Frontiers of difference: control as governance, precarity, and agencies in the journeys of LGBTQI+ migrants at the borders of Brazil and Mexico

This original research analyses continuities and ruptures in the trajectories of LGBTQI+ migrants, focusing on lesbians and transgender experiences at Brazilian and the Mexican borders regions as empirical contexts. Although these trajectories vary in terms of time, geopolitical scenarios and the ways in which social markers of difference shift through border crossings, these displacements suggest, as a transversal characteristic, that the production of uncertainty is a form of governance of human mobility. These displacements suggest that the global migration control regime is framed by a heteronormative and familistic order that shapes gender hierarchies and inequalities in the transit of LGBTQI+ migrants across Latin American borders. The underlying argument is that all migration policies are gender policies. In the cases discussed here, the productive relations between gender, sexuality and migration are based on cis-heterocentric gender norm that is structurally rooted in a limited binary gender system. This system becomes insufficient when confronted with the experiences of lesbian and trans migrants in transit across borders of the Global South. These displacements in the Brazilian and the Mexican borders shed light on the inconsistencies and ambiguities that gender dimorphism brings to humanitarian policies for LGBTQI+ migrants. Finally, the results section explores the resistance and survival strategies employed by LGBTQI+ migrants in response to the precarious and uncertain conditions they face when crossing borders of Latin America.

1 Introduction

In this manuscript, I propose a comparative study of the experiences of five LGBTQI+ migrants in border cities in Brazil and Mexico in order to investigate the ways in which global migration governance (Domenech, 2013) produces precarity and uncertainty in their journeys. Although these trajectories vary in terms of time and geopolitical scenarios, as well as in how social markers of difference shift through border crossings, I argue that the production of uncertainty in these displacements constitutes a form of governance of human mobility. Specifically, I examine how uncertainty is produced according to certain cross-cutting criteria that I have identified among lesbian and trans migrants as they cross the borders of Mexico and Brazil. In this sense, I am interested in identifying continuities and ruptures based on three criteria relating to mobility. The first dimension I want to highlight is waiting. As I demonstrate in this study, my interlocutors are forced to move between fixed and circulating policies in these border regions. In a way, they “get stuck in displacement”: LGBTQI+ migrants must wait long periods to receive refugee status and at the same time they are under constant pressure to circulate° between state and humanitarian institutions during their displacement in these border regions.

A second criterion to be compared is the precarity and uncertainty of their trajectories. These displacements suggest that increasingly precarious mobility leads to increasingly precarious life experiences. In this sense, my interlocutors express that not knowing what will happen during their journeys, not being able to project themselves into the present and immediate future is related to the precarious conditions of travel and to social markers of difference: gender and sexuality hierarchies, race/ethnicity, and social class are central to humanitarian and institutional actions as these five cases reveal.

Lastly, if uncertainty is the only constant in the experience of displacement, then the third axis of analysis focuses on the possible agency within these spaces—specifically, on the survival strategies and responses of LGBTQI+ migrants in confronting the instability and precariousness of migratory journeys. In a way, by exploring the emotional and bodily dimensions of LGBTQI+ migrants and refugees¹, it allows us to identify not only the oppression and suffering experienced during transit, but also the responses, forms of resistance, and survival strategies that sexual dissidents develop to face the precarious conditions of their journeys.

This work is structured into five sections. The introduction outlines the focus of the research: to explore the productive relationships between gender, sexuality, and humanitarianism, and to examine the production of uncertainty and precariousness experienced by sexual and gender dissidents displaced at the borders of Brazil, Mexico, and United States. Section two presents the materials and methods used in the study, including the discussions of research’s dilemmas and challenges. The third section contains the theoretical framework and literature review, based on two main fields of study: humanitarianism and queer migration. The review focuses on Chicano feminist approaches to queer studies and processes of decolonization. The fourth section, presents the results of the study. To archieve this, I have organized the analysis into three central themes, through which I will introduce the empirical cases discussed in the study. These themes are structured around waiting, time, control, and border regimes. I continue to argue that precarious journeys and uncertainty are constants in LGBTQI+ migration, and at the same time, counterintuitively, I also explore the agency, care strategies and interdependence of migrant dissidents during these journeys. I conclude this work with some final remarks.

2 Materials and methods

This original research brings together three different fieldwork experiences, from various time periods, border contexts and divergent methodological approaches. In this study, I present some findings from my Master’s research with trans women from Central America who were in transit in the city of Tapachula, on the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, between 2015 and 2017, as well as findings from my doctoral research, which focused on processes of subjectivation, humanitarian reception policies, and the everyday lives of LGBTQI+ migrants in Boa Vista, Brazil, and along the northern border of Mexico between Tijuana and San Diego.

During my Master’s studies, I carried out fieldwork in the border city of Tapachula, on the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala. On that occasion, I accompanied six trans and cis women through their transits in Mexico. For this work, I include the trajectory of a trans woman I met at that time, on the eve of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Regarding the findings of my doctoral research, in this study I incorporate insights from two long-term fieldworks conducted in the border cities of Boa Vista, Brazil, between 2021 and 2022 and at the Tijuana–San Diego border in 2023. In these border contexts, I conducted interviews, participant observation and fieldnote writing, both inside and outside shelters. Here, I present the experiences of LGBTQI+ migrants caught up in humanitarian policies and migration narratives interwoven with the control and the precariousness of transit.

