Anthony Wayne Fontes

ANTHONY FONTES, American University, Washington, DC, received a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “No Escape from the Criminal State: Transnational Criminal Governance and the Making of Asylum-seeker Subjects.” Funding supported ethnographic research over a period of 13 months (July 2023-July 2024) to explore how criminal governance drives migration from Guatemala and shapes how Guatemalan asylum seekers find sanctuary in the United States. This research had two central aims: 1) to record Guatemalan asylum seeker life histories and their experiences of persecution and flight from their communities of origin, and; 2) through ethnographic and interview research in Guatemala and the United States, generate data illustrating how diverse forms of criminal governance shape their lines of flight and their search for sanctuary in the United States. Drawing on the life histories and social networks of 10 Guatemalan asylum seekers residing in the Washington DC area, the grantee conducted fieldwork in several communities-of-origin in Guatemala where diverse forms of state-criminal networks shape everyday life and the conditions that drive some to flee. From territories “ruled” by narco-traffickers, to communities predated upon by “copycats” pretending to be corrupt police or gang leaders, this research illuminated how collective doubt about where the state ends and its underworld begins feeds and shapes illicit power across personal, communal, national and even transnational scales.