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Mujeres en el Cruce: Remapping Border Security through Migrant Mobility Anna Ochoa O’Leary There is little doubt that the migration of women out of Latin America has been steadily increasing since the 1980s. Their increased participation in the labor market is best understood in the context of global restructuring in what has been referred to as the feminization of international migration (Ramírez, García Domínguez, and Miguez Morais 2005). Yet, little is known about their actual migration experiences. We know, for example, that migration for women is becoming increasingly hazardous. Recent research on human remains recovered in the Tucson sector since 1991 by researchers at the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona1 has not only determined that migrant deaths due to exposure have increased since 1994, when harsher measures to enforce the border between the United States and Mexico border were implemented, but also that women migrants, when controlling for age (younger than 18 years of age), are 2.70 times more likely to die of exposure than all other causes when compared to men (Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006). The hazards inherent in the migration process were also brought to public attention in March 2007 with an outbreak of armed violence in Arizona, allegedly between rival bands of human smugglers. Five undocumented immigrants, two of them women, were killed in these incidents (Quinn and McCombs 2007). Other types of risks including greater reliance on coyotes (Donato et al. 2008), abandonment in the desert (O’Leary 2008, 2009a) have also only recently become more visible. Since 1993 there have been several high-profile cases of sexual assault against migrant women by Border Patrol agents (Cieslak 2000; Falcon 2001; Steller 2001; Urquijo-Ruiz 2004). These highly publicized cases have been instrumental in raising public questions about the risks migrant women face and how common they are. These issues inspired the research project “Women at the Intersection: Immigration Enforcement Anna Ochoa O’Leary is assistant professor of practice in the Department of Mexican American and Raza Studies, University of Arizona. Journal of the Southwest 51, 4 (Winter 2009) : 523–542 524  ✜  Journal of the Southwest and Transnational Migration on the U.S.–Mexico Border.” In the spring of 2006, this study began systematically to document migrant women’s border-crossing experiences. Interviews with migrant women have provided greater understanding not only of migrants’ encounters with U.S. immigration enforcement agents, but also of the broader economic and social environments in which migration takes place.2 These experiences have been analyzed in order to render as complete a portrait as possible of migrant women who are temporarily suspended in a global “intersection ” of diametrically opposed processes on the U.S.–Mexico border: immigration enforcement and transnational movement. After summaries of the political and historical bases for the research and the research itself, I highlight portions of some of the narratives of migrant women that provide insight into how oppositional forces are reworked at this conceptual intersection. Toward this end, I focus on the tension between family separation and family reunification as perhaps the most salient of the issues brought up by migrant women. By focusing on these related but contradictory processes, I flesh out a prominent feature of the intersection, following a relational thinking approach that incorporates subjects and subjectivity into discussions about more abstract processes and concepts such the state and markets (Marchand and Runyan 2000). Multiple accounts suggest that family separation is inextricable from its opposite, family reunification. Indeed, they can be considered as opposite sides of the same coin, so to speak: the result of both poverty and the involuntary migration that can help relieve that poverty. The maintenance of such oppositional categories is further problematized by global actors who simultaneously represent both categories via transnational family forms: the extension of family relations and support networks across households and international boundaries (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2002). Emergent transnational family forms provide the basis of cross-border social networks upon which migrant mobility and settlement ultimately depend (Donato et al 2008). This process by which mobility and settlement are facilitated opens migration opportunities for still more people, until it becomes a generalized social and economic practice (Hondagneu-Sotelo...

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