Captive Bodies: Migrant Kidnapping and Deportation in Mexico

Abstract

Kidnapping, originally considered a problem for the super wealthy, has quickly spread to epidemic proportions among the relative poor, especially among clandestine international migrants. This article examines how people’s relationship to the US-Mexico border shapes their vulnerability to kidnapping. Moreover, through one long ethnographic vignette and survey data of deportees’ experiences with kidnapping, this article explores how the border helps produce and shape kidnapping. By exploring the border as topological, based on the relationships created through clandestine migration and deportation, we can see how kidnapping operates to produce certain, highly varied subjectivities. Moreover, this article explores the contours of sexuality and masculinity for a feminist geopolitical take on some of the darkest chapters of the war on drugs in Mexico.

Keywords: Deportation, Migration, Violence, Drug Wars, Kidnapping, Feminist Geopolitics