Abstract
In this article, I draw from ten years of accompaniment with migrant caravans in Mexico to argue that the caravan as a mobility tactic emerges in response to the increased difficulties and costs of moving across space without authorization as a consequence of the externalization of the US-Mexico border. I demonstrate how, in this context, the caravan and coyotaje – the term used across the Americas to loosely designate the practice of migrant smuggling – are parallel strategies that migrants employ to navigate the shifting terrain of immigration enforcement, exploitation, corruption, and organized crime in the space of transit. The collectivity that emerges in the caravan, though full of potential for political action, is delimited by the conditions that shape it and produce it in the first place. People come together in a caravan because heightened enforcement and the corresponding dangers and rising costs have left them with few other options.
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Notes
This and all names used in this article are pseudonyms.
This first migrant caravan was discussed in my master’s thesis, (Frank-Vitale 2011).
For an account of migrant kidnapping see Frank-Vitale and Palomo Contreras 2019.
The U.S. numbers come from the Department of Homeland Security’s 2020 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. The Mexico numbers come from the Secretaría de Gobernación’s Estadísticas Migratorias Síntesis 2020. It is worthwhile to note that while the U.S. numbers are for the Fiscal Year which runs from October to September, the Mexican numbers are for the calendar year, January to December. However, since the higher numbers in Mexico are consistent year over year since 2015, the difference is still illustrative.
To be clear, the transit of people from other countries through Mexico is not a new phenomenon. What is novel is their visibility which is heightened by the increased enforcement that Mexico has enacted at the behest of the United States. The latest caravans that were organized in Tapachula, for example, are comprised of more Venezuelans than any other nationality (though Central Americans continue to form a substantial group) (Clemente 2022). This is a relatively new phenomenon as Mexico only began to require visas for Venezuelan nationals in January of 2022 (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores 2022).
The Obama administration employed this rhetoric in response to Central American migration in 2014; the Biden administration has also suggested that it is unscrupulous coyotes who are responsible for the tragic loss of life of migrants attempting to enter the United States (The White House 2022)
These differences played out in the press, as part of the extensive caravan coverage, with Solalinde accusing PSF of being in league with smugglers (Saavedra 2018) or using the caravan for its own political aims (Linthicum 2018) and PSF stating that Solalinde does not get to speak for migrants (Franco 2018). I include these details here not to engage in this back and forth, but to demonstrate the larger dynamics of humanitarian aid discourses and their engagement with the idea of smuggling.
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Funding
The research refenced in this article was supported by The Wenner-Gren Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the Inter-American Foundation, along with the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.
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The participant observation research referenced in this article occurred during public events. In addition, the fieldwork I was conducting on migration from 2017 to 2019 was approved by the University of Michigan’s Institutional Review Board. As per their approved protocols, I obtained oral informed consent before conducting interviews and before accompanying people in their daily activities. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.
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Frank-Vitale, A. Coyotes, caravans, and the Central American migrant smuggling continuum. Trends Organ Crim 26, 64–79 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09480-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-022-09480-z