Racialized and moral-religious politics of migrant acompañamiento: Informal hosting as local care entrepreneurship along migration routes

Nanneke Winters*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

This article contributes to understanding contemporary processes of racialization in the Central American migration landscape by looking at the residential reception of increasingly diverse groups of people on the move. Based on research in southern Honduras, it argues that we need to disentangle the racialized and religious politics involved with informal spaces of assistance or acompañamiento in contexts where migrants tend to stay temporarily. Engaging with the notion of acompañamiento through the hosting practices of ordinary citizens shows how racialization gets produced and reinforced in tandem with religious teachings, entrepreneurial considerations, and local migration anxieties. The article concludes that racialization is shaped through the histories and inequalities of place and confirms the intersectional nature of racialization, which incorporates religious identities and hierarchies. Highlighting how the challenges of acompañamiento help attend to shared experiences of injustice and persistent inequalities of human mobility, the article also contributes to broadening migrant trajectory research to the communities that surround migration routes.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere70000
JournalJournal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Volume30
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 17 Feb 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 The Author(s). The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.

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