Participatory photography and undocumented migration through Mexico at the intersection of social work and anthropology

Abstract

This article reflects on participatory photography in the context of ethnographic fieldwork at a humanitarian migrant shelter in Central Mexico to consider broader intersections between social work and anthropology. I describe how shifting immigration enforcement trends across Mexico reconfigured my original plan for integrating participatory photography into my work as a researcher and shelter worker. Tracing these changes through three cases examples, I highlight tensions between photography as a reflection of social experience and photography as a mechanism for enacting social change. In light of recent critiques surrounding formulaic and cursory discussions of empowerment in participatory photography, I argue that unexpected shifts in research and practice strategies are themselves meaningful data, especially in uncertain policy environments.

Keywords

Ethnography participatory research borders migration photography

Introduction

Scene 1: In a train yard in southern Mexico, a flustered video journalist with an exaggerated gringo accent yells condescendingly up at a group of Central American men standing on top of a railway car, “For God’s sake. No! No! No! If you guys are migrants, then show it!” As the migrants calmly climb down the railway car’s ladder and walk past the rebuffed journalist, one of the young men says, “You try it!”

Scene 2: A white photographer with a camera around her neck stands on a railway tie and ponders a young man squatting with his pants around his ankles at the base of a railway embankment. “Hey! What are you doing?!” he yells as he stands and pulls up his pants. “You’re like a monarch butterfly, flying to the north” the photographer explains whimsically, “I’m going to immortalize this moment.”

These scenes from Danger: Journalists Crossing, a video posted to YouTube in the spring of 2015 (Narco News TV, 2015), satirize sensationalized accounts of what the anthropologist Nicholas De Genova (2013) has referred to as the “border spectacle” surrounding undocumented migration along Mexico’s infamous freight railway networks. I first saw the video circulating on social media two months before starting long-term ethnographic fieldwork at La Casita, one of several dozen grassroots migrant shelters that provide humanitarian aid to people crossing Mexico. Two months before seeing the video, as unaccompanied minors arriving at the US-Mexico border continued to make front-page news in the United States (Androff, 2016; Doering-White, 2018a), I had been awarded a research grant to examine the politics of humanitarian aid within migrant shelters in Mexico using participatory photography. The video hit home.

My research plan, which I developed in conversation with the organizers at La Casita, aimed to harmonize my anthropological interest in the everyday politics of humanitarian aid and my interests as a social worker in supporting La Casita’s goals. The bulk of my fieldwork would consist of participant observation as a shelter collaborator. I would conduct intake interviews, prepare meals, and distribute donated clothing, among other tasks. Building on the work of social work scholars who see participatory photography as a form of scholarly praxis (Clark and Morriss, 2017; Molloy, 2007; Wang and Burris, 1997), I planned to document aspects of the migrant trail that are often overlooked in the kinds of reports satirized in the YouTube video. I would ask shelter guests what they considered to be the most significant object, photograph it, and use the photo to guide conversations about what they had experienced along the route. By focusing on seemingly mundane things chosen by migrants themselves—toothbrushes, prayer cards, blanket rolls, cell phones—I aimed to support the shelter’s interest in decentering the spectacle of the train. Photographing objects, as opposed to people, would also respect that anonymity is often a key resource for people migrating through Mexico. I was nothing like the journalists caricatured in the video, I thought.

By the fall of 2015, however, many things had changed since my first preliminary fieldwork visit in 2014. Mexican authorities had intensified immigration enforcement across southern Mexico in an effort to stop unaccompanied minors from reaching the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrants increasingly sought long-term aid term aid in shelters like La Casita after being waylaid by mobile immigration raids along railways (Basok and Rojas Wiesner, 2017; Doering-White, 2018b). While most migrants still only stayed for a night or two, a growing number of people stayed for weeks and months. I wondered about what these shifts would mean for the participatory photography project. The idea was to decenter the train and prioritize respect for migrant anonymity. Would photographing everyday objects unintentionally wash over the increasingly relevant experience of being “stuck in transit” (Frank‐Vitale, 2020)? Maybe I was just as out of touch as the journalists caricatured in the video.

I reflect in this article on my efforts to harmonize participatory photography and shelter work to consider broader intersections between social work and anthropology. I begin by outlining the role of photography across social work and anthropology, focusing in particular on Wang and Burris’ (1997) influential photovoice method as a window into empirical and ethical tensions between documenting social reality and enacting social change. Next, I draw on three case examples to outline how Mexico’s shifting immigration enforcement landscape complicated my initial plan for integrating participatory photography into my fieldwork. Migrants saw photos as an opportunity to update family members living across multiple borders, to reframe “failed” journeys, and to plan for an uncertain future. Photos were not just a reflection of what had happened, they were also tools for carving out a path forward. These dual functions of photography—to reflect social reality and enact social change—illuminate challenges and opportunities involved in conducting participatory research at the intersection of social work and anthropology.

