PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Based on ethnographic research, this research explores how migratory regimes affect and echo migrants' everyday life. For this, Yaatsil Guevara González investigated the daily lives of Central American migrants on the move, asylum seekers, and recognized refugees in a migrant shelter in Mexico’s southern border. Throughout the thesis, she explored how residents of the shelter first, experienced their daily lives under situations of unexpectedly prolonged waiting, and second, how, based on this condition, they overcame it and handled this interim situation in their continuing trajectories. She discussed 1) the role of places en route, i.e., how placemaking occurs while migrants are on their way; and 2) the meaning of waiting phases in refugees’ affective lives during the journeys. She concluded that waiting is an ambivalent condition in which on the one hand migrants are obliged to live in conditions of precarity, exclusion, and denial, creating states of disenchantment and discouragement. On the other hand, waiting also served as a platform for identifying new strategies and reinventing tactics to search for new aspirations and goals and to cope with the multiplicity of challenges encountered along the migratory routes.