Hope, Community, and Visibility Among Venezuelan Migrants at the Juárez-El Paso Border

Hope, Community, and Visibility among Venezuelan Migrants at the Juárez-El Paso Border narrates the rise and fall of a migrant camp built by Venezuelans in 2022 in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, after the Biden administration used the pandemic-era Title 42 order to stop their entry into the United States. Crushed by this sudden change, hundreds of migrants purposefully chose this site at the very edge of the border to create a camp motivated by both the fear of conditions in Mexico and the desire to show strength through their publicly visible presence. Drawing on her own journalistic coverage of the camp, the author shows how migrants grasped and altered the social meaning of the previously vacant space. Their relationship with the border demonstrated its dual nature as both a hard line and a perforated gray area. As they lived in limbo with no path forward and no way to return home, migrants engaged in collective action to maintain the camp and to perform spectacles that would be projected worldwide by professional media workers.

Corrie Boudreaux is lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at El Paso and an award-winning photojournalist who covers the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border.