The Migrant Passage

Clandestine Journeys from Central America

By: Noelle Kateri Brigden

Narrated by: Kristin Aikin Salada

At the crossroads between international relations and anthropology, The Migrant Passage analyzes how people from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala navigate the dangerous and uncertain clandestine journey across Mexico to the United States. Over time, the accumulation of individual journeys has cut a path across the socioeconomic and political landscape of Mexico, generating a social and material infrastructure that guides future passages and complicates borders.

Tracing the survival strategies of migrants during the journey to the North, The Migrant Passage shows how their mobility reshapes the social landscape of Mexico, and the book explores the implications for the future of sovereignty and the nation-state. To trace the continuous renewal of the transit corridor, Noelle Brigden draws upon over two years of in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork along human smuggling routes from Central America across Mexico and into the United States. In so doing, she shows the value of disciplinary and methodological border crossing between international relations and anthropology, to understand the relationships between human security, international borders, and clandestine transnationalism.

The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"An insightful account...Brigden fills in unknown spaces, spaces of uncertainty, oases of previously untapped information." (Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Nations of Emigrants)

©2018 Cornell University (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks

Brilliant Deconstruction of National Imaginaries

This book examines the society and practices that have sprung up on the migrant trail from Central America to the United States. In the process, it sheds new light on the nature of borders and national identities. For a migrant passing through one state on route to another exists in a sort of liminal space between worlds. Neither a member of the community from which they have come anymore, nor a member of that to which they are traveling, they exists outside the law. And this leaves them easy prey to exploitation while the exploitation increasingly characterized the wider society in which the route is situated. But since many of these migrants spend years in this space, or else continually pass in and out of it, the trail itself becomes a destination. Meanwhile, efforts to police it extend American borders deep into Mexico, but also deep into the United States, rendering the very notion of fixed border passé. In this way, categories like citizen, border, national identity, and states themselves are thrown into question in this book.

Ideas like these make this an ingenious book, which brings the best tools of contemporary anthropology to the question of the relations between states, which is the typical provenance of international relations. Unfortunately, those unschooled in these disciplines may lack the conceptual tools needed to appreciate the brilliance of this work. Nevertheless, the interviews with migrants and vivid depiction of the trail itself make this a book not to be missed by the general reader as well.

~ Theo Horesh, author of The Fascism This Time: And the Global Future of Democracy