UC Berkeley

This text is an ethnographic and anthropological investigation into migrant bodily experience in Mexico, especially Central American migrant experience. It seeks to provide a new way of understanding border militarization and migrant il/legalization and racialization through the instantiation of new techniques of bodily control. I analyze a previously understudied, anti-immigration policy in Mexico known as the Southern Border Program, which has quietly detained and deported millions of (mostly Central American) migrants traveling through the country. Likely tens of thousands of migrants are injured each year as they try to traverse Mexico’s new militarized borders, and I seek to document the ethnic, racial, and health disparities that structure migrants’ illnesses and injuries, as well as to depict the material and psychic lives of those subjected to intersecting forms of confinement and dispossession. I particularly work with migrants whose bodies tend to be “somatically othered”—such as Afro-Latinx, indigenous, and trans/queer migrants—as they routinely face some of the highest levels of violence on the migrant trail at the hands of state actors. I analyze the “humanitarian reason” that intervenes on these bodies (especially when they are “ill” or “injured”) and then track when certain somatic qualities or bodily traumas permit one to also acquire particular documents or state resources. Ultimately, I claim that the Southern Border Program does not simply seek to deport migrants, but to eliminate the bodily ability of migrating as such. Therefore, in The Body Migrant I ask the ontological question: Is one still a migrant if they are unable to migrate? Theoretically, I draw heavily upon the work of André Leroi-Gourhan in order to provide a novel materialist and structuralist conceptualization of what the human and the human body are, and therefore what the migrant body is as well. I make special use of Leroi-Gourhan’s conceptualization of “external organs”—that is, aspects of the human body which are externalized from it, such as what are colloquially referred to as “tools”—in order to analyze how one’s being is changed when they have access or are denied particular external organs. In doing so, I set out a different means of bodily analysis that departs from biomedical categories such as “biology” and “genetics,” and instead focus on the body as a corpus, that is, as a body of work and a body that works. I claim that immigration documents (such as passports or “humanitarian visas”) can actually be understood as physically part of one’s corpus, actually structuring the notion of one’s organic body and individualized identity to which it is attached.