Lives in Transit Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey [Paperback]

Lives in Transit chronicles the dangerous journeys of Central American migrants in transit through Mexico. Drawing on fieldwork in humanitarian aid shelters and other key sites, Wendy A. Vogt examines the multiple forms of violence that migrants experience as their bodies, labor, and lives become implicated in global and local economies that profit from their mobility as racialized and gendered others. She also reveals new forms of intimacy, solidarity, and activism that have emerged along transit routes over the past decade. Through the stories of migrants, shelter workers, and local residents, Vogt encourages us to reimagine transit as a site of both violence and precarity as well as social struggle and resistance.

Wendy A. Vogtis Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis.

"Vogt guides us through deeply inspiring and profoundly disturbing transit zones. Her exceptional research invites us to witness the bodily and emotional trauma experienced by migrants and the care and intimacy enacted by unlikely characters in unexpected places. Her powerful writing introduces us to migrants, shelter volunteers, human smugglers, and kidnappers embroiled in webs of violence and profit spun within hierarchies of gender and ethnicity. Her analysis helps us appreciate contradictions of violence, security, and humanitarian projects. This book leaves us heartened and haunted in a world increasingly touched by immigration and displacement."—Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

"Lives in Transitis widely significant and far-reaching, yet also intimate and deeply humanizing. Students and scholars of migration will value Vogt's attention to socioeconomic relationships produced in spaces of clandestine migration, as well as her keen analyses of the ways in which gendelÃ-