ABSTRACT
Since 1990, Central American women began to migrate in great numbers through Mexico to the United States. While finance capitalist (neoliberal) globalization and liberal multiculturalism were expanding to incorporate remote regions of our contemporary world, the United States increased much more its power of attraction, always mediated by one of the most desirable promises and hopes of livable and dignified lives, the imaginary of the American Dream. Even though many postmodern discourses flamed the rhetoric of multicultural diversity vis-à-vis the traditional antisystemic discourses, Central American domestic factors fed by daily ingrained violence – economic exploitation, political domination, racial and ethnic discrimination, and gender inequality – justified the immense risks involved in the journey of migration through Mexico. All that suffering and pain –confronted and sustained from the long memory of oppression and subordination and the hopes of a better future in a space free of violence – just to be able to enjoy the lesser crumbs. However, with the turn to the right in Latin American as well as the Republicans’ comeback with Donald Trump in power, the conservative ideological folds and the greedy rapacity of naked capitalist accumulation made more visible the classic mechanisms of coloniality of power inside the empire over the most vulnerable subjects – undocumented migrant women and children, elders, LGBT, handicapped and activists –providing new configurations in the struggle for a dignified life. The systemic violence executed and performed on fragile bodies transformed the horizon of freedom, empowerment, and better life sustained by the American dream imaginary into undignified survival and shameful endurance, which now feed new politics of resistance and organization. The chapter has been elaborated from an interdisciplinary/cultural studies approach. It interweaves gender violence and affect theory, and it is based on a mixed corpus of personal and other colleague’s ethnographic research, statistics from the Pew Research Center, anthropological and sociological texts, investigative journalism, and several Farmer Associations’ and EEOC’´s work related to specific law cases.
