The Rise, Endurance, and Fall of Migrant Camps on the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Sociology of Border Violence

Bermúdez Tapia, Bertha Alicia

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

The Rise, Endurance, and Fall of Migrant Camps on the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Sociology of Border Violence Public Deposited

Analytics

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/bn999818g

Abstract

My dissertation examines how transformations in state-made immigration policies generate violent dynamics at the local and meso levels. Specifically, I delve into the marginal spaces where migrants experience the now-pervasive practices of mass deportation and restriction of asylum in violent contexts on U.S.-Mexico border cities. My research is based on a feminist ethnographic approach analyzing data from 70 in-depth interviews, two years of preliminary research on the U.S. Mexico border from 2016 to 2018, three years of fieldwork in Tamaulipas from 2019 to 2021, and the analysis of over 500 ethnographic photos and monthly drone footage from August 2020 to January 2022.

This dissertation explains how Metering, the Migrant Protection Protocols, and Title 42 have become breeding grounds for the worsening of systematic violence against migrants in transit, and the seedbed of the process of rising, endurance, and fall of the migrant camps on the U.S.-Mexico Border. In my work, I took a comprehensive look at how the different social dimensions and representations of violent effects are interconnected. To do this, I introduced a framework of analysis that combines the conceptualization of violence as a continuum and the theorization of violence as a web of causal connections between personal, collective, national, and global levels of violence. Based on the intersection of a violent environment, policies designed to deter movement, and an ongoing pandemic, I provide a critical review of how different social structures and actors perpetrate violence and the ways in which immigration policies forced asylum seekers to wait at Mexican border cities, propelling the constitution of "temporal migrant camps" at the doorstep of the United States, turning already complicated journeys into lasting hazardous and deathly experiences.

Creator