Rebecca Torres

Este artículo examina las causas y las consecuencias del desplazamiento forzado mexicano desde una perspectiva feminista decolonial, enfatizando las intersecciones entre el cuerpo y el territorio. La ausencia de datos cuantitativos y cualitativos sobre las personas desplazadas en México las borra de su territorio, las invisibiliza en las rutas migratorias hasta hacerlas desaparecer en el mapa de las geografías contemporáneas del terror. En particular, nos centramos en las experiencias de las mujeres, basándonos en una extensa investigación binacional a lo largo de la frontera entre México y EE. UU. Sus testimonios permiten una comprensión del desplazamiento forzado más allá de las narrativas pasivas y revictimizantes.

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 divers...

espanolDesde una perspectiva geografica, la hibridacion expone la forma en que se enredan los diferentes componentes de la naturaleza y la cultura, creando una nueva variante, que desdibuja las distinciones artificiales. En este trabajo, el concepto de hibridacion se aplica al estudio del caso de Grenada. Si bien el principal atractivo de esta isla del Caribe es sol, mar y arena, los turistas que visitan Grenada tienen una serie de otros intereses lejos de la playa. Los turistas que podrian clasificarse como la masa convencional "de sol y arena", a menudo quieren experimentar mas aspectos de la isla, y muchos lo hacen a traves de visitas guiadas. Estos tours se han desarrollado para reflejar los diversos intereses y por lo tanto dificiles de clasificar dentro de las etiquetas de productos turisticos tipicamente estrechas. Esta investigacion cuenta con el analisis de contenido y la semiotica de la literatura de promocion del turismo, asi como la observacion participante en ...

In this article we examine the root causes and consequences of forced displacement in Guerrero, Mexico. Drawing upon Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminist thought, we use 'cuerpo-territorio' (body-territory) as a lens for understanding multiscalar violence in the region. This centres the experiences of women and children, key figures both in the (re)production of embodied, communal, and territorial ties and in the phenomenon of forced displacement. Their testimonials complicate understandings of internal migration in Mexico and asylumseeking in the US, disrupting typical re/victimising narratives while acknowledging the interconnected, intimate-global violences these women and youth often face. In connection with 'cuerpo-territorio', we incorporate the decolonial concept of 'reexistencia' (re-existence) to show how those suffering displacement actively transform possibilities for being-in-the-world. In conversation with feminist geographic work on oppositional resistance, resilience, and reworking , we explain 're-existencia' as solidarity practices that move beyond mere survival. Instead, these practices draw on longstanding indigenous ways of being to infuse new life into territories dispossessed through violence. This article aims to deepen dialogue with feminist geographic literatures outside of the Anglo-centric canon, and calls for greater attention to Latin American and Caribbean decolonial epistemologies in analyses of displacement in the Americas.

Desde una perspectiva geografica, la hibridacion expone la forma en que se enredan los diferentes componentes de la naturaleza y la cultura, creando una nueva variante, que desdibuja las distinciones artificiales. En este trabajo, el concepto de hibridacion se aplica al estudio del caso de Grenada. Si bien el principal atractivo de esta isla del Caribe es sol, mar y arena, los turistas que visitan Grenada tienen una serie de otros intereses lejos de la playa. Los turistas que podrian clasificarse como la masa convencional "de sol y arena", a menudo quieren experimentar mas aspectos de la isla, y muchos lo hacen a traves de visitas guiadas. Estos tours se han desarrollado para reflejar los diversos intereses y por lo tanto dificiles de clasificar dentro de las etiquetas de productos turisticos tipicamente estrechas. Esta investigacion cuenta con el analisis de contenido y la semiotica de la literatura de promocion del turismo, asi como la observacion participante en las vis...

In the 1960s the isolated tropical forest enclave of Quintana Roo was targeted by the Mexican Government to serve as the cornerstone for launching what is now considered to be one of Mexico’s most successful economic development strategies – Planned Tourism Development (PTD). This paper commences with a brief review of the role of state-driven PTD in Mexico’s national economic development agenda. Government discourse surrounding the Cancun project emphasised tourism as a mechanism for promoting ‘regional development ’ through creation of backward linkages to other economic sectors – notably agriculture and small industry – to benefit the region’s marginalised Mayan peasant population. Based on research in Quintana Roo, this paper contends that while PTD has generated profit for the Government, transnational corporations and entrepreneurial elites, it has failed to achieve backward linkages that may have improved conditions for the region’s impoverished rural population. Employing a ...

Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.

In light of the grave challenges ahead under the Trump administration and the rise of right-wing populism in the West, it is critical that geographers across subdisciplines embrace activist and engaged scholarship. Opportunities for such engagement often emerge organically in our everyday lives at the intersection between personal interests, ethics and commitments, and nascent research agendas. In this article, I share two experiences with community-engaged and activist research: (1) establishing the Los Puentes Spanish–English dual-language immersion program in partnership with a low-income rural North Carolina public school system and (2) collaborating on the Building Austin, Building Injustice participatory action research project with a community-based workers center to document and lobby for improvements to construction workers’ conditions in Austin, Texas. Through a situated and positioned personal account, I seek to not only provide two examples of activist research but also illustrate the diversity of encounters and how they can emerge in unlikely places and outside conventional “activist” arenas. In conclusion, I draw on lessons learned through these experiences to reflect on the various challenges and opportunities for activist scholarship within geography in the future.

ABSTRACT With child migration on the rise, there is a critical need to understand how migrant children express their agency. To date, popular narratives cast migrant children as either victims or criminals, an unhelpful binary that does little to further efforts to develop effective interventions to help migrant youth. Drawing from 32 in-depth interviews and participatory activities with Mexican and Central American children in Mexican youth immigration detention centres, this paper seeks to reconceptualise current understandings of migrant children’s agency. In this paper, we explore how youth express their motivations, assert their will, develop pragmatic dependencies, employ strategic parroting and guard information to achieve their goals. We also examine how state and non-state actors both support and suppress young people’s agency as they try to navigate their way to the U.S./Mexico border. In doing so, we argue for a more nuanced approach to child migrants’ agency. A non-binary approach recognises the development of agency as a process, embracing children and young people’s rights and vulnerabilities, while acknowledging their resiliencies, competencies, goals and strengths. We conclude by proposing a transdisciplinary research agenda to promote this non-binary approach.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied migrant children attempting to enter the United States. In 2014, total numbers peaked at 68,000 apprehensions, mostly from Central America and Mexico. Since then, rising immigration enforcement strategies within Mexico have decreased the ability of unaccompanied migrant youth to reach the US border. However, underlying factors driving child migration have not changed. Children continue to flee high levels of violence, particularly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, which are currently among the most violent nations in the world. Yet, violence does not end for youth once they leave the borders of their countries; as youth ride buses, trains, boats and trucks north, they continue to encounter it along every step of the way. Due to increasing militarization and punitive immigration policies in the United States, migrant children contend with further violence when they cross the US/Mexico border. In this paper, we examine how varied nuanced manifestations of violence shape migrant children’s lives and experiences. While youth may be able to escape immediate and corporeal violence, we explain how different forms of violence influence not only their decisions to leave, but also their journeys and encounters with Mexican and US immigration policies. We argue for a more spatially expansive understanding of violence that considers how state policies and practices extend far beyond national borders to negatively affect migrant children’s lives.Resumen:En los últimos años, ha habido un aumento dramático en el número de niños migrantes no acompañados que tratan de entrar en los Estados Unidos. En 2014, el número total alcanzó un máximo de 68,000 aprehensiones, en su mayoría de Centroamérica y México. Desde entonces, el aumento de las estrategias de control de inmigración en México han disminuido la capacidad de los jóvenes migrantes no acompañados de llegar a la frontera con Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, los factores subyacentes que impulsan la migración infantil no han cambiado. Los niños siguen huyendo de altos niveles de violencia, en particular de El Salvador, Honduras y Guatemala, que actualmente están entre los países más violentos del mundo. Sin embargo, la violencia no termina para los jóvenes una vez que salgan de la frontera de sus países; como los jóvenes toman autobuses, trenes, barcos y camiones al norte, ellos lo siguen encontrando a lo largo de cada paso del camino. Debido al aumento de la militarización y las políticas punitivas de inmigración en los Estados Unidos, los niños migrantes luchan contra más violencia cuando cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos/México. En este trabajo, examinamos cómo matizados y variadas manifestaciones de violencia forman las vidas y experiencias de los niños migrantes. Mientras que la juventud puede ser capaz de escapar de la violencia inmediata y corporal, explicamos cómo las diferentes formas de violencia no sólo influyan su decisión de salir, sino también sus viajes y encuentros con las políticas de inmigración de México y EEUU. Argumentamos a favor de un entendimiento más amplio y espacial de la violencia que tiene en cuenta cómo las políticas y prácticas estatales se extienden mucho más allá de las fronteras nacionales para afectar negativamente la vida de los niños migrantes.