The findings I present here suggest divergences according to the methods and the historical processes that shape the trajectories I have selected for this manuscript. I present research findings and excerpts from interviews with transgender migrants at Mexico’s southern border and on the other side of the Tijuana border wall, in San Diego, California. These interviews gather dissident migratory experiences from a decade-long migratory context. I also incorporate more recent historical processes, such as migration during the pandemic and mobility from the Global South in the post-pandemic context. Another interesting angle to analyze in the five cases discussed here is how diverse border regions in the Global South are creating bridges of dialogue between LGBTQI+ migrants in Brazil and Mexico. This offers a perspective on the expansion of far-right agendas, which is having a direct impact on the everyday lives of dissident migrants forced to flee their countries of origin.

As might be expected, these fieldworks present several challenges, one of which concerns the transit and circulation of the interlocutors themselves. From a migration studies perspective, we recognize that displacements present challenges to research conduct because interlocutors move through diverse scales and conditions of mobility: migrants’ itineraries include movements outside and inside shelters, center–periphery movements, as well as internal and rural–urban movements. Migrants often move through different spaces and scales (Strathern, 2017) not only between institutions, but also across borders, cities, and neighborhoods, which makes it difficult to trace their experiences over an extended period. Nevertheless, transit can also be productive in analyzing the resources that LGBTQI+ migrants draw upon during their journey and the networks they activate during their transit.

Another barrier to research on migration, gender and sexuality in humanitarian contexts is precarity. The precariousness experienced by LGBTQI+ people during transit and mobility produces uncomfortable feelings such as frustration and anger, which constantly arise in my conversations with dissident migrants in border regions. However, the strength of my work lies in the fact that, although precarity permeates the life experiences of LGBTQI+ migrants, these experiences are not confined to the precariousness of their journeys.

In almost all the cases I present here, I have accompanied LGBTQI+ migrants through regularization procedures and searched for housing while they wait for a humanitarian visa to continue their journey to the United States. I have also engaged with their networks of affection and solidarity, their connections with non-governmental organizations, and the broader universe of refuge, as well as other everyday experiences during their transit in these border cities.

In Boa Vista, this research project employed the following methodological strategy: keeping a fieldwork diary, engaging in flexible conversations, conducting semi-structured interviews at the Rondon 2 shelter. This approach brought me into close contact with Venezuelan LGBTQI+ migrants sheltered in Boa Vista. I accompanied the interviewees through their migration regularization procedures, and domestic care activities, and became familiar with their temporary homes, solidarity networks, connections with the humanitarian sphere, and local institutions.

As you might imagine, my involvement in ethnographic fieldwork with queer migrants on the borders of the Global South raises important ethical questions about anthropological research. I raise this issue of the bonds and relationships that we researchers establish with their interlocutors in migratory contexts because, in the Global South, we have challenged the binaries that distance researchers from the communities they work with. While we acknowledge that power relations exist and recognize that researchers occupy a positionality in the field, we also seek to construct an engaged, militant, and activist form of research in the face of increasingly precarious journeys and migrations, as demonstrated by this very study.

For example, my fieldwork in Tijuana was mediated by an NGO. As this border city has become a kind of “laboratory” for the study of migration, local organizations and shelters have expressed strong and legitimate criticism of academic research, considering it extractivist and complicit in the epistemic violence against migrants and refugees. For this reason, my fieldwork involved the process of building relationships with a shelter for LGBTQI+ migrants.

Important anthropological figures such as Renato Rosaldo, in his classic ethnography Rosaldo (1989)—challenging the positivist assumptions of anthropology—wrote: “A sea change in cultural studies has eroded once-dominant conceptions of truth and objectivity: ‘The truth of objectivism—absolute, universal, and timeless—has lost its monopoly status. It now competes, on more nearly equal terms, with the truths of case studies that are embedded in local contexts, shaped by local interests, and colored by local perceptions. (…) Such terms as objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality refer to subject positions once endowed with great institutional authority, but they are arguably neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors’” (Rosaldo, 1989).

In this sense, there is an important distinction between intervening, “help,” and collaboration in the field. Here, the figure of the anthropologist is neither messianic nor distant. By building relationships with interlocutors, we learn how our research can serve as a tool for raising awareness and contributing to the development of dignified migration policies for dissident migrant populations.

This comparative research between Boa Vista and Tijuana was made possible thanks to the award of the CAPES scholarship, PrInt-Unicamp, Methodology and Teaching: Challenges and Innovations in the Humanities. As I mentioned earlier, in Tijuana the methodological strategy consisted of keeping a fieldwork diary and conducting in-depth interviews with LGBTQI+ migrants. However, the methodological approach was radically different under the conditions imposed by the pandemic.

3 Theoretical framework and literature review

In this research, I seek to articulate the contributions of queer migrations, a relatively emerging field of study in Latin America and globally, to the discipline of humanitarian studies. In Anglo-American queer academic scholarship, as exemplified by Luibhéid and Chávez (2020), the term “queer migration” is used as a category intertwining migration, displacement, and gender and sexual dissidence.

In this manuscript, I present initial findings from fieldwork conducted both online and in-person in Boa Vista and on the border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, United States. I incorporate excerpts from interviews and ethnographic scenes to outline the preliminary findings of my doctoral research, which are based on processes of subjectivation and the everyday lives of LGBTQI+ migrants in these cities. Following Rose (2019), Parrini et al. (2021) defines subjectivation as the processes and practices through which human beings engage with themselves and with others as subjects endowed with characteristics.

My ethnographic engagement with LGBTQI+ migrations in the border regions of Brazil and Mexico led me to the disciplinary field of gender and sexuality studies. I focused particularly on homosexuality and queer research, as well as migration studies. A fruitful period emerged for North American anthropology and Anglo-Saxon traditions in these two fields of study during the late 1980s and the last decade of the twentieth century.

On the one hand, the humanitarian paradigm played a key role in world geopolitics at a historical moment when nation-states were fragmenting, dictatorships were collapsing, U. S. interventionism was being reorganized, and other postcolonial processes were giving way to the wars and conflicts of globalization. Against this backdrop, migration, forced displacement, refuge, and humanitarianism emerged as subjects of anthropological research. Examples include Malkki (1996) ethnographic research, among others. Conversely, the 1990s also saw an “explosion of research on transnational queer migration” (La Fountain-Stokes, 2009). As La Fountain-Stokes (2009) suggests, during these years, issues related to gender diversity and sexual orientation began to attract the interest of the social sciences, as they came to be considered causal factors of both national (internal) and international (transnational) migration. Since then, this field of research has continued to expand into other geopolitics of knowledge, challenging Western predominance in the literature on migration, gender, and sexualities.

3.1 Queer migration studies

Earlier, the work of the lesbian, Chicana, working-class writers Anzaldúa (1987) and Moraga (1983, 1997) created a new language and style of writing in the North American academic sphere. Through essays, poems, and autobiographical narratives, they gave meaning to the border as an in-between space and a subjective realm of constant cultural transition. Anzaldúa and Moraga explored alterity and the border as expansive universes, drawing on their experiences as migrant, racialized, and lesbian writers. In this way, Chicana feminisms in the United States set an important precedent for queer/cuir migration studies in Latin America from a decolonial perspective.

By the 2000s, the analysis of literature, performance, and poetry by Puerto Rican LGBTQI+ migrants in the United States had become a key focus of cultural studies. One notable work in this field is Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora by La Fountain-Stokes (2009), which became a seminal text on the cultural resistances of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people, contributing to the concept of queer diasporas in the United States.

However, Chicana and Puerto Rican migrations were not the only origins of queer/cuir migrations. Important contributions also came from mobilities and diasporas in India and Southeast Asia, helping to decentralize this field of study toward other geopolitics of knowledge. Moving away from the Western framework that predominates in Latin American perspectives, works such as Manalansan (2004), which focuses on the experiences of gay Filipinos in New York, as well as those by Gopinath (2018), who more recently analyzes new diasporic queer cartographies from South Asia to the United States, place central emphasis on postcolonial diasporic processes.

It is important to understand that queer migration studies as well as the humanitarianism and refuge studies emerged as distinct disciplinary fields in the 1990s, initially following different research paths. Almost half a century later, both fields have become intertwined and interwoven. Gender, sexuality, and humanitarianism are inextricably linked to the extent that what we call queer migration studies overlaps with the field of humanitarianism, as demonstrated by this very research. Luibhéid and Chávez (2020) argue that “sexual and gender logics, in their intersections with economic dispossession, racialization, settler colonialism, and empire, shape who is targeted for detention and eventual deportation” (Luibhéid and Chávez, 2020).

Another analytical contribution connects these fields of study. In their research on gender refugees—the term they use for LGBTQI+ refugees seeking international protection in South Africa, Camminga (2019)—proposes that gender is understood as a binary system of classification which appears neutral and natural. They also investigate the waiting experienced by transgender refugees in South Africa: “at the center of this system is a constant waiting, something that seemingly wears applicants down: for access, decisions, acknowledgement, papers, renewals, and officials to finish their lunches and phone calls. It is a battle in which the rules of engagement are constantly changing. As Tatenda explains, the waiting can seem so endless, so devoid of hope, that asylum seekers do consider turning back” (2019). Camminga (2019) analysis aligns with our research produced from the Global South, revealing a cross-border dialogue on the refugee model for racialized LGBTQI+ populations in various regions of the world.

We demonstrate that there is a standardized, universal model of the humanitarian regime that is traversed globally by gender and sexuality boundaries. Our research engages with Camminga’s work on the uncertainty and waiting in LGBTQI+ migration, and how these are produced. Thus, queer readings of migration, alongside critical perspectives and analyses of gender and sexuality norms in humanitarian contexts, represent a significant contribution to the dialogue between queer migration studies and humanitarianism research.

3.2 Medical anthropology and humanitarianism

As I mentioned above, this manuscript’s theoretical framework draws on contributions from medical anthropology and humanitarianism studies. The first studies on humanitarianism emerged in the late 1980s and gained significant momentum throughout the 1990s, coinciding with the establishment of the universal refugee model. At the beginning of the decade, Malkki (1996) began to question humanitarian practices through what she called “universalist philanthropy” (Malkki, 1996, p. 388). According to the author, this provoked an analysis of humanitarianism that inaugurated a new global regime through standardized policies that dehistoricized and silenced the life histories of refugees and asylum seekers. “These practices of humanitarian representation and the standardized interventions that accompany them have the effect of producing anonymous corporealities and silences. These practices actively tend to displace, weaken, or pulverize history in the sense in which the Hutu refugees in Mishamo understood it” (Malkki, 1996).

