Lockdown and the list: Mexican refugees, asylum denial, and the feminist geopolitics of esperar (waiting/hoping)

Abstract

Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of diversion and delay, producing a false sense of certainty while using indefinite waiting times as soft and surreptitious mechanisms to block displaced people’s legal claims for asylum. This imposed distinctly gendered burdens on women and youth. However, we also identify how the lists, where appropriated by migrants themselves, became tools to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work extends established political geographic analyses of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.