Abstract:Based on research in the Totonacapan region in Veracruz, Mexico, we examine left-behind children’s perceptions of migration to the United States (“el otro lado”) as manifest in their complex understandings of the journey, landscapes of urban life, social (space/ interactions), and material culture. We privilege young children’s perceptions about the migration experience through writing and drawing activities. While multiple factors shape children’s perceptions, the migration stories of adults and older youth are among the most present influences. By focusing on children aged eight and nine, we demonstrate the young age at which narratives about migration processes are already ingrained. The so-called “surge” of unaccompanied migrant children to the USA in 2014 highlights the need to pay attention to left-behind youths’ ideas about migration. We find that left-behind children’s narratives demonstrate astute perceptions of urban life and economic amenities in the USA, as well as of migrants’ risky journeys. These narratives also demonstrate clear tensions between what the children perceive as the life conditions that await migrants on the other side and the risky journey that they feel migrants must undertake.Resumen:Basado en la investigación en la región de Totonacapan en Veracruz, México, llegamos a examinar las percepciones de la migración hacia los Estados Unidos (“el otro lado”) por parte de los niños dejados atrás, a través de su entendimiento complejo del viaje, de la vida urbana, de lo social (espacio/interacciones), y de la cultura material. Nos enfocamos en la percepcion de los niños de su experiencia migratoria, manifestada a través de su escritura y dibujos. Mientras existen múltiples factores que forman las percepciones de estos niños, las historias de migración de adultos y jóvenes mayores están dentro de las influencias más impactantes. Al enfocarnos en niños de ocho y nueve años, demostramos la temprana edad en la cual el proceso migratorio está ya arraigado. La llamada “fuga” de ninos migrantes no acompanados a los Estados Unidos en el 2014 destaca la necesidad de prestar atención a las ideas que tienen los niños dejados atrás sobre la migracion. Encontramos que la narrativa de estos niños dejados atrás demuestra percepciones astutas sobre la vida urbana y las amenidades económicas en los Estados Unidos, y también sobre los viajes arriesgados de los migrantes. Estas narrativas también demuestran la clara tensión entre lo que ellos perciben como las condiciones de vida que esperan a los migrantes del otro lado y el peligroso viaje que ellos piensan que los migrantes deben llevar a cabo.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union forced Cuba to diversify its trade links and to produce more goods domestically. In spring 1990, Cuba announced a “Special Period in Peacetime” in which food self-sufficiency was to be paramount.1 Much land previously used for export crops, especially sugar, was turned over to production for domestic consumption, and there was a return to nonmechanized agriculture using mainly organic inputs. By 1992 Cuban trade with Eastern bloc countries had fallen to 7 percent of its 1989 levels.2 The U.S. trade embargo was continuously tightened, culminating in the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 under which the United States threatened to punish third countries trading with Cuba.

Tourism scholars in recent years have posited a global paradigmatic shift from Fordist to more post-Fordist and neo-Fordist modes of tourism production and consumption. This article provides a brief literature review of transformations in global tourism production and consumption from a Fordist spectrum of analysis. Following a discussion of tourism development in Cancun and the surrounding state of Quintana Roo, this article draws on empirical data from a survey of 615 visitors to the Yucatan Peninsula and 60 Cancun hotels to provide a contextual application of the Fordist spectrum in understanding the nature of tourism production and consumption in the region. Cancun is situated as a predominately Fordist mass tourism resort, however, analysis reveals that the region’s tourism landscape, which is experiencing processes of diversification, is in reality a complex combination of both Fordist and post-Fordist elements manifest in different ‘shades’ of mass tourism, ‘neo-Fordism’ and ...

ABSTRACT Neoliberalization of the construction industry, in combination with Texas’ anti-labor climate, has resulted in “precarious employment regimes” in Austin’s construction industry. Austin is currently the second fastest-growing urban area in the United States and depends heavily on a Latino immigrant workforce to meet its construction demands. In 2009 a community-based worker center in Austin, Workers Defense Project (WDP), in collaboration with the University of Texas students and faculty, undertook one of the most extensive studies to date on the U.S. construction industry in order to better understand working conditions and to promote fair labor practices and legislation. The study took a participatory activist approach to research and included a survey of 312 construction workers, as well as 37 qualitative interviews with workers and construction industry leaders. Findings revealed an industry characterized by poor and dangerous working conditions, low and stolen wages, limited benefits and racialized divisions of labor, resulting in weakened social citizenship and exclusion. The study exposes the often unaccounted for social, economic and bodily costs of these precarious labor regimes on workers, families, employers and taxpayers. We conclude that the emergent spaces of activism and collective response carved out by immigrant civil society, in particular the worker center movement, are resulting in new forms of social citizenship that are empowering for immigrant workers.

Over the past twenty years, changing processes of globalization and economic integration have sparked an increase in Latino transnational migration to the United States. According to the most recent US Census, Latinos are now the nation's largest minority group, ...

