Shelter Vision: Compassion, Fear, and Learning to (Not) See Trauma along the Migrant Trail through Mexico

Abstract

Within a context of shifting affective economies of racialised fear and reluctant humanitarianism that surround Central American migration through Mexico, this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to describe how aid workers negotiated concerns expressed by visiting volunteers about compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation. Building on the work of scholars who examine intersubjective and relational dynamics of looking and being looked at beyond a lens of either surveillance or performance, I describe how shelter workers learned to (not) see trauma by negotiating the affective expectations of visitors. I argue that what visitors took to be indifference and insensitivity reflects what I refer to as ‘shelter vision’, a tacit and embodied form of competent looking developed through apprenticeship and enskilment. Such vision refuses racialised discourses that position undocumented migrants as either passive victims deserving of compassion or as a toxic threat to the body politic, both in the United States and Mexico.