Almost 30 years later, when the humanitarian paradigm had already been consolidated globally, Fassin (2012) proposed that this model of universal social assistance has been studied by the social sciences from two fundamental perspectives. Firstly, through an analysis of humanitarian morality, the discussion of humanitarianism as a creator of moral sentiments linked to sadness, compassion, charity, and victimization and secondly, through an analysis centered on humanitarian politics “linked to international relations and political science, which have studied the deployment of interventions in disaster and conflict zones” (Fassin, 2012).

It could be argued that these social science perspectives on humanitarianism are closely linked to biopower (Foucault, 2011) whereby the moral sentiments described by Fassin (2012) function as technologies of subjectivation, and migration and security policies evolve into disciplinary control strategies at borders and in conflict zones. Fassin (2008) also discusses the regimes of truth at stake when the humanitarian apparatus seeks to manage the experience of violence among migrants and refugees. The truth or falsity of statements is judged from positions of power, based on the discursive production of political authorities, humanitarian organizations, religious actors, and teams responsible for providing reparations, such as psychiatrists and psychologists.

Nowadays, research on humanitarian regimes has advanced to other angles of biopolitics in migration. For example, this research demonstrates that precariousness is an experience that shapes the journeys of racialized LGBTQI+ migrants at the borders of the Global South as well as their processes of subjectivation during displacement, which condition their ability to survive the precarious conditions of transit. Lorey (2016) distinguishes between three dimensions of the precarious. The precarious condition, which “refers to the dimension of vulnerability of bodies, existentially shared” (Lorey, 2016, p. 26); precarity, understood as “an ordering category that refers to the political, social, and legal effects of a generalized precarious condition” (Lorey, 2016, p. 27); and precarization as a form of governmentality, where making people precarious becomes a tool of governance.

According to Parrini et al. (2021), it is important to acknowledge the precariousness and vulnerability of migrant journeys as spaces of subjectivation (Parrini et al., 2021). Drawing on biopolitics, Lorey (2016) suggests that under neoliberalism, precariousness is, in a sense, democratized (2016, p. 26), and argues that governing through uncertainty mobilizes specific subjectivities, such as anxiety and fear. “For many people, anxious concern about existential vulnerability becomes increasingly indistinguishable from a fear that arises from precarization” (Lorey, 2016).

However, the logics of power in humanitarian interventions are not solely vertical. By this, I mean that the humanitarian apparatus is not a rigid, totalizing structure of power. To analyze, for instance, how and in what contexts humanitarian responses admit breaches and ruptures in their gender order, we must investigate the negotiation and transgression of the norm —dynamics that are visible in the everyday relations between migrants and different humanitarian actors.

4 Results

4.1 Making wait: time, control, and border regimes

Brazil and Mexico are embedded in the broader continuity of the global migration regime (Feldman-Bianco, 2018; Domenech, 2013) which is centered on the transnationalization of international migration policy, driven by agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and various United Nations institutions (Domenech, 2013). In this research, I am interested in exploring some analytical vectors that have not yet been examined within global migratory governance (Domenech, 2013) such as gender and sexuality norms in humanitarian responses and the production of hierarchies between heterosexual and LGBTQI+ migrants in transit locations. This is based on the understanding that the broad disciplinary field of migration studies has often been founded on heteronormative and gender-neutral assumptions, frequently portraying migrants as a universal mass of heterosexualized subjects with no gender distinction.

But what does all of this have to do with the waiting experienced by LGBTQI+ migrants at the borders? Migration externalization and humanitarian interventions often force migrants to become “stuck” in transit zones—as in the cases studied here. The appropriation of migrants’ and refugees’ vital time for regularization processes or humanitarian activities compels them to stretch humanitarian aid from international organizations to its limits, often making them dependent on these resources and their relations with institutions during transit. In other cases, navigating through the webs of humanitarianism and other institutions, such as the prison system, creates spaces for negotiation, allowing access to networks and resources in gender transition processes on the other side of the border. All of this shows that LGBTQI+ migrants navigate, move, and activate diverse resources, networks, and contacts during displacement. At the same time, it raises broader discussions about access to rights for sexually diverse migrants within reception policies, the care practices among LGBTQI+ migrants, the gender norms that shape these spaces, and the connections with both the humanitarian apparatus and the institutional frameworks at these borders.

In a way, the dependence on humanitarian aid of LGBTQI+ migrants worsened during and after the pandemic, as I noted in my conversations with a Venezuelan transmasculine person and lesbians in transit through Brazil. Antonie,² a young, brown-skinned transmasculine migrant from Venezuela, told me via Google Meet video call about his journey from Caracas to the border of Peru and Brazil during the pandemic. Speaking to me from the shelter where he had arrived in São Paulo, Antonie told me that he had first traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, where he lived for 6 months singing on public transport to earn money. However, due to the harsh routine of working on the streets and barely being able to pay rent, and without a clear destination, he continued his journey crossing from Colombia to Ecuador and then Peru, until he reached the border with Acre in Brazil. Antonie made this entire journey through South American countries on foot:

“While I was walking in Peru, I made a post on Facebook asking what the situation was like in Brazil (where we were heading), if there was work and things like that, because we did not know where we were going or what we were going to do with our lives” (Antonie, online interview via Google Meet, May 2021).

During the pandemic in 2020, migrants moving through Latin America were detained or “trapped” at various borders in the Global South. This is precisely what happened to Antonie in Peru. In a sense, he describes an increasingly frequent condition in migration where surviving uncertainty has become a way of life (Lorey, 2016). Camping was the only remaining strategy to put pressure on the states of Brazil and Peru to receive these migrants, who were literally left in a legal limbo between the two countries.³

In another Brazilian border region, and a year after Antonie’s migration, I accompanied a Venezuelan lesbian couple in Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima state. They had initially migrated with their families, but once they crossed the border into Brazil, they met in the shelters, fell in love, and lived as an LGBTQI+ couple in the tents for dissidences. The displacement of this Venezuelan lesbian couple speaks to the possibilities of love and care between dissidences within the everyday frameworks of humanitarian intervention, and the creation of homo-affective bonds in the temporary shelter spaces. However, they also highlight the challenges of living with and resolving conflicts arising from the constant circulation that characterizes humanitarian life in these transit zones. As I demonstrate in this ethnographic scene from my fieldwork notes:

I wrote on January 11, 2022:

“The AVSI⁴ staff had told them that they would be transferred from the shelter today, but that did not happen, so we arranged to meet. They told me that one of the transfer options was to the Pricumã shelter, but they didn’t want to go there because it is designated for people with special health needs. I noticed that Glória had two styes in her eye and that she was feeling weak and irritable. They hadn’t been able to bathe that day. Her partner Fernanda prepared a homemade remedy in an attempt to heal her. I suggested that applying chamomile tea might relieve the styes, but Glória angrily replied that they had to pay 10 Brazilian real to make tea at the shelter. ‘Just for chamomile tea, 10 reais. We can’t afford it,’ she said. There were several moments of silence during our conversation. Once again, they were facing transit in Boa Vista. But they must continue with the relocation process. They cannot abandon the option offered by Operação Acolhida now⁵” (Fieldnotes, Boa Vista, 11 January 2022).

In a sense, my interlocutors’ journeys across the Brazilian border shed light on the control mechanisms over the lives of LGBTQI+ migrants during and after the pandemic: daily life in the camps shows how migration policies, sanitary justification, precarity, and social markers of difference impact the intimate time of LGBTQI+ people in mobility. Much of their time is spent trying to obtain refugee status or regularization, or engaging in daily humanitarian activities at the shelters. The uncertainty is quite literally embodied in the camp’s limbo, where Antonie and a 100 other migrants were left without access to international protection from any country, living in tents between the bridge that separates Brazil from Peru.

In the case of this lesbian couple in Boa Vista, within the Operação Acolhida shelters, precarious conditions are compounded by uncertainty, in a way produced by humanitarian policies. Through my daily accompaniment of this couple, I have noticed the emotional and physical distress caused by circulation, transitoriness, and the condition of uncertainty in their everyday life in the shelters. As Auyero (2012) suggests, waiting and making others wait are ways in which we experience domination. According to Auyero, it is in temporal processes that political subordination is reproduced (Auyero, 2012).

The Operação Acolhida policy is a military–humanitarian response that promotes strategies of both fixation and circulation for migrants. This policy absorbs and consumes their vital time, as they spend their days inside camps queuing for essential services. It is also important to note that various actors participate in urban dynamics, including different businesses such as supermarkets, barbershops, clothing stores, and bars, which are located around the shelters. The camps are connected to different actors in the city as well as to the migrants themselves, who also interact with the city by mobilizing resources.

But what does this have to do with gender, sexuality, and the processes of racialization experienced by these groups? LGBTQI+ people on the move often encounter barriers relating to gender and sexuality within these humanitarian politics, which prioritize nuclear family structures. Parenthood or family formation is a relevant factor in the refugee application process. Luibhéid and Chávez (2020) argues that during migration, sexual reproduction and the nuclear family model perpetuate patriarchal structures that reinforce dominant gender, racial/ethnic, economic, and colonial interests (Luibhéid and Chávez, 2020).

During the pandemic, the heteronormative structure was reinforced as a selection mechanism in migration control. This is reflected, for example, in the prioritization of refugee applications for heterosexual nuclear families. This cis-heterocentric norm is often overlooked in migration policies, yet it plays a significant role in shaping the classification of migrants in transit spaces as either heterosexual or LGBTQI+. This further exacerbates the precariousness and uncertainty of their journeys.

4.2 Uncertainty, precarious journeys, and sexual politics in displacement

In this section, I am interested in further developing the idea that every migration policy is also a sexual policy, seeking to analyze the stabilizations and destabilizations of gender categories within the humanitarian sphere. The cases I analyze here show that the precariousness of transgender displacement experiences is not only linked to economic deprivation and material conditions but also express the ways in which LGBTQI+ migrants live and face precariousness through their bodies, subjectivities, interdependence, and emotions.⁶

The precarization experienced by my interlocutors compels them to mobilize every possible resource, network, and connection to endure and navigate their displacement. Esmeralda, a 29-year-old Honduran trans woman who began her gender transition while in a San Diego detention center, has long collaborated with trans Latina networks on the Tijuana- San Diego border. Speaking with her, I found myself asking: How do care strategies among trans migrants move within and beyond governmental and humanitarian structures at these borders?

Esmeralda: I’ve been living through violence. I ended up spending seven months in that prison, where, as I told you, there was a lot of discrimination among the officers because when you realize you’re dealing with case of illness, when people arrive sick, they were monitoring you [inside the ICE detention center] since at that time they didn’t want anyone to die inside, unlike now. I don’t know if you heard, when Trump was in office, a trans woman died in the hielera [‘icebox,’ detention cell], because she was sick too, like me. And so, the ones who cared for us the most were the doctors, making sure we wouldn’t catch pneumonia, because that’s what kills us. At that time there was discrimination within society, among the men, who looked down on you, who would tell you, ‘hey, clean this up.

And you had said you were living with HIV?

Esmeralda: Yes, I used to take my cocktail of pills. The doctor told me, we are not going to deny you hormones; we are going to give you your antiretroviral medication, tests, analyses—we’ll be monitoring you. That’s when they started giving me PrEP and my hormones, there at ICE. Now it’s different, because today I take injections.

And how was your transition?

Esmeralda: Good, because when one body is fighting against another, you feel discouraged, depressed, your skin becomes more sensitive, you feel your body hair decreasing—you have difficult days.” (Interview with Esmeralda, August 2023).

In an unprecedented case within the current migratory context of this border, doctors working for ICE facilitated Esmeralda’s transition process by providing her with the necessary hormones and medical follow-up within the detention center. Through Esmeralda’s narrative, we can observe the various actors and the institutional and non-institutional negotiations that enable her transition within the detention center. I also aim to highlight Esmeralda’s reflexivity as she describes her transition process as a “struggle between bodies,” highlighting the bodily, psychological, and subjective complexities of gender transition. This gender transition is mediated by displacement and by the assertion of health rights within detention centers for dissident migrants.

In Esmeralda’s case, it is striking that she was able to access HIV treatment and begin her gender transition in 2014 while held in ICE detention in San Diego, California—well before Donald Trump’s election—through a medical team operating inside migrant detention centers. In a sense, this demonstrates that every migration policy is also traversed by sexual and gender politics, as migrant dissidents had access to specific care protocols for this population within detention facilities a decade ago. It is worth noting that San Diego, California, is considered a society that values “sexual democracy,” which helps to explain the existence of protocols supporting her gender transition. It is also important to note that these sexual politics for migrants were connected to a broader agenda of LGBTQI+ rights protection in the United States.

In the following case, I accompanied Maria, a 32-year-old Salvadoran trans woman whom I met in Tapachula, a city on the border between Guatemala and Mexico. She was a sex worker waiting to regularize her status so that she could continue her journey to the United States. More broadly, an interesting idea was circulating among migrants during those years: entering the United States was, in quotation marks, “easier” for LGBTQI+ migrants. Nevertheless, there were many ambiguities within the policies targeting this population. On the night of November 8, 2016, the worst nightmare became reality: Donald Trump, the anti-immigrant candidate, was elected president of the United States. Rumors about the tightening of restrictive policies, the expansion of the border wall, and the cancelation of international protection policies for migrants and refugees were already widespread in Tapachula. Maria wanted to leave Tapachula as quickly as possible and apply for asylum before Donald Trump took office.

The UNHCR proposed that she submit an LGBTI+ refugee claim in order to consider a third settlement option and facilitate her transfer to the United States. However, she would have had to wait 6 months in this border town with no guarantee that the third resettlement would be approved. According to França and Fontgaland (2020), applicants who fall into the LGBTI+ refugee category, as defined by the UNHCR, would be subject to a double process of truth production, first being identified as refugees and as LGBTI+ (França and Fontgaland, 2020). Maria then told me about the conditions she would have to meet to apply to the UNHCR for a third resettlement:

“Maria: They made me another offer at the UNHCR.

What did they tell you?

Maria: They told me about a third resettlement.

What do you mean?

Maria: I have my resettlement in El Salvador, and here in Mexico it’s my second resettlement, the third resettlement would be in the United States. If I have to tell my story again, what happened to me in El Salvador and everything that happened to me, that I have problems in Mexico, then they come and do another interview with me and send it back to the UNHCR for me to go to the United States, but I have to wait six months here.

And how do you feel about that?

Maria: Well, sometimes I feel like it, but after six months they tell you. If the application is accepted, you go to the United States with all expenses paid.

And what do you think?

Maria: Well, I’m thrilled, but if they tell me “no,” I lose my six months here. At the UNHCR they told me “look, when we send you your application, we have nothing to do with it, but even so, as you are going to keep talking, the more interviews we do with you, the better, so they can see your development and everything, wait, Maria José, they told me” (conversation with Maria, October 26, 2016).

This passage is evidence of the repetitive nature of the narratives that asylum seekers must recount. In order to be recognized as an LGBTQI+ refugee, Maria must narrate the circumstances of her displacement to various humanitarian actors. Facundo (2019) warns of the exhaustive narrative regimes in the context of refuge, which, in addition to being technologies of subjectivation, are closely linked to processes of verification, legitimization and individualization (Facundo, 2019). LGBTQI+ asylum requests are subjected to a “credibility assessment” (França, 2012), which implies a process of revictimization that offers no guarantee of access to international protection. Notably, the UNHCR offered Maria a third-country resettlement on the condition that she extended her stay in Tapachula by 6 months. However, this offer failed to mention that living conditions for trans migrants in this border city are extremely precarious, as they are forced to survive through informal commerce or sex work. Ultimately, Maria rejected UNHCR’s proposal and continued alone toward the United States where she still lives today.

4.3 Affronting uncertainty

In this final section, I argue that strategies and agencies historically employed within the LGBTQI+ sphere are displaced, transmitted, and transferred during migration. I am interested in discussing how the LGBTQI+ migration experiences are not limited to precarization and uncertainty as mechanisms of migration control. To achieve this, I will pay attention to the micro-dynamics of everyday life and to how situations of precarity are managed by LGBTQI+ migrants during their journeys. The question of agency in queer migrations marked by precarity and uncertainty leads me to discuss dimensions of care practices, forms of mutual care, and the promotion of well-being through practices of collective care.

