Dying for a Cup of Coffee? Migrant Deaths in the US-Mexico Border Region in a Neoliberal Age

Abstract

Well over 4,000 unauthorised migrants have lost their lives in the U.S.-Mexico border region since 1995. These deaths have occurred at the intersection of a dramatically strengthened U.S. boundary policing enforcement apparatus and persistent and arguably growing out-migratory pressures in Mexico and beyond. A number of the deceased have come from coffee-growing and -harvesting households and regions in Mexico and Central America, areas devastated by unstable commodity prices that reached their lowest point in a century in 2000–2001. This article explores the discursive and empirical interrelationship between a neoliberalised international coffee market, an increasingly policed U.S.-Mexico boundary, and migrant deaths. In doing so, it finds evidence to suggest that there is a causal link between the international crisis in prices received by coffee bean producers, out-migration by individuals in households and communities dependent on the coffee sector for their livelihoods, and migrant fatalities. It thus illustrates that the age of neoliberalism is one in which processes of nationalisation, liberalisation, and regulation exist simultaneously in space and time, the intersection of which in a world of deep inequality sometimes produces untimely death for those on the global socio-economic margins. Finally, the article highlights the limitations of extant research on this matter and lays out an agenda for future investigation.