“Reborn in Guate”: Making Resource Frontiers in Asylum in Guatemala’s Northern Petén

Abstract

The last decade and a half have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing and offshoring of asylum processing and resettlement to countries in the Global South. This article advances a new theoretical framework to examine the surge in new asylum regimes worldwide. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in several externalised asylum sites and specifically in Guatemala, it looks at these recent developments through the lens of ‘resource frontiers.’ Merging critical political ecological approaches on resource frontiers with research on border externalisation, I argue that ‘asylum frontiers’ are the social spaces connected to the exploration and development of a resource sector that extracts value from people on the move. I centre my analysis on the US-driven development of an asylum regime in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. I consider the specificities of Guatemala’s emerging asylum frontier, detailing how this arrangement sits with the country’s own histories of asylum and enforced return. In doing so, I show how different political actors – migrants, Indigenous Mayan refugees, and deported Guatemalans – ‘live with’ these frontier economies.