"Clean Up Your Mess, Chino": Contested Space, Boredom, and Vulnerability among Central American Migrants Crossing Southern Mexico.

Summary

The growing subdiscipline of archaeology of the contemporary has stressed the importance of studying detritus to access silenced or abject aspects of the recent past. This paper takes a different approach, focusing on the ways that an archaeology of the present is not about uncovering “truths” that correct ethnographic research, but is rather a constant agitation and addition to ethnographic engagement. Following recent American pressure on the government of Mexico and changes in Mexican immigration enforcement strategies, the experience of undocumented Central Americans migrating through Mexico has transformed drastically over the past year. The social process of undocumented migration is now defined by long periods of waiting in vulnerable and marginalized spaces. Drawing on recent fieldwork with Honduran migrants in Southern Mexico, this paper argues for the necessity of a combination of ethnographic and archaeological techniques and sensibilities to study how boredom, uncertainty and vulnerability are experienced and dealt with by migrants staying in these marginal spaces. Combining day-to-day ethnography with a systematic mapping of material culture and migrant activity in Pakal-Na, Chiapas, we show how the use and reuse of ‘trash’, as well as the use and re-appropriation of ‘trash-filled’ spaces, defines how migrants wait and deal with boredom.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Why Social Archaeology Matters

Keywords

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