WALLS AND CARAVANS. THE CENTRAL AMERICANS MIGRANTS IN TIJUANA IN DECEMBER 2018

Resumo

Live reportage of a “caravan” of Central American migrants who arrived
in Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico) in December 2018, this text provides
some information on the thousand people accommodated in the shelter
of El Barretal and their day-to-day life in this place which the municipality
dedicated to them from November 28, 2018 to January 29, 2019.
It evokes a moment of hope for the members of the caravans since the
Mexican government, led by a new president, André Manuel Lopez Obrador,
offered them the opportunity to work and settle temporarily in Mexico
and promised to help their countries of origin. As the preamble of the text
points out, this hope was brutally destroyed by the radical political turn of
the spring of 2019, which led to the closure of Mexico’s southern border,
accompanied by the criminalization and imprisonment of Central American
migrants to whom Mexico had opened his arms a few months earlier.