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Paper short abstract

Recurring to ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tijuana and taking a gender-sensitive lens, I demonstrate how the monthslong waiting experience of Central American and Mexican women at the US-Mexico border is permeated by overlapping or alternating configurations of im/mobility on various scales.

Paper long abstract

Since 2018—and further reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic—migration policy at the US-Mexico border has aimed to radically restrict the mobility of asylum seekers. Due to various intertwined waiting mechanisms, migration along the Central America-Mexico-US corridor appears to be characterized by immobility more than ever before. Contrary to the common perception of waiting as merely a passive state, however, recent anthropological and migration research shows that waiting is not an experience of absolute stillness, but of differentiated speeds and rhythms related to a wide range of practices of and in waiting. Recurring to my ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 in the north Mexican border city of Tijuana, I aim to expand these recent works. Taking a gender-sensitive perspective, I demonstrate how the monthslong waiting experience of Central American and Mexican women at the US-Mexico border is permeated by multiple, often overlapping or alternating configurations of im/mobility on various scales: First, in the context of forced migration and the ongoing externalization and securitization of borders of the global North, it is not only prolonged waiting that is part of the functioning of migration regimes, but also unexpected accelerations of processes. Second, migrant women are often forced to be mobile during periods of waiting due to persecution, (fear of) violence, bureaucratic processes, or regulations of migrant shelters. And third, mobility at the place of waiting can also be an expression of the migrant women’s agency and strategy for coping with chronic waiting in everyday life.