Migrant Itinerancy: The Hemispheric Politics of Contemporary Undocumented Migration

Abstract

Migrant Itinerancy: The Hemispheric Politics of Contemporary Undocumented Migration analyzes contemporary literary production on the recent intensification of migration patterns in Latin America and the United States. I engage with Latin American and Chicano cultural criticism to examine the neoliberal re-structuration of the nation-state under neoliberalism and its effects on the politics of migration in the region. Migrant Itinerancy argues that undocumented migration exposes the unfounded nature of any figuration of community and reveals the exclusionary logics of contemporary discourses of resistance. I propose the concept of migrant itinerancy as a method of analysis to highlight tensions that reveal how undocumented migration problematizes forms of political subjectivity premised upon notions of identity and belonging. Rather than merely reflecting on the effects of the exclusionary logics of immigration discourse in the region, Migrant Itinerancy asks how the tensions and contradictions at the heart of the politics of migration in the hemisphere open a space of reflection to rearticulate a sense of community premised upon practices of communal care. Through readings of Antonio Ortuño’s La fila india, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, Óscar Martínez’s The Beast, and Valeria Luiselli’s Los niños perdidos, I demonstrate how undocumented migration disrupts residual postcolonial configurations of power, emerging as a political force that demands the redrawing of our current social order. By foregrounding questions of identity, national belonging, human rights, immigration and asylum discourse in a hemispheric context, Migrant Itinerancy reassess the status of the nation-state as principle of social and political organization in times of global migrations.