Participatory photography at the intersection of social work and anthropology

In both social work and anthropology, participatory photography emerged in response to disciplinary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge production (Coemans et al., 2019; Edwards and Morton, 2016). Early uses of photography in both disciplines revolved around bolstering the legitimacy of knowledge claims. As participant observation developed as the hallmark of anthropology in the early 20th century, for example, photos from the field (taken by and large from the perspective of a white male ethnographer) provided evidence that the ethnographer had really been there (Clifford, 1983; Edwards, 2011). During the same period, progressive era social workers partnered with documentary photographers to present photographs as objective and transparent evidence in advocating for social reforms (Szto, 2008). Lewis Hine, for example, who identified himself as a “social photographer,” partnered with Jane Addams to support National Child Labor Committee (Sampsell-Willmann, 2009).

In the latter decades of the 20th century, the social sciences underwent what is often referred to in anthropology as a “crisis of representation” (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In line with a broader postmodern turn (Harvey, 1992), scholars emphasized that photographs are a product of politically situated perspectives (Pink, 1999). Susan Sontag, whose seminal book On Photography (1977) was published on the leading edge of this sea change, argued that while “Photographs are miniatures of reality,” they also “get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out” (4). Sontag’s intervention and others like it have had a significant impact on social work and other helping professions given that photography constructs social problems and solutions in particular ways (Bourgois, 2001; Schonberg and Bourgois, 2002). The anthropologist Andrew Lakoff (1996), for example, traced how photographs of Balinese children taken by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1942) shaped research into healthy child development norms in the United States. These critical analyses called the factual objectivity of photographs into question and raised ethical concerns about how photos are decontextualized and recontextualized to support social policy, often with little attention paid to the desires of those represented in the photographs.

It is in the context of this intellectual history that Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997) outlined photovoice as an interdisciplinary framework for integrating photography into participatory research in an explicitly political manner. I focus on photovoice here because of its significant influence in both social work and anthropology (Liebenberg, 2018). However, it is important emphasize that Wang and Burris draw on earlier efforts to provide cameras to people that have historically been the object of the Western gaze: young people, immigrants, native people, and individuals experiencing homelessness, for example (Byrne et al., 2016; Clark and Morriss, 2017).

Guided by Paolo Freire’s (1968, 1973) work on critical pedagogy and feminist approaches to participatory research (Maguire, 1987), photovoice aims to empower community members to “become advocates for their own and their community’s wellbeing” by photographically depicting community problems and strengths (Wang and Burris, 1997: 373). Wang and Burris describe photovoice according to three goals that correspond to three stages: (1) photograph community strengths and concerns, (2) reflect on the significance of the photographs, and (3) reach policymakers (370). They are careful to emphasize the method’s “adaptability” in light of several “disadvantages” or “limitations” (374), including risks to participants associated with the explicitly political nature of photovoice, the tendency for photographs to hide as much as they reveal, and the possibility for the participatory process to reproduce material and status inequalities.

While the history of photography in social work and anthropology has important parallels, this language of “disadvantages” or “limitations” highlights epistemological and ethical tensions between the two disciplines. First, the idea of “limitations” echoes positivist hypothesis testing in which knowledge claims are “limited” by, for example, sampling or response bias (Staller, 2012). This differs from anthropology’s interpretivist commitment to reflexively contextualizing aims and unintended consequences (Pink, 2003). The anthropologist Christopher Wright (2013), for example, emphasizes the importance of tracing photograph’s “echoes” to understand “not just what is depicted in the photograph, what it might be thought to contain in any fixed historical sense, but also what goes on around it, its life” (p.7). Similarly, tracing what Ari Heinrich (2008) describes as the “afterlives” of photographs beyond their initial production is important for understanding how photos shape ideas about race, disease, and identity over time (p.5).

