The journey of Central American women migrants: engendering the mobile commons

ABSTRACT

This article delves into the concept of the ‘mobile commons’ which is articulated within the Autonomy of Migration (AoM) approach. The AoM literature focuses on migrant agency by advocating that migrants practice ‘escape’ and ‘invisibility’. However, drawing on the stories of women migrants from the Northern Triangle of Central American (NTCA) (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) travelling through Mexico, this article aims to engender and thereby trouble the concept of the mobile commons by questioning several taken-for-granted assumptions that are based on gender-neutral knowledge and dichotomous ways of thinking. Using women’s experiences to question the assumptions made with respect to ‘migrant knowledge’, I show that the knowledge among women migrants from the NTCA is influenced by gendered power imbalances that place women in subordinate positions. The analysis will first focus on explaining the mobile commons as a theoretical concept. Following this, I discuss how conceptualizing the mobile commons through a feminist perspective challenges the ideas of invisible knowledge and trust often integral to the ways in which the concept of the mobile commons is used. Finally, I outline the survival strategies that migrant women may use given their own knowledge of the migration context in Mexico, and reflect on what this means for the scholarly understanding of the ‘mobile commons’.