ABSTRACT
In putting forth a borderland hermeneutic that seeks to resacralize the migrant Other at the US-Mexico border, it is necessary that this book ends with a discussion on the predatory desires of entrepreneurial humanitarians, particularly those lacking ethical currency. Framed as an afterword, this chapter enters an unrestricted discursive space, albeit of the author’s own making, in which the author defines the amorphous and complex phenomenon of humanitarian entrepreneurship at the intersections of migrant trauma and the US-Mexico border. Sifting further through these entanglements reveals a representation of migrant trauma defined by data points, percentages, scales, tables, and decontextualized snapshots for social media consumption. Here, the humanitarian entrepreneur’s diagnosis of migrant trauma yields the initial phase of the marketization of trauma—a process that disembodies migrant sufferers from their suffering. As a collection of data, the lived traumas of migrant border crossers are distilled into malleable and transportable artifacts that then allow them a multiplicity of functions within the humanitarian’s economy of professionalization. In this redacted form, however, would the migrants themselves recognize these artifacts of trauma as their own?
