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Paper short abstract

This article explores emotional entrapment in asylum-seeking migrants in México. exploring how emotions shape strategies and attempts at integration during prolonged waiting. Based on ethnographic research, waiting is understood as an active way of inhabiting marked by uncertainty

Paper long abstract

This article positions the emotions that emerge in contexts of seeking asylum in the United States as central to understanding contemporary migration experiences. It examines how these emotions shape the strategies and attempts at integration through which migrants navigate an uncertain and precarious period of waiting across different cities in Mexico. Based on ethnographic research with asylum-seeking migrants in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico City, as well as on a situated experience of humanitarian accompaniment, the article proposes understanding waiting not as a dead or immobilizing time, but as a form of inhabiting marked by uncertainty, risk, and emotional labor. The research combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, art therapy workshops, and socio-emotional activities as methodological tools to explore the affective dimension of migratory experience.

Drawing on the analytical category of emotional entrapment, the article shows how the tightening and constant reconfiguration of U.S. migration policies, together with the containment mechanisms of the Mexican state, produce prolonged regimes of waiting that reorder migrants’ life projects, social ties, and everyday practices. In this context, waiting becomes a space of emotional management in which strategies to sustain life emerge, including engagement in informal labor, the circulation of knowledge among migrants, the reorganization of daily routines, and forms of silent integration aimed at reducing exposure to violence and discrimination.

Rather than immobilizing migrants, waiting reconfigures precarious forms of belonging. By foregrounding emotions as constitutive of migratory experience, this article contributes to anthropological debates on mobility, affect, and belonging.