Migrant knowledge before the outdoor shelter

Dossier Intemperie: políticas de la voluntad y poéticas del cobijo

Abstract

The migration that today moves along the routes extending from Central America to the United States. and other precarious migrant trails across the Americas. generally represents a pursuit of refuge for those who unable to find adequate protections from the insecurities of their homeland. Contemporary processes of migration, that may go on unresolved for years, for these migrants likewise imply a prolonged exposure to the dangers of unsheltered spaces, and the dream of asylum (whether legal or informal) becomes virtually unreachable. People are expelled from their countries of origin and made into migrants, who later are subjected to exclusions or deportations from the countries in which they aspire to settle. Notions of refuge, cover, and asylum become nearly synonymous with vulnerability, neglect, and disregard. For contemporary migrants, lack of shelter is an ubiquitous condition, and migration has assumed an inevitable and perhaps perpetual attribute of precarity. This scenario leads to situations that seem illogical, in which migrants themselves choose to remain unsheltered, but that may also reflect the rationality of social actors whose agency must be interpreted via the precarities of their lives and the volatilities of their surroundings. In their testimonial narratives, migrants can be observed accommodating themselves to the extreme conditions of being left unsheltered out of need, but at other times it seems that where the autonomy of migration is best affirmed is in the shelter of the open air.