Second, framing dilemmas of voice, ownership, and intention as obstacles implies something to be avoided. This language is significant given anthropological writing around “ethnographic refusal” (Ortner, 1995), the tendency for anthropologists to “sanitize” ethnographic data that does not fit neatly into “romantic” narratives of domination and resistance (p.179). As scholars like Amelia Frank-Vitale (2019) and Alexandra Crampton (2015) suggest, omitting or “refusing” ethnographic data that portrays communities facing complex vulnerabilities doing oppressive or violent things is itself oppressive to the extent that it silences ethically ambiguous survival strategies (looting, for example) in favor of more ‘respectable’ forms of resistance (permitted marches, for example). Along these lines, social work researchers have raised concerns that photovoice studies tend to omit the kinds of “disadvantages” noted by Wang and Burris and provide only a thin, relatively monolithic discussion of empowerment (Bukowski and Buetow, 2011; Coemans et al., 2019). As Coemans and colleagues (2019) argue, photovoice has often been implemented rather formulaically with only limited attention to tensions of voice, ownership, and empowerment. Del Vecchio and colleagues (2017) similarly argue that photovoice tends to be a relatively linear, self-contained, and largely researcher-driven process. “When images are packaged into glossy slideshows and presented at conferences by researchers,” Del Vecchio and colleagues ask, “what happens to the meanings intended by the [participant]?” (p.361). While I have called attention to the ways that Wang and Burris write about “limitations” and “disadvantages” might have contributed to this trend, I do not think that this is what Wang and Burris had in mind when they wrote their article. Indeed, much of Wang and Burris’ analysis of their work with women in Yunnan focuses on representational dilemmas at various stages of the photovoice process.

My aim in this section has been to situate participatory photography in a much wider conversation regarding photography and the politics of knowledge production at the intersection of social work and anthropology. Participatory photography, and photovoice in particular, have emerged in response to an extractive and colonial documentary photography tradition. This tradition perpetuated the idea that photos are a transparent reflection of reality, a perspective that tends to overlook the opinions of those most impacted by the social policies that photographers and researchers sought to influence. Later, scholars critiqued the way that this stance erased the interpretive context and political dimensions of knowledge production. This, of course, carries significant risks given that, as Bourgois and Schonberg write, “Letting a picture speak a thousand words can result in a thousand deceptions” (Schonberg and Bourgois, 2002: 388).

This history reveals a persistent tension between photos as a reflection of social experience and photos as mechanisms for enacting social change. In their influential article, Wang and Burris note that these tensions are particularly evident in the context of photographic collaborations between researchers, community members, and organizations. However, as participatory photography has become more commonplace as a method for action research, scholars have pointed out a tendency to “refuse” such representational tensions. In what follows, I affirm the importance of attending to the unexpected politics of participatory photography by outlining deviations from the initial plan I developed in collaboration with shelter workers at La Casita. I first frame my methodological approach in relation to visual regimes that have tended to center railways as the locus of immigration politics across Mexico. I then present three examples from my ethnographic research that speak to the ways that shifting immigration enforcement trends led to a reconfiguration of the relationship between myself as researcher-photographer, the migrants who passed through La Casita, and the organization itself.

Methodology

I began the broader ethnographic study that this paper draws on in 2014, shortly before the Mexican government announced the Southern Border Program, a policing initiative that intensified immigration enforcement in the name of defending the human rights of undocumented migrants, young people in particular (Ureste, 2015). The Southern Border Program, which focused in particular on closing freight railways to the business of undocumented migration (Leutert et al., 2019), replicated a broader tendency exemplified by films such as Sin Nombre (Fukunaga, 2009), Which Way Home (Cammisa, 2009), and Who is Dayani Cristal? (Bernal, 2013) to center railways as the locus of undocumented migration through Mexico. Scholars note how this emphasis on the highly mediated figure of La Bestia both reveals and conceals (Basok, 2019) given that freight railways, which have often been described as the option of last resort for migrants who do not have the money to pay smuggler’s fees, make up one slice of a much broader migration landscape through Mexico (Sanchez, 2017).

As I mentioned in the introduction, I developed a plan for integrating participatory photography into my fieldwork as a response to this representational imbalance. I introduced myself as a researcher and shelter worker during intake procedures and explained the goal of documenting underappreciated objects that others might overlook. Most people are aware that researchers and journalists tend to rely on shelters as relatively safe space to learn about their experiences. That being said, I arranged to conduct interviews only after shelter guests had the chance to rest overnight in order to minimize the possibility that shelter guests might feel compelled to participate in an interview in order to access the shelter. I used a digital camera to photograph objects that people carried then integrated those images as “probes” into interviews about the material impacts of intensified policing along railways and highways (De León and Cohen, 2005). I also carried a polaroid-style instant camera to offer easy-to-carry portraits as a small token of gratitude.

