can also turn humanitarian workers and church members engaged as shelter volunteers, into more assertive advocates. Caravans, hunger strikes, and protest confrontations with police strip these volunteers and pastoral workers of their fear of political participation. Finally, the book also details many precious everyday moments within the shelter that offer windows into a lived dignity. People give and receive hospitality that reaffirms human worth and love by exchanging food, water, and conversation. These moments are triumphs in a politics of the everyday—practices which are all too often overlooked by political scientists searching only for more systemic solutions.

Empirically, Solano gives due attention to the diversity and complexity of the shelter as a political space, acknowledging the ways that power infiltrates shelters’ protocols as these sites struggle to survive repression and accusations from hostile governments. Importantly, the book examines the complexities, contradictions, and complicities of shelters carefully, avoiding accusations and offering an empathetic self-critique of humanitarian work. Solano faithfully discusses the gray zones where heroes and victims sometimes collaborate in their own oppression. However, she does so without further stigmatizing or contributing to the criminalization of human rights defenders or vulnerable populations. Her analysis walks a line between sensitivity and honesty about the messy edges of activism and its unintended consequences, such as when shelters reproduce potentially harmful narratives or surveillance practices. In so doing, the book also provides a model of ethical analysis of the shelter system while it confronts state-led repression; it is a compassionate acknowledgment of human agency.

A methodological strength of the book is the way that small stories build up to show how shelters operate. The many stories from migrants and shelter staff provide examples of fleeting moments of dignity, daily victories that often go unsung. Solano also provides the reader an opportunity to hear their demands for sustainable human rights protections and better lives. Thus, the book offers a glimpse of human dignity and how the shelter provides a space for its reinvention. With this empirically grounded approach, Solano contributes to discussions of political theory by exploring the contradictions and practices inspired by liberal principles of freedom, security, and peace in a context of global inequality and capitalist violence.

In this way, Solano brings migration studies into conversation with important theoretical questions in political science. Too often, the study of migration becomes siloed on separate “migration themed” panels at conferences or as an empirical academic subspecialty, somewhat isolated from other conceptual debates that animate the broader discipline. This book, however, encourages migration scholars to speak to a larger community of political scientists, encouraging the exploration of what an ethnography of the migrant shelter system can teach us about the nature of the global political economy, social movements, human rights, and humanitarianism.