:Walking Together: Central Americans and Transit Migration through Mexico

While Mexico has been openly critical of US immigration enforcement policies, it has also served as a strategic partner in US efforts to externalize its immigration enforcement strategy. In 2016, Mexico returned twice as many Central Americans as did the United States, calling many to criticize Mexico for doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Based on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, this article unpacks and complicates the idea that Mexico is simply doing the “dirty work” of the United States. It examines how, through the construction of “dirty others”—as vectors of disease, criminals, smugglers, and workers—Central Americans come to embody “matter out of place,” thus threatening order, security, and the nation itself. Dirt and dirtiness, in both symbolic and material forms, emerge as crucial organizing factors in the politics of Central American transit migration, providing an important case study in the dynamics between transit and destination states.

Home in Honduras

Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US‐Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materially through everyday objects like pickup trucks, coke bottles, and welding torches, as rhetorical strategies that migrant guests rely on to negotiate the contradictions of welcome and trespass that anthropologists have largely discussed through the lens of humanitarianism. These dynamics illuminate how intersecting migrant communities reify and reconfigure ambiguities of solidarity and suspicion that surround transit migration as ethical‐moral border regimes increasingly push migrant communities toward informal hospitality spaces at the margins of the West.

The Paradoxes of Im/mobility in Central American Transit Migration in Mexico

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las metáforas y su función persuasiva en los discursos periodísticos a favor de los migrantes en tránsito irregular por México. Para su logro se analizan las metáforas conceptuales empleadas en textos sobre la transmigración centroamericana en prensa nacional mexicana del 2014. Asimismo, se discute la metáfora como mecanismo de persuasión mediante la apelación a emociones.