Undocumented Bordering Practices: Protagonism and Spaces of Making

Abstract

Abstract Borders are at the centre of everyday lives, often with gendered and violent outcomes exacerbating harm across space and time. The feminization of waiting is embedded in the power structures of borders. Yet, feminized waiting in the context of displacement can also be a necessary pre-condition for generating affective geographies of making, and transformative spaces of solidarity and contestation across borders. This paper draws on ethnographic and feminist participatory action research carried out in southern Mexico to document bordering practices ‘from below’, Undocumented Bordering Practices performed by women from Central America experiencing waiting in the Mexico–Guatemala borderlands. I expand the definitions of bordering and refugee protection by centring on women’s protagonism (self-authorship) and collective acts of making (art, food, and spaces of care) as they wait. I illustrate three processes of making while waiting: The making of a ‘mural-on-the-move’, a newsletter titled Breaking Barriers: When women migrate, life migrates, and intimate geopolitics of making and sharing food in borderlands.