English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Open

This article considers the following question: how do the migrant caravans en route from Mexico and Central America to the USA use delays and fragmented movement to challenge state governance through their manipulation of time? I argue that migrant caravans disrupt conventional rhythms of migration governance through what I refer to as “the time of pilgrimage.” Meant to capture the different temporalities bound up with migrant caravans, including their sacred dimensions, the time of pilgrimage cuts across state time, which is otherwise assumed to be the time in which migration proceeds and borders are controlled. The time of pilgrimage sometimes defies state time, is sometimes indifferent to state time, and sometimes alters state time’s established scripts about who waits for whom at the border. The article takes an interdisciplinary approach but brings insights and methods from my home discipline of geography, including reflections on maps and other visualizations of migrant caravans. Drawing on these and other media and secondary sources but also informed by several rounds of fieldwork in areas through which caravans move, I reflect in a somewhat speculative approach on political possibilities emerging at the intersection of state time and the time of pilgrimage. I offer the notion of “altar-temporalities” as a provocation intended to heighten attention to unexpected subversions of state-centric migration regimes.

Migrant caravans and the time of pilgrimage