Humanitarian aid and the everyday invisibility of climate-related migration from Central America

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how everyday practices of humanitarian documentation shape the visibility of climate-related migration from Central America. Based on participant observation and interviews with migrants at a humanitarian aid shelter in Mexico, we argue that existing documentation practices may contribute to the everyday erasure of climate-related migration. We observed that migrants rarely mentioned climate change during routine shelter intake interviews, which primarily revolve around interpersonal violence as a driver of forced displacement from Central America. However, in the context of follow-up interviews, migrants explained that such interpersonal violence is often structured in complex ways by climate-related vulnerabilities. Interviews revealed that a variety of climate-related drivers, including inconsistent rainfall variability, deforestation, and land dispossession underlie and exacerbate the forms of interpersonal violence that existing legal regimes consider deserving of legal recognition. Our findings suggest that climate change as a driver of displacement may be obscured in everyday humanitarian encounters. They also point to the role that humanitarian spaces such as migrant shelters might play in documenting and drawing attention to climate-related forced displacement. Finally, we discuss how our findings contribute to emerging academic and policy discussions regarding the integration of climate-related displacement into existing humanitarian legal regimes.