Abstract
This chapter relates the migratory experiences of Hilda and Julián, a young married couple from a small village in the rural northwestern section of the state of Guanajuato. Julián made his first trip to the USA in 1994, at the age of 21, just as he and Hilda were beginning their romance. He went back and forth between Guanajuato and Dallas, Texas for the next couple of years before returning to marry Hilda at the end of 1996. They returned to Dallas together to live and work early in 1997. Although their first border-crossing together went relatively smoothly, when they attempted to return with their baby daughter after a visit home at the beginning of 2000, they suffered tremendously. Hilda and Julián’s second sojourn in Dallas was marked by a series of economic and emotional setbacks that led them to question whether it made sense for them to remain together in Dallas, especially since it was nearly impossible for Hilda to work after having two more children there. Finally, in mid-2003 they decided it would be best for Hilda to return to Guanajuato with their children. Even though it was getting more difficult and dangerous every year, Julián continued to go back and forth across the border to work. The suffering experienced by the couple in their migratory experiences is analyzed in terms of Galtung’s concepts of structural and cultural violence.
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- 1.
The names of Hilda and Julián, their town, and other people discussed in this paper are all pseudonyms.
- 2.
Spener (2009) refers to this type of in-group coyotaje strategy, which involves traveling with community guides who had “graduated” from being migrants to being coyotes as professional migration coyotaje.
- 3.
Pateros is the name given in Tamaulipas and South Texas to men and women who ferry undocumented migrants across the Río Bravo/Rio Grande away from the international bridges that connect the two states. For more information on the origins of this term, see Spener (2009).
- 4.
By the 1980s, coyotes and their migrant customers in Mexico had worked out a standard payment arrangement whereby migrants paid most or all of the fee for their transport upon arrival in their US destinations, relying upon migrants’ friends and relatives already living in the USA to pay their coyotes. This arrangement was advantageous to migrants in several ways. First, it made it unnecessary for migrants to carry large amounts of cash with them that they could potentially be robbed of en route. Second, it gave coyotes a greater incentive to fulfill their obligations to the migrants they transported. And third, migrants were freed from having to finance their trips north from personal savings or by relying upon usurers in Mexico to borrow the funds needed to travel (Browning and Rodríguez 1985; Pérez 1991; Spener 2009)
- 5.
Elsewhere (Spener 2009), I have discussed how, in dealing with the Border Patrol, migrants seldom identify their guides to agents that apprehend them not out of fear of reprisals from coyotes but rather because they regard the coyotes as being “on their side” vis-à-vis US government agents. We can view the motivations of migrants in such situations as an example of what Portes (1995) calls bounded solidarity.
- 6.
The state of Texas had not yet begun to require applicants for a driver’s license to present a valid Social Security number and other documents demonstrating their right to reside in the USA.
- 7.
- 8.
Undocumented Mexicans and their coyotes in Ciudad Juárez had long ago mastered “the look” that was most likely to make US immigration authorities mistake them for US-born Mexican Americans. See Debbie Nathan’s (1991) essay “The Eyes of Texas Are upon You” in her book Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border.
- 9.
It was not until 2008 that all persons entering the USA at a land port of entry had to show identification to immigration inspectors. Prior to that time, it was left to the discretion of individual inspectors whether or not to require entrants to produce documentation that demonstrated their legal right to enter the country.
- 10.
In the border region with Mexico, US law enforcement agents are held to a lower standard in establishing legal grounds to stop and interrogate individuals than they are in the US interior (see Hing 2004).
- 11.
“Voluntary return” is the bureaucratic euphemism for the procedure that allows Mexican nationals to return to their country without spending a long period in jail awaiting a formal deportation hearing. This procedure has been practiced routinely on the border since at least the 1920s (see Corwin 1978, 148).
- 12.
In Clandestine Crossings (Spener 2009), I refer to this coyotaje strategy as document dispatch. With the increase in physical barriers to border-crossing in recent years, it has become considerably more attractive to migrants.
- 13.
The documents that they coyote had provided them were the so-called laser visas, the updated version of the old border-crossing card that now had biometric date embedded in it. At the time Hilda and Julián were arrested on this occasion, agents were not yet checking the fingerprints of all noncitizen entrants at land ports. That would not happen until later in the decade with the implementation of the US Visit program.
- 14.
Although Hilda and Julián contracted this coyote through their social network connections, he devoted himself full-time to the business of transporting undocumented migrants into the USA, working with many strangers as well as people who were recommended to him by members of their paisanaje networks. Elsewhere (Spener 2008b, 2009a, b) I have referred to these types of enterprises as commercial transport coyotaje.