Altogether, I conducted 20 months of fieldwork in and around migrant shelters across Mexico between 2014 and 2017. Most of my fieldwork consisted of participant observation at La Casita, though I also followed several people over time and across several sites, keeping detailed field notes and taking hundreds of photographs as I did so. All study participants provided oral consent to participate, as outlined the study's research ethics protocol (University of Michigan Institutional Review Board Study #HUM00111651). All names in this paper are pseudonyms. La Casita is also a pseudonym. In line with those who argue that blurring or blacking out faces in photographs contributes to the dehumanization of vulnerable populations (Allen, 2015; Nutbrown, 2011), I have chosen to exclude photographs in this particular article. There are certainly instances when showing someone’s face makes sense (De León, 2018). For example, another aspect of my research follows a migrant whose case was widely covered in local and national press outlets in collaboration with a documentary filmmaker (www.bordersouth.com). Differently, my focus in this paper is on the unexpected uses of photographs as opposed to their content.

Findings

The photographic component of my fieldwork focused initially on sharing what migrants considered to be important about the route with a broader audience. This approach emphasized photographs as a reflection of migrants’ experiences crossing Mexico and respect for migrant anonymity. As crossing Mexico became more circuitous and the number of migrants seeking long-term aid at La Casita increased in the wake of the Southern Border Program, this approach increasingly came across as out of touch with the shifting needs of migrants and the shelters’ efforts to address them. In what follows, I present three case examples that speak to how photographs played a part in migrants’ and shelter workers’ sometimes conflicting efforts to shape an uncertain future.

Updates En route

The first departure from the initial plan for photo interviews revolved around migrant and shelter worker anonymity. All new arrivals at La Casita were asked to share demographic information during a brief intake interview, but sharing identifiable personal information was not required to access the shelter. In fact, shelter workers tried their best to avoid collecting and sharing personal information because migrant shelters, which are often referred to as safe spaces or sanctuaries for people navigating criminalized pathways, are also known to be frequented by people looking to take advantage of migrants (Vogt, 2018). Shelter workers worried about being accused of sharing information that people might use to exploit migrants or delegitimize the shelter. For the same reason, shelter workers asked shelter collaborators (including researchers like myself) to not exchange contact information or social media handles with migrants. As abuses against migrants escalated in the wake of the Southern Border Program, however, some shelter workers came to see this ethic of anonymity as patronizing and counterproductive. A shelter worker named Norma explained that migrants are often well aware of the risks they take in sharing information with strangers. From Norma’s standpoint, limiting photo interviews to the objects that migrants carried would protect migrant anonymity, but it would also withhold a powerful tool for updating family members as migrants increasingly faced setbacks along the route. Instead of viewing my camera as a potential risk factor for migrants, Norma often slyly informed people passing through the shelter that my camera could also record video.

One day, for example, I returned to the shelter after running an errand to find Norma chatting with a newly arrived migrant named Daniel, who sat trying to warm himself up by the stove while Norma chopped carrots for the midday meal. After I shook hands with Daniel, Norma turned to him and said, “John is the person I was mentioning who has a video camera.” Daniel recounted how he and his nephew, who was sleeping in the dormitory, had been shot at by railway guards a few hours earlier. Luckily the bullets missed, but they were understandably shaken. Daniel, Norma explained, had told her how badly he would like to record a video message and send it to his family back home in Honduras. “I want my wife to be able to see my face and hear my voice, come what may,” he explained.

The next morning, I grabbed my camera and Daniel and I left the shelter, walking a couple of blocks down the tracks to find a quiet place to talk. Sitting on a street curb, Daniel looked directly into the camera’s lens and left a message for his wife and two daughters.

Hi Catalina, it’s a pleasure to greet you, baby. I want you to know how much I miss you, how much I love you, and for you to see how I’m doing. Thankfully, I’m doing ok. I’m just a few hours away from Mexico City. I ask you to forgive me for being out of touch. Something happened. We’re ok, but I’m tired. And, well, take care of the girls for me. Don’t lose faith that we’re going to be together again. It’s taking me longer than I expected because of what’s happening here. I just want to let you know that I’m here, and that I’m with you no matter where I am. I don’t know what will happen next, but don’t worry. Everything will be ok.

Daniel’s desire to send a video message to his wife and children reflected a sense that the route had become more uncertain and more deadly as a consequence of the Southern Border Program. Norma enlisting me to help Daniel went against shelter safety protocols and deviated from the initial plan of only photographing migrants’ belongings. This deviation offered insight into shifting logics of shelter work, as organizers at La Casita reckoned with the ways that protecting migrant anonymity also foreclosed opportunities for migrants to connect with their broader support systems.

