Transmigrations: Central American Trans Queer Mobility, Detention, and Return

Abstract

Transmigrations studies the implementation of border security outsourcing in Mexico after the 2014 American Immigration Crisis when thousands of Central American unaccompanied minors and families arrived at the Texas-Mexico border seeking asylum in the United States. In response to the emergence of massive family-based emigration, US authorities began to outsource immigration and border security to Mexico causing a proliferation of checkpoints and other infrastructures of border security. Based on more than thirty months of field research in Central America, Mexico, and the United States, this dissertation traces the grounded development of outsourced border security in Mexico, as well as practices of detention in the United States, by incorporating the testimonies of hundreds of LGBTQ and other Central American refugees of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. The displacement of Central Americans, which is caused by an economic precarity, transmuted into massive forms of collective mass emigration, best known as “Caravans,” as a result of changes in Mexico’s approaches to immigration security and the development of lower-scale anti-immigrant criminal and extortionist groups. From a gay stateless man escaping the tentacles of migrant persecution in a small town on the Mexico-Guatemala border to the struggle for survival in the 2018 Central American exodus attempting to reach the US-Mexico border, this dissertation employs a long-term advocacy approach to ethnographic research to unveil the materialized efforts by US authorities to offshore border security south of the US-Mexico border.