In this final section, I present the last case for analysis. This case tells the story of Ray, a 30-year-old Salvadoran trans woman and bar owner who fled with her staff—all of whom were dissidents—from gang death threats. They arrived collectively in Tijuana in search of political asylum. Examining Central American forced LGBTQI+ displacement, group migration can be understood through the lens of interdependence in the face of transit risks. Notably, Ray, who had extensive migration experience, had the greatest economic resources and networks of contacts, enabling her to sponsor herself, Nestor, and Carlita—a necessary requirement at the time for applying for political asylum. Ray reflects on trans activist networks on both sides of the border as an established practice of care among Latin trans migrants in Mexico and the United States:

“I know some trans women who, autonomously, help others cross from Tijuana to San Diego.”

Ray: That’s how it used to be. What I’ve been told is that they would come to Tijuana, the trans women would arrive with one of us, they would get their papers in order, and help them cross to the other side. Many of us want to take a stand and do the work to support everyone. Now this is my project: to be able to help, and to ensure that trans women have a welcoming space.” (Conversation with Ray, 3 November 2023).

For Central American LGBTQI+ people, group migration is a strategy not only for confronting precarious living conditions, but also as a form of cooperation and mutual support within migration processes marked by multiple forms of deprivation. In the context of Central American migrant caravans on their way to the United States, migrating in groups represents both agency and a strategy to address specific precariousness and violence in the Central American migratory context.

Regarding the Venezuelan lesbian couple who fell in love at the shelter in the Operação Acolhida camp in Brazil, what stands out to me is that they abandoned their family-based migration projects to live together in the tents of this humanitarian response. In a sense, they were “coming out of the closet” on the other side of the border. Later, they continued their migration journey together, relocating to Maringá, in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, which is located at the far opposite end of Boa Vista.

Antonie, who camped on the Integration Bridge between Brazil and Peru during the pandemic, is a street artist who mobilized his social networks to pressure the states of Peru and Brazil, to grant his refugee status. After nearly a month of occupation, he decided to start documenting daily life at the camp. This audiovisual material was shared among contacts and on social networks, serving as evidence for the migrants’ legal actions during the occupation and accelerating their process of migratory regularization in Brazil. He explains this to me in the following interview:

“I started recording the camp, how we slept, I recorded songs, I started sending them to a lawyer who fought the case. When I got to Brazil, he told me that he was very moved, because it's one thing to talk and another to say ‘I'm here in the camp, I feel bad, I want to get out of here, because these are my rights and everything’, it's different, you know. I never imagined that it would do any good, I just did it and thought I'd send it. A lady helped me because she started sending the video and that was part of the evidence of what people go through here. Because they were just telling us no, there's no chance, they're not getting in, but somehow or other, that video sparked everything” (Antonie, online interview, 21 May 2021).

Similarly to how our research into mobility, gender, and sexuality focuses on the creation of uncertainty and precariousness in migration, our findings would be incomplete without considering the significance of the micro-dynamics of the daily lives of LGBTQI+ migrants during their migratory transit. In Maria’s case, as I mentioned above, one of her survival strategies during her time in Tapachula was to extend her access to UNHCR’s humanitarian aid until her migratory situation was regularized. Her love for her partner, Pedro, a Honduran migrant, was also a fundamental support network, and an affective and emotional force for this trans woman in displacement.

These various scenarios involve different negotiations and acts of caring (Teixeira et al., 2020), as well as self-care within the context of migrant dissidences. The focus is on the experiences of lesbians and trans women at the borders of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Here, I offer an initial overview of the care practices and life maintenance strategies employed by lesbians and trans women within migratory trajectories in border regions of the Global South. I refer to these practices as cross-border care, as they are forms of collaboration and interdependence that are mobilized through the experiences of dissident bodies and the crossing of borders. As we have seen, this approach centers caregiving subjectivities that enable the maintenance of everyday life throughout the displacement of migrant dissidences across the Global South.

Together with Rodrigues de Sousa and Williamson (2022), we wrote an article exploring the situated agency of LGBTQI+ migrants and refugees in response to the recurrent victimization these migrants often experience. In the article, we argue that “improvisation (…) operates as a way of life amid the precarities that characterize transnational displacements” (Rodrigues de Sousa and Williamson, 2022). Drawing on Brigden (2016), we argue that the interaction between different actors during displacement constitutes an uncoordinated, situational, and unpredictable everyday life. Thus, unpredictability makes improvisation a survival strategy. According to Brigden, the very identity of migrants and refugees is improvised by nature (Rodrigues de Sousa and Williamson, 2022). Wasser and França point out that the experience of inhabiting borders for LGBTQI+ migrants involves facing various forms of rejection, but also offers opportunities for alternative notions of belonging.

These practices, as well as homoaffective relations and work across activist networks on both sides of the border, could be understood as forms of cross-border care. I see them as ways in which care, collaboration, and interdependence are mobilized through the experiences of dissident bodies and the crossing of borders. The cases presented here highlight the various forms of care. They point to the actions that LGBTQI+ migrants take when faced with suffering or distress. As we have seen, this approach focuses on caregiving subjectivities that enable the maintenance of everyday life amidst the displacements of migrant dissidences in the Global South.

