Social and affective constitution of transit spaces: Migrants in Necoclí, Colombia

Abstract Transit spaces are pivotal junctures in migration journeys, as geographical points where people, policies, and power converge, causing temporary pauses. Necoclí, Colombia, at the edge of the Darién Gap on the Pan-American route to the United States, exemplifies such a site that has yet to be studied in its constitution as a transit space. This article examines how transit is socially constituted, arguing that it is not a fixed category but a lived spatial and temporal phenomenon shaped by governance structures and migrant practices. Drawing on qualitative interviews with migrants, humanitarian practitioners, and Necoclí residents, complemented by non-participant observations, the analysis foregrounds the interplay of multiple actors in producing transit space. Using lenses of social geography, this article demonstrates how migrants actively constitute this space through social, emotional, and affective processes, including shaping atmospheres, creating solidarity and information networks, and negotiating social hierarchies. This article thus highlights the duality of transit as both a condition governed by state, border, smuggler and local regimes, and an experience lived and mediated by migrants’ in their emotional decision-making, relation-building, information accumulation, among other everyday sociopolitical structuring. These findings show that transit is spatially distributed and affectively charged, co-constituted by migrants and governing actors. By centring lived experiences, this article contributes to critical scholarship on transit spaces, emphasizing their relational, inhabited, and contested nature, revealing how everyday practices materially and socially shape migration geographies and the meaning of transit itself.