Transcontinental Migration in Mexico.

Likewise, academic production on Central American migrations transiting Mexico is substantial, with well-established theoretical and methodological references, largely due to the groundbreaking work of colleagues like Rodolfo Casillas, Manuel Ángel Castillo and, recently, Jéssica Nájera Aguirre, among many other researchers that can’t be mentioned here due to space constraints. 

In the twenty-first century, researchers who study migrations and borders have noticed new patterns of mobility and settling among Haitian communities, who have arrived in Mexico individually or in families since 2016. These individuals, who had previously lived in cities in Brazil and Chile, were forced to settle in northeast Mexico due to the impossibility of crossing the border with the United States. They were distinguished by their blackness, as well as their language, music, religions, and freewill. 

Fieldwork conducted in Tijuana, Mexico’s northern border, revealed that the young people I interacted with did not only come from Haiti, but also from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Senegal. A couple of years later, in Tapachula, a city located 40 kilometers from the Mexico-Guatemala border, my ethnographic observations expanded to include Asian people. 

Hence, in 2019 I began independent research, and by 2022 I was joined by UNAM students from various undergraduate programs and from the graduate program in Political and Social Sciences. Our focus shifted to the experiences of extracontinental migrants from Africa and Asia who transit through Mexico. 

Thanks to UNAM’s Program to Support Research Projects and Technological Innovation (PAPIIT, Spanish initials), we were able to conduct four ethnographic fieldworks in two bordering cities in Mexico: Tapachula and Ciudad Juárez. The project, titled “Transcontinental Migrants/Asylum Seekers and the Conformation of a Waiting Bordering Space in Mexico,” brought together a diverse group of students with distinct social backgrounds, skills and tools. This collaboration allowed for the establishment of relationships between racialized and peripheral women and the children of academics.

The work developed allows me to affirm that today we know more about who these migrant individuals coming from distant continents are, which are their motivations and their journeys, and why they settle in the Mexican borders. 

Tapachula serves as the primary entry point to Mexico for migrants from Central and West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Before crossing the Suchiate River, which separates Mexico and Guatemala, migrants typically take two to three flights to reach destinations like São Paulo, Brazil, or Quito, Ecuador. From there, they travel in buses, taxis or on foot through parts of the Amazonia and the Andes, as well as across nearly all the Central American countries. Over the course of our two-year project, we have gathered stories from almost forty migrants from African countries, including Angola, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea Conakry, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Sierra Leona, Somalia, Tanzania, and Togo. Additionally, people from four Asian countries have been registered: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, and Pakistan. 

Diverse reasons drive them away from their home countries: from armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to coups in the Sahel region countries, to prolonged droughts in the Horn of Africa. Also, from the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the political and religious persecutions in China. These triggering events often intersect with precarious structures such as insecurity, unemployment and famine in the places of origin, add to different forms of racism they face on the move. In some cases, the desire for adventure and to explore the wider world is a motivation. However, almost always the goal for most is to reach the United States or Canada, from where they can send remittances and support their families remotely. 

In Mexico, particularly in border regions, these intercontinental migrants have been forced to temporarily settle and wait for the documentation to cross the territory in a regular and secure manner. Depending on the political situation and the capacities of the Migration National Institute (INM, Spanish initials) or the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR), these waiting periods can extend for weeks, months or even years. 

As they wait in cities like Tapachula, migrant communities integrate and gradually transform the local environment, introducing subtle yet significant spatial and cultural changes. This phenomenon has turned “The Pearl of Soconusco”—as Tapachula is known—a locality with a population of less than half a million, far from big urban conglomerates, into a global city. This is a bottom-up kind of globalization driven by migrant and diasporic individuals who connect Tapachula with other cities from the global South, such as Dhaka, Islamabad, Conakry, Luanda and Mogadishu. 

Social and spatial transformations in Mexico’s border cities have accelerated over time. For instance, humanitarian offices and public bathrooms now display advertisements in Haitian Creole, traditional Chinese restaurants in Tapachula now cater to commensals from Ghana, and hair salons specialize in afro haircuts. Hotel instructions are always available in English, but now also in Chinese and even Uzbek; an African imam manages a mosque where young Muslim migrants from Africa or Bangladesh gather. 

These are powerful indicators that Mexican border cities have new dynamics and are inhabited and constantly transformed by migrant individuals from other continents, beyond the traditional flow of Central American migrants. This underscores the need for researchers and students to investigate how Mexican border regions respond to events on both regional and global events.
The institutional framework provided by UNAM through PAPIIT enabled the formation of a team committed to ethnographic research and innovative approaches to fieldwork. This allowed students whose undergraduate degrees were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic to engage in fieldwork practices. 

Mexican borders are changing as we also are. Every fieldwork stay and every new interaction exposes us to stories of previously unimaginably distant worlds, making us more perceptive and restless individuals, with new questions and concerns. 

 

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