Restricted access: The Reflexive Subaltern History of Central America–US Informal Migration

Contemporary discourse on the part of the US State Department and immigration authorities represents informal migration from Central America as a transgression of dubious and potentially criminal subjects who assail the United States. Such a representation relies on a memory that draws a purposeful blind eye to the history of colonial extraction and post-colonial “development” that has marginalized and brutalized Central America's indigenous populations and working poor, as well as US involvement in sustaining and enhancing the root causes of informal migration. This article asks how we can narrate the history of informal migration's root causes in Central America, and how such a narrative illuminates the operations of the Anti-Refugee Machine in this part of the world.