On the Perverse Trinity from which Central American Families Flee: State, Market, and Patriarchal Violence

Guest post by Amarela Varela-Huerta. Amarela is a professor and researcher at the Academy of Communication and Culture of the Autonomous University of Mexico City. She is a feminist who is committed to co-producing chronicles of migrant struggles (and practices of death against them) narrated from the experience and knowledge of the people themselves in movement. Amarela holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and a degree in Communication Sciences from the UNAM. She is a member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico and collaborates with different action research groups on migration and feminism. Amarela’s latest publication is a book chapter ‘From vulnerable victims to insurgent caravaneros: The genesis and consolidation of a new form of migrant self-defence in America’, in Migration and the Contested Politics of Justice published by Routledge.

This is the third post from our new themed series focusing on selected chapters from the newly published Handbook of Migration and Global Justice, edited by Leanne Weber and Claudia Tazreiter and published by Edward Elgar. The editors’ complete introduction to the handbook is available as an open access download here.

In summer 2016, while my second daughter gestated in my womb, I wrote a text in which I reflected on the multiple reasons why Central American women migrate. It had only been a few years since women’s presence had reached a mass level along the routes of the bottleneck country that is Mexico. However, paradoxically, women migrants rarely appeared in the media’s representation of the phenomenon (which, in migration studies, has been analyzed as the “spectacularization of the border” or the production of a spectacle to be consumed). These images – of middle-aged men, alone or in groups, riding the cars of the Ferrovía train company – mold our imaginary of Central Americans’ journeys, creating the impression that all migration occurs that way. We refer to this imaginary as bestialization because it produces the image of migrants as less than human, as mere freight traveling by train.  However, only thirty percent of all transmigration attempts takes place on those packed train cars. The majority of transmigration in the region occurs in small groups, with or without coyotes, paying bribes to different government agencies in Central America and the United States. In opposition to this bestialized imaginary, many researchers of my generation posed a challenge: to feminize our vision of migration, because women have always been, and still do migrate.  Thus, migration is not new; what is novel are the perspectives from which we study it and the necro and biopolitical dispositifs with which states and the owners of capital seek to govern it to their advantage.

When I wrote “La trinidad perversa de la que huyen las fugitivas centroamericanas: violencia feminicida, violencia de estado y violencia de mercado” (“The Perverse Trinity from which Central American Fugitives Flee: Feminicidal Violence, State Violence, and Market Violence”) nearly half the people who made up Latin American diasporas in the United States were women, according to available statistical information. One out of every two Latin American migrants living and working in the United States, whether documented or made irregular by laws that produce their foreignness in order to hyper-exploit them, are women. Feminizing our perspective on migration was a challenge because, despite that data, our imaginary regarding migration was heavily masculinized, as were the methodologies and research questions guiding migration studies, which, up until that point had assumed that women migrated to “reunite” with their husbands, to “follow the family bread winner.” However, families in Mexico and Central America do not follow the western patriarchal nuclear family model. Therefore, concepts of migratory chains or networks proposed by feminist thinkers specializing in migration, such as Claudia Pedone, were very useful. They proposed understanding migrant families as transnational care networks that are, despite legal borders and geographic distances, maintained by millions of women in the global north and south today.

With research on the so-called feminization of migration, many of us sought to understand the multi-causality of women’s decision to migrate alone, even those who were mothers and part of transnational families. When “The Perverse Trinity” was published in 2016, the “war on drugs” had been going on for ten years in Mexico, with more than 350,000 dead and almost 100,000 people disappeared. The same was taking place in Central America. There, besides state violence, the violence of the maras – youth street gangs, which have been radicalized by local policies,  the deportation of thousands of young people from the US, poverty, and juvenicide as a regional policy – had proliferated and, with it, the ways of inflicting terror on vulnerabilized bodies – children, young people, Indigenous people, Afrodescendent populations, and women. In my text, I tried to create a dialogue between researchers working on feminicide, such as Rita Segato, and Central American researchers working on the mass flight of impoverished and violated women. Additionally, I wove together reflections with the available data analyzed by Central American feminists regarding forms of feminicidal violence or gender-based violence in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.

In synthesis, “The Perverse Trinity” argues that Central American women’s migration is a strategic “flight” of resistance against a tripartite violence: that of the state (human rights violations and impunity), the market (“made in Central America” neoliberalism), and patriarchal violence (the continuum of feminicidal violence in those countries following their distinct post-war periods). Furthermore, in the text, I propose understanding women’s migration as a form of an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist struggle in the contemporary world.

The article appeared one month after “The Girls’ Rebellion” in the Guatemalan capital, which ended with forty-one of the rebels burned to death by the orphanage guards. March 8, 2017 proved without a doubt that the “Virgen de la Asunción” Safe House, a public orphanage managed by the Guatemalan executive power, was the epicenter of many forms of infanticidal (state violence against children as public policy) and feminicidal violence. The girls and boys being held there rebelled against that violence, attempting a collective escape. However, they were caught, and the girls were locked in a classroom that went up in flames later that night. Nineteen girls died from poisoning and burns. Days later, another twenty-two girls who had been hospitalized died, adding up to forty-one deaths. The rest of the trapped girls were left disfigured from their burns. Some were returned to their impoverished households. The orphans were relocated to other shelters. Among them were also pregnant girls, resulting from rapes they had suffered while they were under the guardianship of the Guatemalan state. Thus, it became clear that the Guatemalan state is another feminicidal state in the region, with this case being only one example of the many reasons forcing women and children to migrate.

This, many of us understood, was the beginning of a new era. Migration, no longer only of women, but also of women with children, babies, young kids, and teenagers, increasedexponentially. State violence was combined with the terror of the war against drug traffickers, impunity, and the violence experienced by the children of transnational families. As they have reported, the  remittances their mothers and fathers sent to them was not always used for their upbringing, but as a protection against their caretakers, who were violent and maras or gangs, who would stalk them on their way to school. 

This shows that these mothers needed to escape. But, far from being passive victims, they made the decision,  a calculation that valued life above all: to take their children with them or even to return for them so that they can take them to a place where life can be lived, and even celebrated.

It is in this context that, in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than a dozen migrant caravans showed how the continuum of femicidal violence affected the bodies and lives of the children of millions of women. Due to that violence and because of the poverty that makes it impossible to survive economically, socially, or politically, families in Central America decided to migrate in groups. They used their bodies as their only tool for self-defense. They walked with thousands of other families, out of the shadows, defying the coyotes, the borders, and the police.

That was when I was invited to collaborate on the collective book Handbook of Migration and Global Justice, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2021. In the English translation of “Feminicide, State-perpetrated Violence, and Economic Violence: An Analysis of the Perverse Reality Driving Central American Women's Migration,” I explored migrant women's agency, after having seen them cross my country on foot, in caravans or small groups of families guided by coyotes or on their own. They were attempting to reach a better life, with their children in arms or in strollers, or walking beside them. Now, this fall of 2021, a caravan is moving across the country which journalists refer to as “the children's caravan,” because it is primarily made up of migrant families walking with their children, using their bodies as tools to defy the global border regime. I hope that this book and this chapter, which explains the causes driving them to migrate, will provide context to readers interested in taking up diverse forms of radical hospitality to embrace the life drive of millions of families seeking life.

Note: The author would like to thank Liz Mason-Deese for ther translation services.  

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Varela-Huerta, A. (2021). On the Perverse Trinity from which Central American Families Flee: State, Market, and Patriarchal Violence. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/12/perverse-trinity [date]