Confinement in Motion

• In Event: The Policy and Politics of Forced Migration in the Americas

Abstract

While scholars continue to debate the normative and descriptive relevance of categories that imply differing degrees of legitimacy such as “refugee” and “economic migrant,” the notion of “displacement” denotes a larger phenomenon, one that portrays the human experience of mobility along a continuum of “force” and “will” (Horn and Parekh 2018; Yarris and Castañeda 2015). However, despite efforts at demystifying these categories —and the arbitrariness of the rights claims and levels of deservingness they imply—, the focus on mobility may underplay the great immobility and loss of freedom that displaced people experience once set into motion. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2018 in Central America, Mexico and Southern California, I develop the concept of “confinement in motion” as an existential predicament, a state that persists even when the subject is not moving or incarcerated in an ordinary sense (a concept I initially proposed in Balaguera 2018). I argue that migrant bodies are captive because migratory movement is not only often forced, but also profoundly disciplined, rendered docile within and beyond carceral facilities. At the same time, experiences of imprisonment endure beyond their discreet temporality, as when asylum-seekers carry ankle monitors after paying bonds to get out of detention in the United States. They also transcend the boundaries of countries of origin, transit and destination. Confinement in motion therefore disrupts the binary of mobility and immobility, unveiling the endurance of material conditions under which questions of agency and democratic practice need to be reconceived.

Author

• Martha Balaguera, University of Massachusetts Amherst