Comunidades en espera: la promesa de futuro en el tiempo incierto de la migración mezquitalense contemporánea

Abstract

Migration has been approached from a predominantly spatial focus that has largely neglected its temporal dimension, although the reference to the future has been recognized as an expressive factor of the phenomenon itself. Approaches in anthropology that focus on the temporality of migration have recently warned that, in contemporary global circumstances, migration projects, particularly those of irregular migrants, seem to be marked by waiting and by the temporary suspension of their resolution. Such studies tend to emphasize the migrants’ experience of time, subjected to a chronopolitics conditioned by the bureaucratic management of migration. In this paper, based on an ethnographic approach developed between 2012 and 2019 in Otomí-Hñahñu indigenous communities in the Mezquital Valley, in central Mexico, I follow anthropological concerns about the temporality of migration and waiting. However, I propose an alternative path to the one that has been developed in recent literature on the subject. At the same time, I explore the multiple ways in which the uncertain time of migration is managed among the communities of origin. I propose that these migrants co-participate in the migration project and its temporalities, by engaging in concrete practices to manage absence and waiting times. The Mezquital Valley communities, which have experienced intense migration to the United States since the end of the last century, are currently communities in waiting. A wait that, although marked by the chronopolitics of migration, does not cease to identify its promise for the future and temporarily steer migratory projects.

Keywords

• absence management
• future
• hope
• migration
• valle del mezquital
• waiting