5 Discussion

In this proposal, I analyzed the production of uncertainty and precarity in the displacement of LGBTQI+ people at the borders of Brazil and Mexico. Precarity is the condition of our times. The displacement of these migrants sheds light on the direct link between the intersection of migration and precariousness and the hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and other social markers of difference, such as race, indigenous belonging and social class, among others.

A significant challenge in researching queer and LGBTQI+ migrations in the Global South is progressing toward more specific analyses and nuanced discussions about the needs, characteristics, and diversity of the LGBTQI+ social group. This study therefore focuses on the displacement experiences of sexual and gender dissidents and their lives in camps during and after the pandemic. These recent historical processes reveal an exacerbation of precarious conditions, which is also a consequence of border securitization policies justified on health grounds.

It is interesting to compare the stories of Maria, a transgender woman from El Salvador, who sought to cross Mexico’s southern border to reach the northern border and enter the United States to request political asylum. She was concerned about seeking refuge in the country before Donald Trump took office in 2016. In this work, I also explore the journey of a Honduran trans woman who entered the United States through the border city of San Diego, California, in 2015.

At that time, transgender people in detention centers were entitled to receive healthcare and even access hormone therapy for gender transition. While the links between the prison system and migration policies are evident, transgender migrants should have access to health rights in these spaces. While these are two distinct experiences of transgender women, what emerges is, on the one hand, the negotiation between the interlocutors and humanitarian actors, and, on the other hand, the categorization of “transgender” within the LGBTI refugee category, which remains in a state of constant negotiation and ambiguity within these spaces. Considering these cases, which reflect what LGBTQI+ travel was like a decade ago, I view with concern the rise of the far right and the setbacks in access to rights for LGBTQI+ people traveling in camps and detention centers.

Although these trajectories are located in remote border regions and influenced by distinct historical events, a consistent heteronormative logic remains evident in global migration policies. These policies intersect with other axes of differentiation, such as race, social class, migration status, and place of origin, and continue to obstruct LGBTQI+ migrants’ access to rights. All migration policy is also sexual policy, because, even when seemingly invisible, as Lorey (2016) argues, the production of uncertainty is structured by an order of gender and sexuality.

These dimensions are reflected not only in the material conditions in which these mobilities occur—sleeping on the street, going hungry, lacking access to bathrooms or a stable income—but also in the subjectivities and bodily sensations they produce, as seen above. Finally, I would like to propose a critical reading of the category of resilience that has become popular in scientific research on migration. I challenge this focus on resilience because it attributes “natural” qualities to migrants, as if resisting, surviving, and confronting different kinds of violence were innate characteristics of people in mobility. This ultimately depoliticises the conditions of structural inequality surrounding migratory processes. The lives of migrants around the world must improve, and the concept of resilience normalizes the inequalities surrounding the experiences of racialized dissident migrants.

Data availability statement

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because no restriction. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to bWFjYXdpbGxpYW1zb25AZ21haWwuY29t.

Ethics statement

The studies involving humans were approved by the Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa nas Ciências Humanas e Sociais da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (CEP-CHS/Unicamp). The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s) for the publication of any potentially identifiable images or data included in this article.

Author contributions

MW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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Footnotes

^The acronym LGBTQI+ refers to lesbians, gays, bisexuals, travestis, transsexuals, queer, intersex individuals, and the plus sign (+), which denotes other sexual and gender identities. Variations of this acronym exist depending on discursive production and geopolitical context. For instance, in the field of asylum and international protection, UNHCR guidelines recommend the use of the acronyms SOGI or LGBTI. In Anglo-American queer academic scholarship, as exemplified byLuibhéid and Chávez (2020), the term “queer migration” is used—a category specific to that disciplinary field, which intertwines migration, displacement, and gender and sexual dissidence.

^Due to the lack of life prospects in Venezuela and the desire to live out his sexuality away from the moral regimes imposed by his family and his community of origin, he decided to migrate in 2019. Two years after this article was written, now living in Brazil, Antonie began his gender transition through the SUS (Brazil’s Unified Health System) in São Paulo, where he has lived for 4 years. Although Antonie now identifies as a Venezuelan transmasculine man, at the time of our interviews, he still identified himself as a lesbian. The experiences narrated here reflect his migration journey while identifying as a lesbian; therefore, his gender transition had not yet begun. It is worth emphasizing that the migratory process itself played a key role in mobilizing and enabling Antonie to begin his gender transition in Brazil after his displacement.

^When I asked Antonie about daily life in the camp, he described the routine as a constant lethargy.

^Associação de Voluntários para o Serviço Internacional (AVSI) it is a Brazilian humanitarian NGO that works in 9 lines of action, migration and refuge it is one of those.

^Since 2018, Operação Acolhida has been an extensive military–humanitarian policy for receiving Venezuelan migrations, bringing together international organizations, local NGOs, federal and municipal governments, the Brazilian armed forces, among other actors. My analysis focuses on the reception hubs in the “shelters” and the internal relocation strategy, which promotes the transfer of Venezuelan migrants to other Brazilian states and their insertion into certain key economic sectors—industries and services—in southeastern Brazil. All the Venezuelan LGBTQI+ interlocutors who participated in this research still live in Brazil.

^I have included these case studies because they reveal similarities between them. When my interlocutors migrated, between 2014 and 2015, trans women and gender non-conforming people were considered a specific protection group in the United States. This meant that LGBTQI+ migrants, during those years—a decade ago—although still required to go through ICE detention centers, were more likely to receive international protection. This is a radically different scenario from that seen today in Central American LGBTQI+ migration flows to the United States.

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