Shifting the Border

Abstract

This chapter decenters the traditional focus on the US-Mexico border as a site of migration discourse and shows how the conceptual shift of the border now extends to Mexico-Guatemala, El Salvador–Honduras, Nicaragua–Costa Rica, and even along the “vertical border” that is Mexico. Analyses of Central American artworks reveal what the chapter describes as “shifting the border”—an act of visual disobedience that creates countercartographies of migration and recenters the right to freedom of mobility. By shifting the border, these artworks instead highlight the physical journeys and landscape of migration, anti-immigrant sentiment within the region, the consequence of migration on families, the architecture of remittances and changes to urban space, memory and mapmaking in migration, resilience of unaccompanied child migrants, and other intricacies of Central American migration. Central American artists locate migration beyond the US-Mexico border to reveal empires' spatial logics of movement control—a war on mobility.