The Shelter Multiple: How Humanitarianisms Hang Together at a Mexican Non-governmental Migrant Shelter

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at a nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico to examine how aid workers coordinate apparently contradictory humanitarian orientations. Prior research has called attention to the institutionalization of grassroots humanitarian organizations as they take on the work of categorizing migrants as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. Studies also call attention to initiatives that oppose such institutionalization, with a particular focus on highly mediated acts of civil disobedience. We argue that in Mexico, where the ambiguous line between state and criminal authority makes such explicit claims potentially damaging and dangerous, knowledge practices that seem to signal the institutionalization of otherwise grassroots spaces—the work of registering, classifying, and documenting migrants—are also central to how aid workers discretely subvert such deservingness distinctions without taking explicit and potentially damaging moral and political stances. Our analysis engages with science and technology studies scholarship that understands knowledge practices to be performative in that knowing migration produces the reality that it describes, rather than merely reflecting a taken-for-granted reality. We suggest that attending to how aid workers enact and coordinate information about migrants illuminates how aid workers simultaneously resist and reify distinct legal and moral regimes in violent contexts.