Unruly Practices at the Border: From Mobility Regimes to Infrastructures in Latin America

Abstract The aim of this Article is to present a general and nonexhaustive overview of the legal infrastructures that configure cross-border movement in Latin America. It draws on the mobility approach, regime interaction, and—legal—infrastructural studies, which, together, provide a tentative analytical framework for the legal infrastructuring processes that we observe around border regulation in Latin America, an, arguably, understudied but core mobility hotspot. We present—in the form of several vignettes—different outcomes of infrastucturing processes which either enable or impede cross border mobility. This approach reveals the dynamic nature of law surrounding mobility and its apparent contradictions and unintended consequences. It concludes that the shift to an infrastructural account of the law can help us gain a more holistic and, therefore, more realistic understanding of how the law works over time, how it infrastructures crossborder mobility beyond and sometimes against states’ intentions and expectations, and how people on the move have more agency than the snapshot image of—forced—migration law conveys.