WENDY A. VOGT Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Crossing Mexico: Structural violence and the commodification of undocumented Central American migrants ABSTRACT The undocumented-migrant journey across Mexico has become a site of intense violence, exploitation, and profit making within the logics of capitalism. While transnational migration is often conceptualized from the perspective of sending and receiving communities and borderlands, I suggest the liminal spaces between these zones are crucial sites for understanding how structural forms of violence are reconfigured in local settings. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in migrant shelters located along the journey, I trace how Central American migrants’ bodies, labor, and lives are transformed into commodities within economies of smuggling, extortion, and humanitarian aid. I argue that everyday violence along the journey is produced by historical trajectories of political and criminal violence and by local and global economies that profit from human mobility. As violence is rearticulated at the local level, new tensions and social dislocations emerge between and among social groups. [migrant journeys, commodification, structural violence, securitization, political economy, Central America and Mexico] D uring my fieldwork studying violence and migration in south- ern Mexico, Father Jos´ e, a priest who runs a migrant shelter in the state of Oaxaca spoke to me about the cachuco indus- try. Cachuco is a derogatory term used for Central Americans in Mexico and roughly translates to “dirty pig.” Instead of sim- ply blaming an increase in violence against migrants on “bad” individu- als, gangs, or drug cartels, Father Jos´ e spoke of the dynamic economic in- dustry that surrounds the steady movement of undocumented transit mi- grants. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras attempt to cross Mexico, where they regularly en- counter abuse, rape, dismemberment, and death. 1 While Central Ameri- cans have historically encountered abuse in Mexico since they began mi- grating in substantial numbers during the civil wars of the 1980s, in recent years, direct violence and exploitation have become far more systematic and inescapable. 2 Manuel, a migrant from El Salvador, described this shift: Before on the journey, there were robbers and everyone knew that they would steal whatever you had on you but then they would leave you in peace. But now, with these groups that are kidnapping, well it’s a whole other level, now they are organized together with the police and they carry weapons, heavy artillery. The same police that denounce them are the ones who protect them. It’s the same group that you see on the news, the ones who kidnapped the 32 [referring to 32 migrants held captive in Puebla in 2008]. They have not been around long, I think it was just this year that it all began, or maybe two years. Imagine, they kidnap 20, or ten or even five people and they ask for $5,000 for each one. They know that their families will send money even if they cannot afford to. In this article, I examine how the journey across Mexico has become a site of intense violence and profit making. I suggest that everyday physical acts of violence must be understood as arising at the in- tersection between local and global economies that profit from human AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 764–780, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12053