Evidencing Violence and Care along the Central American Migrant Trail through Mexico

This ethnographic study explores how migrant shelters that assist people migrating without authorization through Mexico mediate seemingly contradictory frameworks: human smuggling and humanitarianism. Amid intensified immigration enforcement and policing along migration routes, Central Americans crossing Mexico without authorization increasingly interact with smugglers. These interactions are often characterized as much by mutuality as they are by exploitation. Shelter workers relied on material and embodied signs to make tentative interpretations about these ambiguous dynamics of care and coercion without confronting potential smugglers explicitly. These findings build on previous studies that examine how social workers rely on different kinds of evidence to both reproduce and transform social inequities. Examining how shelter workers interact pragmatically with material objects, in addition to language, to mediate frameworks of humanitarianism and human smuggling informs social work practice with other criminalized populations who do not fit neatly into dichotomies of victimhood and victimization, or innocence and guilt.