ABOUT THIS BOOK

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Priscilla Solano is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lund University in Sweden.

REVIEWS

"Shelter on the Journey expands our understanding of the critical role that humanitarian actors play in shaping irregular migration through Mexico. The book contributes a rich examination of how efforts to 'dignify transit' work within but also subvert Western humanitarianism and state border securitization efforts."—Law & Society Review

"[A] valuable account of the shelter system that provides migrants who are in transit in Mexico with a place to sleep, a hot meal, and an oasis of care during otherwise challenging journeys.... [B]ased on impressive and challenging research.... Shelter on the Journey is valuable reading."—Racial and Ethnic Studies

"Solano argues that the work of shelters in addressing the basic needs of migrants can imply support for their flight from economic precarity and personal danger; some shelter leaders and personnel have gone further, explicitly defending the human right to seek safety and security through movement. The book is strongest in its presentation of fieldwork findings, which, while dated, trace patterns of abuse that have only worsened over time.... Summing Up: Recommended."—Choice

“[T]he book offers a glimpse of human dignity and how the shelter provides a space for its reinvention. With this empirically grounded approach, Solano contributes to discussions of political theory by exploring the contradictions and practices inspired by liberal principles of freedom, security, and peace in a context of global inequality and capitalist violence. In this way, Solano brings migration studies into conversation with important theoretical questions in political science.”—Perspectives on Politics

"This [book] offers a beautiful interrogation of the liberal conceptions of the human at the center of human rights and a reframing of that human within a context of the freedom of movement. The itineraries of this book, through migrant aid, shelter, human mobility, human rights, humanitarian frameworks and the ways they appear in the micropractices that sustain the movement of people towards life, provide necessary reorientations for thinking about the ways in which we might shape a world in which migrants are not only allowed dignity, but also deeply matter."—Latino Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Foreword: Humanitarianism in an Age of Global Apartheid by Douglas S. Massey

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: We All Have the Human Right to Emigrate but Not to Immigrate

1. “They Walk as Fugitives”: Situating Shelters and Transit Migration

2. “I Was a Migrant and You Gave Me Shelter”: The Open Ethos and Social World of the Shelter

3. “Of Course There Is a Difference between Charity and Solidarity”: The Power of Giving

4. “The Shelter Is a Garden in a Mine of Oil”: The Humanitarian Project under Threat

5. “That They Do Not Keep Expressing That Mexican Territory Is a Cemetery for Central Americans”: Advocating Free Dignified Transit

Conclusion: Dreaming on the Journey

Notes

References

Index

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