Essential yet disposable: The challenge of informal migrants to the anthropology of disasters in times of accelerating calamities

Abstract (English)

The first quarter of the 21st Century is ending amid simultaneous interconnecting global disasters. Anthropogenic climate change, a mass extinction event, COVID 19, and the rise of authoritarianism are prime examples of these socio-political-environmental catastrophes. How is anthropology, with its longstanding commitment to the study of the local, to engage these processes that defy national boundaries and whose ontology connects the social and the cultural with the political and material? This paper explores these questions through the lens of the experiences and challenges of informal transnational migrants from Central America living in the United States. According to the IPCC’s 2014 report, Central America is the sub-tropical region of the world that stands to be most affected by the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, this is an area with a lengthy history of political and military turmoil brought about by the region’s Colonial and post-colonial immersion in global political economies, a history that has undermined its socio-political capacity to mitigate and respond to disasters. The situation of informal migrants from Central America is a particularly precarious one. As transnationally displaced peoples whose reasons for informally crossing national borders are not recognized by existing migration policy regimes, they are subjects who are often displaced by transnational disasters in their home communities, who serve as exploitable and disposable disaster recovery labor in the nations they migrate to, and who have little recourse to disaster assistance when they become survivors of new disasters in transnational contexts. This paper explores the epistemological challenges informal migrants pose to the anthropology of disasters as they embody the realities increasingly confronted by humanity in a time of accelerating calamities.