Leyes Crueles - Lugares Violentos: Mexican Women's Testimonios Along the Migration Journey

Abstract

Women's stories of the immigration journey illustrate the high stakes of getting to the US in the first place. These show how national and transnational policies and consequential experiences of risk and vulnerability are strategically tied to particular places and peoples before, during and after the immigration journey. My work offers a bottom up approach in which hegemonic rules can be revealed and analysed critically; this work brings to light how experiences from the "other" are linked to particular national and transnational policies created in the name of US national "security." It shows broad forms of violence resultant from structures of inequality rooted in colonial power and contemporary neoliberal economy and policies. Testimonios from vulnerable migrants serve to uncover the hidden agendas and unfair detrimental consequences of these policies from people who experience multiple forms of vulnerability, even as they are constructed, in theory, as having `chosen' to migrate.