Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the historical political ecology of transnational migration in Central America, Mexico, and the United States and presents a critique of the representation of these population movements as a "crisis" that manifests in a historical vacuum.

Paper long abstract:

Central America and Mexico have a 14,000 year history of human migration, settlement, and relocation. Across this history, the 16th Century stands out as a period of violent transformation of human environment relations, urbanization patterns, and ethnicized and racialized relations. The incorporation of this part of the Americas into the mercantilistic system of the Spanish Empire resulted in a cataclysmic loss of life among indigenous populations and the establishment of a socio-economic order that engendered severe inequities for centuries to come. Following elite-driven criollo independence movements in the early 19th Century, the region began to experience another socio-political transformation during the late 1800s in the form of the Liberal Reforms. The Liberal Reforms were intended to once again transform human-environment relations in a way that would promote the production of export crops in large plantations for circulation and consumption in global capitalist markets. Liberal Reforms also enabled, once again, the exploitation of indigenous labor, and the appropriation of indigenous lands. The Twentieth Century witnessed bloody insurrections and armed struggles whose roots were engendered over the long course of Colonial and Post-Colonial history, and the migration patterns seen today can only be understood from the vantage point of the longue durée that led to the neoliberal present. In this presentation, I examine the strategic forgetting that the declaration of a migratory "crisis" by United States political leaders entails and make a call for a historical political ecological understanding of the intersection of climate change, migration, and American Empire building.