The intimate life of borders: Violence, care, and urban refuge in southern Mexico

In recent years, critical scholarship has highlighted the violent outcomes of state-bordering practices and the externalization of migration governance. Less attention has been paid to how people experiencing displacement and the urban spaces they occupy are actively involved in and influence these geopolitical endeavors. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory research conducted in southern Mexico from 2021 to 2024, this paper explores how global processes of violence are lived, negotiated, and contested through the everyday social, political, and emotional lives of La 72 Casa migrante and adjacent makeshift camps along the Mexico-Guatemala border. By focusing on intimate sociospatial relationships of care, conflict, and survival, it shows how gendered, racialized, and classed violence are simultaneously reproduced and collectively transformed. From a global-intimate lens, the article analyzes how practices within spaces of refuge, both intimate and urban, reverberate outward, shaping local political imaginaries and challenging transnational migration controls.