ABSTRACT
The proliferation of for-profit immigrant detention centers in rural and suburban communities sets the stage for this chapter. Taking a feminist geographic approach to discourses surrounding sites and cases in Texas, the authors use discursive analysis and informant interviews to expose uneven power relations, divergent discourses across actors, and disproportionate impact present within an immigration landscape controlled through state tactics of invisibility and dislocation.

... principal type of tourism occurring at the destination, among other factors, all destinations ... it difficult in some cases to determine which factor is truly influencing tourist consumption. ... Mexican seafood dish), they enable a gross assessment of tourist consumption patterns according ...

In light of the grave challenges ahead under the Trump administration and the rise of right-wing populism in the West, it is critical that geographers across subdisciplines embrace activist and engaged scholarship. Opportunities for such engagement often emerge organically in our everyday lives at the intersection between personal interests, ethics and commitments, and nascent research agendas. In this article, I share two experiences with community-engaged and activist research: (1) establishing the Los Puentes Spanish–English dual-language immersion program in partnership with a low-income rural North Carolina public school system and (2) collaborating on the Building Austin, Building Injustice participatory action research project with a community-based workers center to document and lobby for improvements to construction workers’ conditions in Austin, Texas. Through a situated and positioned personal account, I seek to not only provide two examples of activist research but also illustrate the diversity of encounters and how they can emerge in unlikely places and outside conventional “activist” arenas. In conclusion, I draw on lessons learned through these experiences to reflect on the various challenges and opportunities for activist scholarship within geography in the future.

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing
the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in
recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama
era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S.
policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and
migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion
of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included:
outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing
migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and
accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of
state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability
of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and
Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ
a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate
and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the
workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal
practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable
yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon
examples from two research projects, informed by personal
experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday
state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three
arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral
spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee
crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely
deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and
reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and
responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist
ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee
narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting
rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and
hospitality towards newcomers.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied migrant children attempting to enter the United States. In 2014, total numbers peaked at 68,000 apprehensions, mostly from Central America and Mexico. Since then, rising immigration enforcement strategies within Mexico have decreased the ability of unaccompanied migrant youth to reach the US border. However, underlying factors driving child migration have not changed. Children continue to flee high levels of violence, particularly from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, which are currently among the most violent nations in the world. Yet, violence does not end for youth once they leave the borders of their countries; as youth ride buses, trains, boats and trucks north, they continue to encounter it along every step of the way. Due to increasing militarization and punitive immigration policies in the United States, migrant children contend with further violence when they cross the US/Mexico border. In this paper, we examine how varied nuanced manifestations of violence shape migrant children’s lives and experiences. While youth may be able to escape immediate and corporeal violence, we explain how different forms of violence influence not only their decisions to leave, but also their journeys and encounters with Mexican and US immigration policies. We argue for a more spatially expansive understanding of violence that considers how state policies and practices extend far beyond national borders to negatively affect migrant children’s lives.

Resumen

En los últimos años, ha habido un aumento dramático en el número de niños migrantes no acompañados que tratan de entrar en los Estados Unidos. En 2014, el número total alcanzó un máximo de 68,000 aprehensiones, en su mayoría de Centroamérica y México. Desde entonces, el aumento de las estrategias de control de inmigración en México han disminuido la capacidad de los jóvenes migrantes no acompañados de llegar a la frontera con Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, los factores subyacentes que impulsan la migración infantil no han cambiado. Los niños siguen huyendo de altos niveles de violencia, en particular de El Salvador, Honduras y Guatemala, que actualmente están entre los países más violentos del mundo. Sin embargo, la violencia no termina para los jóvenes una vez que salgan de la frontera de sus países; como los jóvenes toman autobuses, trenes, barcos y camiones al norte, ellos lo siguen encontrando a lo largo de cada paso del camino. Debido al aumento de la militarización y las políticas punitivas de inmigración en los Estados Unidos, los niños migrantes luchan contra más violencia cuando cruzan la frontera de Estados Unidos/México. En este trabajo, examinamos cómo matizados y variadas manifestaciones de violencia forman las vidas y experiencias de los niños migrantes. Mientras que la juventud puede ser capaz de escapar de la violencia inmediata y corporal, explicamos cómo las diferentes formas de violencia no sólo influyan su decisión de salir, sino también sus viajes y encuentros con las políticas de inmigración de México y EEUU. Argumentamos a favor de un entendimiento más amplio y espacial de la violencia que tiene en cuenta cómo las políticas y prácticas estatales se extienden mucho más allá de las fronteras nacionales para afectar negativamente la vida de los niños migrantes.