Forced Migration across Mexico (Routledge Studies in Development, Mobilities and Migration)

This book analyzes the different ways in which forced migration comes together with organized violence in the Americas, focusing specifically on the migration corridor from Central America, through Mexico and on to the United States.

No matter their starting point, most South and Central American migrants to the United States must eventually traverse Mexico, and often many other borders beforehand, to reach their destination. As border controls tighten, for many migrants turning back is not a possibility, or something they desire. And so, when faced with hardening policies, migrants are often forced into situations of increased violence and precarity, without a shift in their ultimate objective. This book analyzes the complex social situations of everyday violence, and increasingly aggressive border controls, which face migrants in Mexico, as well as their exposure to a different kind of violence during their migration trajectory through the criminal actors such as gangs, cartels, and corrupt law enforcements that seek to make a profit from them. The book takes a critical approach on migration policies and on the externalization of borders by analyzing their effects on the trajectories and experiences of migrants themselves. It shows that the more migrants’ opportunities and rights during transit are hindered, the more they are at risk of exposure to these actors.

Foregrounding the voices of migrants, this book offers fresh insights into debates surrounding migration, politics, international relations, and anthropology in the Americas.

Ximena Alba Villalever is an anthropologist, researcher, and professor in the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin, where she is a coordinator of the Gender Studies profile of the Master’s program. Her research has focused on migration processes with a particular interest on gender, labor, inequality, globalization, and violence.

Stephanie Schütze is Professor for Cultural and Social Anthropology with a specialization in gender and migration studies at the Lateinamerika-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin. She has conducted research on political culture, social movements, migration, and gender relations in diverse contexts and regions in Mexico, the United States, and Brazil.

Ludger Pries held Chair of Sociology and is now Senior Professor at the Department of Social Science of Ruhr-University Bochum. He had longer teaching and research stays in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Fields of research are (international comparative) sociology of migration, work and organizations, life-course research, and transnationalism.

Oscar Calderón Morillón is Research Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. His lines of research are labor studies and migration processes in the contexts of exclusion and vulnerability.