Full Description
Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of extracontinentales—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.
The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster-riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the DariÉn Gap—the gateway from South to Central America.
Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality as mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito's tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama's DariÉn Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with race, gender, and class exploitation. Even then, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.
Contents
Introduction
1. The Leaving Business
2. Entering the Americas: Into the Paws of the Coyotes
3. Quito's Little India
4. Self-Catering on the Ecuador-Colombia Border
5. Gulf of UrabÁ: The Two Faces of Paradise
6. The DariÉn: The Land of the Dead
7. Central America: Controlled Flow
8. The Waiting Cell of Tapachula
9. The Road Trip to End All Road Trips
10. "Welcome to America": Zero Tolerance in the Immigration Gulag
Conclusion: Destination Liminal
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Notes
