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- Title
"I Want to Get on the Next Bus and Leave This City Now": A Study of Violence and Deportation on the Texas-Tamaulipas Border.
- Authors
Bermúdez Tapia, Bertha Alicia
- Abstract
The rapid increase in deportations during the last decade has provided multiple avenues to analyze the experiences of deportees immediately after deportation. More than 90% of the deportations to Mexico occur in border cities. Deporting people to the border is problematic since most of these deportees are not familiar with the area and do not have a social support network. On top of that, Mexican border cities are experiencing a growing spiral of violence due to the aftermath effects of the "Mexican drug war." Within this context, migrant shelters have become one of the few survival resources for deportees. Using an ethnographic approach, in this study, I investigate how violence is not singular but multiple and multilayered by inspecting deportation policies and practices as the junction where migrant shelters interact with cartel forces and state-made violence to support deported migrants. The paper demonstrates how deportation policies produce or perpetuate various forms of violence toward Mexican deportees in already hyper-violent border cities in Tamaulipas. The empirical findings shed light on how violence against migrants is not exclusively about cartel forces. It is a matter of institutional and structural violence coming from US deportation policies and practices that migrant shelters can hardly handle. Therefore, in this paper, I approach violence not exclusively as direct violence that inflicts physical pain but as a complex process that uncovers other more subtle forms of structural and symbolic violence, carrying nonphysical injuries that can be more enduring and traumatic than those caused by physical pain.
- Subjects
TAMAULIPAS (Mexico : State); MEXICO; SOCIAL support; DEPORTATION; VIOLENCE
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 2022, Vol 45, Issue 4, p483
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11133-022-09521-7