!Que mamada! (What a Joke!): Humor, Hostility, and Hospitality along the Central American Migrant Trail

Along the Central American migrant trail through Mexico, jokes and teasing offer a window into a transnational border regime defined by both migrant hospitality and xenophobic hostility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a welding workshop in Monterrey, a city in Northern Mexico where Central Americans are increasingly waylaid on journeys to the US-Mexico border, this article examines playfully derisive and sexually charged jokes, enacted materially through everyday objects like pickup trucks, coke bottles, and welding torches, as rhetorical strategies that migrant guests rely on to negotiate the contradictions of welcome and trespass that anthropologists have largely discussed through the lens of humanitarianism. These dynamics illuminate how intersecting migrant communities reify and reconfigure ambiguities of solidarity and suspicion that surround transit migration as ethical-moral border regimes increasingly push migrant communities toward informal hospitality spaces at the margins of the West.