“ Your Life Is One-Hundred-Percent at Risk”: The Caravan of the Mutilated and the Internationalism of the Vulnerable

Abstract

This essay examines the cultural politics of migrant caravans through video testimonies produced by Honduras’s Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS). While the stated aim of the 2015 association-sponsored Caravan of the Mutilated involved raising transnational public awareness of the plight of Central American migrants, this essay argues that AMIREDIS’s testimonies and embodiments conjoin the savage risk confronting migrants with histories of imperialist expropriation and transnational financial processes in which migrants find themselves increasingly incorporated. In effect, their testimonies and embodiments invert the reparative logic of worker remittances—cash transfers often thought to be the objective of migration. Against the cruel economies of risk that decapacitated AMIREDIS members as laborers, their testimonies offer an internationalism of the vulnerable. This ethic of mutual vulnerability works against financial markets’ “pooled risks” and capitalism’s predilections to explain away its crippling eventualities with terms like “negative externalities” or “spillover effects.”