Degrees of visibility : multi-continental travelers' journeys through the Americas

The combination of ever less accessible migration pathways in the wake of global systems of immigration enforcement, together with ever stronger drivers pushing individuals out of their homes, has resulted in the increasing prevalence of non-Western Hemispheric migrants moving along Latin American migration pathways. Split between a remote jungle on the Colombia-Panama border and a sprawling urban metropolis at the gateway to the United States, in the dissertation that follows, I chronicle the active mobility experiences of individuals who originate in dozens of countries, speak countless languages, and operate with distinct systems of living. To examine their mobility experiences, and the challenges that ensue therein, I meet travelers where they find themselves: in tents in the jungle, prosecutors’ offices, local NGOs, mosques, soccer fields next to the ocean, and border crossings throughout. In meeting travelers where they found themselves, I demonstrate how multi-continental travelers – as I have come to call their journeys – are on the one hand, highly visibilized as potential security threats, aberrations, or simply mobile others. At the same time, the relative novelty of their journeys results in their specific mobility needs being deprioritized, and therefore structurally invisibilized. Their journeys are subsequently seen and unseen – invisizibilized and hyper-visibilized – depending on the space, person, or activity they are encountering at that moment. These (in)visibilization practices profoundly impact the mobility experiences of multi-continental travelers on the move though often in paradoxical, inconsistent, and even counterintuitively positive ways. As such, in the chapters that follow, I work to disentangle the full range of grit, mundanity, sociality, grief, and creativity of those journeys, ultimately arguing that perhaps it is simply how they managed the challenges they encountered during the migration projects that actually makes these journeys extraordinary.