Caitlyn Yates

This project ethnographically examines Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants’ transitory journeys in and through Latin America. Specifically, this research focuses on how these extra-continental migrants negotiate mobility in countries whose immigration regimes center on Latin American migrants as the almost exclusive migrant typecast. I will concentrate this project on the ways in which extra-continental migrants contend with compounding forms of exclusion, marginalization, illegality and immobility along transitory pathways. Drawing from multi-sited fieldwork in migrant camps in Panama and a legal aid organization in Mexico, I ask: 1) how do extra-continental migrants negotiate their mobility in Latin America despite being labeled as Other by transit countries; and 2) how do these Othering tactics impact the ways in which extra-continental migrants conceive of their individual and collective identities. This project will broaden the anthropological literature in two ways. First, I will highlight the particular ways in which extra-continental migrants experience enforcement regimes and illegality. Second, I will elucidate how migrants respond to such processes by reclaiming their migrant identities, developing particular mobility strategies, and ultimately moving across Western Hemispheric borders. Ultimately, I offer a critical anthropological lens from which to conceptualize being deemed extra-continental, illegal, and also not deportable in Latin America.