- 15.
So dangerous was this canal to migrants crossing the border that the US Border Patrol in the El Paso sector eventually set up a Swift-Water Rescue Team in response to numerous drownings in the canal. See http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/newsroom/news_releases/archives/2008_news_releases/may_2008/05232008_8.xml.
- 16.
Here we can see that the violence to which migrants are subjected is principally structural violence, insofar as their suffering owes more to the desperate crossing conditions imposed upon them by the state than any overt, direct violence meted out against them by their coyotes. Feldman and Durand (2008) have discussed this type of violence imposed on migrants by the system of global apartheid as a form of Social Darwinism.
- 17.
One of the challenges faced by analysts of the practice of coyotaje is how to evaluate situations such as this. Government agents and the press typically refer to migrants apprehended under these conditions as hostages that have been liberated from captors who are holding them against their will as hostages. While the use of dogs to guard them is certainly violent and degrading, it is also significant that migrants agreed ahead of time to stay with their coyotes until their friends and relatives come forward to pay for their passage. It is also interesting to note that Hilda recognizes the potential flight of migrants before they paid their coyotes for transporting them to that point. I discuss the ambiguities of these kinds of situations in greater detail in Clandestine Crossings (2009).
- 18.
While this type of treatment of migrants clearly fulfills Galtung’s (1969) definition of direct violence, it also can be interpreted as a significant example of cultural violence, insofar as such treatment of migrants results from deep-seated attitudes on the part of law enforcement agents that seem to regard migrants as criminals that represent a threat not only to the social order but also to the physical integrity of those around them, including their fellow migrants.
- 19.
Hilda’s attitudes regarding the conditions she experienced on this trip are perplexing insofar as she appears not to blame the coyotes who transported her for the suffering imposed upon her. As I have suggested elsewhere (Spener 2009), we can interpret her attitudes as reflective of the habitus of working-class migrants whose lifelong socialization towards conditions of precariousness and material deprivation inure them to all but the worst forms of overt abuse against them.
- 20.
News reports from the early 2000s indicated that the sale of visas and other documents by US consular personnel was a regular occurrence in Ciudad Juárez. See López (2003a, b). Elsewhere (Spener 2008b, 2009a, b) I have referred to this type of illegal provision of border-crossing services as migra-coyotaje.
- 21.
Here again we see the way in which migrants can benefit from the social embeddedness of their relations with coyotes, an aspect of coyotaje I discuss extensively in Clandestine Crossings (2009).
- 22.
As this passage poignantly illustrates, the resources inhering in migrants’ social relations, no matter how indispensable to the success of their migratory strategies, are often insufficient to guarantee their comfort and security on their cross-border journeys.
- 23.
From the website of the Texas Department of State Health Services: “WIC is a nutrition program that helps pregnant women, new mothers, and young children eat well, learn about nutrition, and stay healthy. Nutrition education and counseling, nutritious foods, and help accessing health care are provided to low-income women, infants, and children through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program, popularly known as WIC. Retrieved on October 31, 2009 from http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/wichd/. The prevention of Hilda and Julián from accessing a form of state assistance that was vital to the health development of their children clearly fulfills Galtung’s definition of structural violence. Insofar as the laws producing this structural result reflect important cultural norms and values on the part of US voters and their public servants, this situation can also be understood as embodying a form of cultural violence.
- 24.
Julián’s choice of coyote and the payment arrangements he worked out with the coyote in 2004 belie the pronouncements of government officials and the press that tighter border enforcement since the early 1990s had effectively put an end to this type of socially embedded professional migration coyotaje (see Spener 2007, 2009a, b). It also illustrates the application of the cultural practice of rascuachismo by working-class migrants to the project of undocumented international migration, a term that refers to the solving of problems ingeniously and in an improvisational manner using what resources and materials one has at hand (see Spener 2010).
- 25.
Literally, a “chicken grower” or “chicken farmer.” Originally used on the western stretches of the USA–Mexico border as a synonym for coyote, today it is widely used throughout Mexico and Central America to refer to the service-providers hired by migrants to help them enter the USA. See Spener (2009) for a more complete explanation of the origins and use of this term.
- 26.
For a more extensive discussion of this phenomenon with regard to coyotaje, see Spener (2009).
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Spener, D. (2016). Se Batalla Mucho: Border Enforcement and the Story of Hilda and Julián. In: Leal, D., Rodríguez, N. (eds) Migration in an Era of Restriction and Recession. Immigrants and Minorities, Politics and Policy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24445-7_7
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