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Journey without End
Migration from the Global South through the Americas
by Andrew Nelson and Rob Curran
Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of "extracontinentales"—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.
The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America.
Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality. Mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito's tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama's Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with racial, gender, and class exploitation. Throughout this struggle, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.
The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America.
Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality. Mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito's tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama's Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with racial, gender, and class exploitation. Throughout this struggle, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Leaving Business
Chapter 2: Entering the Americas: Into the Paws of the Coyotes
Chapter 3: Quito's Little India
Chapter 4: Self-Catering on the Ecuador-Colombia Border
Chapter 5: Gulf of Urabá: The Two Faces of Paradise
Chapter 6: The Darién: The Land of the Dead
Chapter 7: Central America: Controlled Flow
Chapter 8: The Waiting Cell of Tapachula
Chapter 9: The Road Trip to End All Road Trips
Chapter 10: "Welcome to America": Zero Tolerance in the Immigration Gulags
Conclusion: Destination Liminal
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
Chapter 1: The Leaving Business
Chapter 2: Entering the Americas: Into the Paws of the Coyotes
Chapter 3: Quito's Little India
Chapter 4: Self-Catering on the Ecuador-Colombia Border
Chapter 5: Gulf of Urabá: The Two Faces of Paradise
Chapter 6: The Darién: The Land of the Dead
Chapter 7: Central America: Controlled Flow
Chapter 8: The Waiting Cell of Tapachula
Chapter 9: The Road Trip to End All Road Trips
Chapter 10: "Welcome to America": Zero Tolerance in the Immigration Gulags
Conclusion: Destination Liminal
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
Andrew Nelson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Texas.
Rob Curran is a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Dow Jones Newswires and the Dallas Morning News.
"This book provides a fascinating, detailed account of one of the most unique and extreme migration routes on the planet. It breaks new ground in providing new and extensive research on certain aspects of this migration route—for example, the financial and logistical aspects of it."
—Nadja Drost, winner of the Simón Bolívar Prize, the I. F. Stone Award, and the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for best reporting in any medium on Latin America
On the night of Monday, July 9, 2018, a local smuggler made his second attempt at the crossing with Kidane and about ten other Eritreans—in Colombia, smugglers often divide the migrants by nationality to make communication easier. Kidane and his compatriots were wearing life jackets of the bright orange variety that slip over the head. As the small motorboat entered the open Caribbean, the waves picked up. Near Capurganá, several hours northwest of Turbo, wave crests are often ten feet high. The boats take the waves at speed; for the passenger, it feels like an extreme fairground ride, with a rush to the stomach as the boat climbs the face of the wave, then the sensation of floating in air as it reaches the peak, followed by a plunge down to a hard landing. Even the ferry-sized high-horsepower boat that carries the tourists arrives drenched in spray. On smaller boats—lanchas as they are called in Latin America—the engine’s roar often kicks up an octave from the strain of climbing the rolling hills. On the way back down, the engine often stutters as it tries to find purchase, and the passenger’s heart does the same.
When Kidane’s boat stopped, it was still some way short of the beach near the Capurganá harbor. The smuggler ordered his passengers to jump into the sea with their life jackets. Those who did not jump were pushed. They had to swim to shore, carrying backpacks with them.
Kidane, who can swim, remembers the boat stopping about ten yards short of the beach. Some of the non-swimmers on the boat described it, with horror, as being more like fifty yards.
By the time we met Kidane and his group the next day, he and his compatriots, only a handful of whom he had known before Turbo, were drying their clothes on the downstairs railings of a safe house in Capurganá. They were sitting together in an exterior covered porch near the railings, talking over the near disaster of the previous night. The hotel was not that different to the lodges where European and American twentysomethings were vacationing nearby: a brightly painted clapboard building overlooking a sheltered fishing dock. It was a Caribbean idyll. But the dripping clothes provided a glimpse of an experience as far removed from the tourists’ Capurganá as possible. Kidane and his friends were on a months-long journey but only carried enough clothes between the eleven of them to cover twenty feet of railings.
When Kidane’s boat stopped, it was still some way short of the beach near the Capurganá harbor. The smuggler ordered his passengers to jump into the sea with their life jackets. Those who did not jump were pushed. They had to swim to shore, carrying backpacks with them.
Kidane, who can swim, remembers the boat stopping about ten yards short of the beach. Some of the non-swimmers on the boat described it, with horror, as being more like fifty yards.
By the time we met Kidane and his group the next day, he and his compatriots, only a handful of whom he had known before Turbo, were drying their clothes on the downstairs railings of a safe house in Capurganá. They were sitting together in an exterior covered porch near the railings, talking over the near disaster of the previous night. The hotel was not that different to the lodges where European and American twentysomethings were vacationing nearby: a brightly painted clapboard building overlooking a sheltered fishing dock. It was a Caribbean idyll. But the dripping clothes provided a glimpse of an experience as far removed from the tourists’ Capurganá as possible. Kidane and his friends were on a months-long journey but only carried enough clothes between the eleven of them to cover twenty feet of railings.
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