This paper examines some of the intimate, embodied and affective dimensions of mobility for unauthorised Central American migrants in Mexico. While in transit, migrants become implicated within the violence of local and transnational economies of smuggling, organised crime, kidnapping and securitisation. At the same time, migrants engage intimate economies of exchange, kinship and care as they negotiate their movements and their lives. Bringing together ethnographic research and transnational feminist scholarship, this paper reconceptualises human smuggling as a form of intimate labour along migrant routes. I pay particular attention to the ways human smuggling becomes a point of closeness and intimate exchange as migrants and their smugglers strategically re-imagine the borders of kinship. While the types of social relations forged along the journey may defy traditional understandings of smuggling as inherently exploitative, I also examine how such arrangements contribute to new forms of inequality. Through a lens of intimacy, this work contributes new insights on the complex and shifting nature of Mexico’s human smuggling industry and the state policies purportedly aimed to contain it. © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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labor mobility Mexico [North America] immigrant ethnography smuggling kinship