Guerreros del Camino: Central American migration through Mexico and undocumented migration as civil disobedience

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans make a treacherous trip through Mexico in hopes of reaching the United States every year. Many travel on top of freight trains, many are victims of assault, kidnapping, rape, and murder, and many stay at a series of shelters during their journey. This thesis focuses on this phenomenon of Central American migration that has received relatively little scholarly attention, unlike the flows of migration from Mexico into the United States. It does so through arguing that mass undocumented migration can be seen as a new form of civil disobedience in a globalized world. Updating civil disobedience for the modern globalized context, it places mass undocumented civil disobedience squarely within this tradition of resistance. It makes this argument based on extensive interviews with Central American migrants and engaged ethnographic fieldwork done at the migrant shelter located in Ciudad Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico.