Migration and Mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Lexicon

Lucie Laplace; Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez; Cécile Blouin

doi:10.22151/politikon.6200

Authors

Lucie Laplace Université Lumière Lyon 2 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1503-3492
Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez University of Warwick https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6988-4543
Cécile Blouin Durham University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22151/politikon.6200

Keywords:

migration vocabularies, categorisation, mobility regimes, coloniality, knowledge production, Latin America, migration

Abstract

This introduction presents the Lexicon on Migration and Mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean as a bilingual and collaborative inquiry into the political, institutional, and epistemic work performed by migration vocabularies. It approaches naming as a situated process through which mobility is rendered legible, classifications acquire material form, and unequal possibilities for movement, protection, and belonging are organised. Drawing on critical migration, refugee, border, and mobility studies, it examines how these processes are embedded in longer histories of racialisation, coloniality, and state formation. The Lexicon approaches Latin America and the Caribbean not merely as empirical settings for established concepts, but as sites of conceptual production where migration vocabularies are generated, contested, translated, and reworked. Translation itself is approached as part of this epistemic politics, shaped by unequal geographies of scholarly circulation.

References

Acosta, Diego, and Luisa Feline Freier. 2023. “Expanding the Reflexive Turn in Migration Studies: Refugee Protection, Regularization, and Naturalization in Latin America.” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 21(4): 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2146246

Alatas, Syed Farid. 2003. “Academic Dependency and the Global Division of Labour in the Social Sciences.” Current Sociology 51(6): 599–613. https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921030516003

Álvarez Velasco, Soledad. 2020a. “From Ecuador to Elsewhere: The (Re)configuration of a Transit Country.” Migration and Society 3: 34–49. https://doi.org/10.3167/ARMS.2020.111403

Anderson, Bridget. 2013. Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aradau, Claudia, Brenna Bhandar, Manuela Bojadzijev, Josue David Cisneros, Nicholas De Genova, Julia Eckert, Elena Fontanari, Tanya Golash-Boza, Jef Huysmans, Shahram Khosravi, Clara Lecadet, Patrisia Macías Rojas, Federica Mazzara, Anne McNevin, Peter Nyers, Stephan Scheel, Nandita Sharma, Maurice Stierl, Vicki Squire, Martina Tazzioli, Huub van Baar, and William Walters. 2022. “Minor Keywords of Political Theory: Migration as a Critical Standpoint.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40(4): 781–875. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420988563

Bakewell, Oliver. 2008. “Research Beyond the Categories: The Importance of Policy Irrelevant Research into Forced Migration.” Journal of Refugee Studies 21(4): 432–453. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042

Beigel, Fernanda, ed. 2013. The Politics of Academic Autonomy in Latin America. Farnham: Ashgate.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Casas-Cortes, Maribel, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli, Giorgio Grappi, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Irene Peano, Lorenzo Pezzani, John Pickles, Federico Rahola, Lisa Riedner, Stephan Scheel, and Martina Tazzioli. 2015. “New Keywords: Migration and Borders.” Cultural Studies 29(1): 55–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.891630

Chimni, Bhupinder S. 1998. “The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South.” Journal of Refugee Studies 11(4): 350–374. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/11.4.350-a

Chimni, Bhupinder S. 2009. “The Birth of a ‘Discipline’: From Refugee to Forced Migration Studies.” Journal of Refugee Studies 22(1): 11–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen051

Crawley, Heaven, and Dimitris Skleparis. 2018. “Refugees, Migrants, Neither, Both: Categorical Fetishism and the Politics of Bounding in Europe's ‘Migration Crisis.’” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(1): 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1348224

Dahinden, Janine. 2016. “A Plea for the ‘De-Migranticization’ of Research on Migration and Integration.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(13): 2207–2225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1124129

De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–47. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432

De Genova, Nicholas, and Martina Tazzioli, eds. 2016. Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”. New York: Zone Books.

Domenech, Eduardo. 2013. “‘Las migraciones son como el agua’: Hacia la instauración de políticas de ‘control con rostro humano.’” Polis. Revista Latinoamericana 35: 1–35. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-65682013000200006

Domenech, Eduardo, María Basualdo, and Manuel Pereira. 2023. “Migraciones, fronteras y política de datos: nuevos medios de control del movimiento en el espacio sudamericano.” In Movilidades, control fronterizo y luchas migrantes, edited by Liliana Rivera Sánchez, Gioconda Herrera, and Eduardo Domenech, 317–355. Buenos Aires and Ciudad de México: CLACSO and Siglo XXI.

Gandini, Luciana. 2026. “Keeping in Transit: Flexible Externalization and the Dual Logics of Transit Governance in the Americas.” Frontiers in Human Dynamics 7: Article 1663807. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2025.1663807

Glick Schiller, Nina, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. “Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39(2): 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253

Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2018. “The Coloniality of Migration and the ‘Refugee Crisis’: On the Asylum–Migration Nexus, Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism, Migration and Racial Capitalism.” Refuge 34(1): 16–28. https://doi.org/10.7202/1050851ar

Hacking, Ian. 2007. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285–318. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197264249.003.0010

Harrell-Bond, Barbara E. 1986. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Herrera, Gioconda, and Carmen Gómez Martín, eds. 2022. Migration in South America. IMISCOE Regional Series. Cham: Springer.

Jiménez Zunino, Cecilia, and Verónica Trpin. 2021. Pensar las migraciones contemporáneas: Categorías críticas para su abordaje. Córdoba: Teseo Press.

Malkki, Liisa H. 1995. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495–523. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002431

Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. “Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377–404. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050

Menjívar, Cecilia. 2006. “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111(4): 999–1037. https://doi.org/10.1086/499509

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mignolo, Walter D. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1(3): 533–580. https://doi.org/10.2979/NPT.2000.1.3.533

Rivera Sánchez, Liliana, Gioconda Herrera, and Eduardo Domenech, eds. 2023. Movilidades, control fronterizo y luchas migrantes. Buenos Aires and Ciudad de México: CLACSO and Siglo XXI.

Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38(2): 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268

Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Croom Helm.

Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks 2(4): 301–334.

https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043

Zetter, Roger. 1991. “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4(1): 39–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/4.1.39

Zetter, Roger. 2007. “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization.” Journal of Refugee Studies 20(2): 172–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem011