Material Boundaries of Citizenship: Central American Clandestine Migration through Mexico

Summary

Each year, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central American migrants transit through Mexico by hopping freight trains. Migrants navigate organized crime networks and government officials that seek to extort and detain them. They also receive assistance from sympathetic Mexican citizens and a network of humanitarian shelters that have developed along common migrant routes. Throughout this process, migrants seek to both highlight their presence as non-citizens and blend in with the citizen population. The objects that migrants carry with them, leave behind, and pick up along the way illuminate how citizenship and non-citizenship are expressed, interpreted, and manipulated amongst social and material infrastructures of clandestine mobility. By collecting and documenting the material culture of migration, along with participant observation in and around migrant shelters in southern Mexico, this paper combines ethnography and contemporary archaeology in order to investigate how the boundaries of citizenship and non-citizenship are negotiated materially through clandestine migration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crossing Borders and Erasing Boundaries: An Overview of the First Five Years of the Undocumented Migration Project   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 109