Reframing “failed” journeys

A second and related departure from my initial plan reflected the growing number of migrants seeking to regularize their immigration status in Mexico with the help of organizations like La Casita (Leutert et al., 2019). Some migrants sought recognition as refugees while others applied for what is commonly referred to as the humanitarian visa, which grants temporary legal status to undocumented individuals who suffer or witness certain violent offenses while crossing Mexico (González-Murphy, 2013). While in some areas, accessing legal status was relatively straight-forward and timely, authorities in other areas appeared to intentionally set up bureaucratic roadblocks in the hope that migrants would abandon their cases and continue their journeys. This was the case at La Casita, where shelter workers came to see publicizing abuses as a key strategy for pressuring reluctant local officials to proceed with migrants’ cases. In addition to photographing migrants’ belongings, I was increasingly called by my fellow shelter workers to photograph evidence of abuses against migrants, ranging from bruises to bullet wounds. However, several migrants who suffered violent abuses were themselves apprehensive about publicizing their suffering in order to secure legal status, even when precautions to hide identifying information were taken. This would become a central dilemma for shelter workers: whether the process of helping migrants to obtain legal status in Mexico was more damaging than helpful, especially when most migrants ultimately hoped to reach the United States where their legal status in Mexico would be meaningless.

William, for example, arrived at La Casita in the early days of 2016 after being shot through the foot by railways guards. Embarrassed by what had happened, William shied away from reporters and human rights advocates, much to the dismay of shelters workers who were optimistic about his chances of receiving a humanitarian visa. Like many migrants, he primarily saw applying for humanitarian recognition as a way to bide his time (Doering-White, 2018a). At the same time, William was keen to have me take photographs that he could send to family members back home, but only after he could walk without crutches again.

Most days, William wore a comfortable pair of gray sweatpants and slip-on sandals. When I arrived on the agreed upon day, William was dressed in a pair of jeans and a crisp, oversized white shirt that he had selected from the piles of clothing donated to the shelter. Instead of slip-on sandals, he wore a pair of sneakers loosely laced to accommodate his swollen foot. When we got out on the railway tracks that ran just beyond the shelter’s door, I wondered out loud about the best way to portray his foot, whether he wanted to take off both shoes or just the one. “You think I want to be barefoot in the picture?” he responded. “I thought you wanted to have a record of what you’ve been through,” I said. His retort was playful, but also instructive: “You think I’m proud of this?” For William, the shooting was as humiliating as it was unjust.

After our photo shoot, I accompanied William to a local internet café where he uploaded the photos to Facebook. “I need them to believe in me,” he explained. Instead of making his trauma more widely visible, William wanted to show his family members back home that everything was fine and that they should proceed with the plan to help him find a smuggler once he made it to the U.S.-Mexico border. Like Daniel, William’s interest in visually representing his journey went well beyond the ethic of anonymity that structured our initial focus on objects. William also hoped to update his family members, albeit with a very particular visual message. Unlike shelter workers, who hoped that a photo of the bullet wound would put additional pressure on local authorities to grant William a humanitarian visa, Daniel hoped to conceal his injuries and portray himself as capable, strong, and determined.

Planning for an uncertain future

A third unexpected dimension revolved around the fact that many people fleeing the consequences of gang violence and the militarized war on drugs continue to depend on illicit economies to continue migrating. During the final months of fieldwork, I left La Casita to spend time with a man named Gustavo who had settled in Monterrey, a major city in northern Mexico, after receiving a humanitarian visa while staying at La Casita. While in Monterrey, I met Rolando, a man from El Salvador who had received refugee status in Mexico a year earlier at a different shelter. Gustavo and Rolando worked together at a welding workshop and I spent most days with the two men to better understand the experience of living in Mexico after receiving formal humanitarian recognition. In mid-October 2016, I lent Rolando the instant camera that I had carried with me throughout my fieldwork. Two weeks later, just days after Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States, we met to discuss the photos he had taken. To my surprise, Rolando was using the photos he had taken to convince his gang-involved brothers to lend him money to attempt a crossing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The younger brother of two gang members who tried to protect him from how they made a living, Rolando had grown up surrounded by the drug economy, yet kept at its margins because of his addiction to the drugs sold by his brothers. In one sense, the journey through Mexico had been one of redemption for Rolando. Since detoxing while waiting for refugee status at a shelter in southern Mexico, he had stayed away from hard drugs and he was holding down a steady job at the welding workshop. However, as with many Central Americans facing an uncertain future, Rolando’s redemption depended to an extent on remaining connected to the world he was fleeing.

Rolando began by reflecting on how much his life had changed now that he no longer lived in constant debt to his dealers. Holding a photo that showed a fleece blanket folded neatly across a bare mattress, Rolando explained how in El Salvador he often stayed at family member’s homes, sleeping fully clothed in outside patio areas in case dealers he owed money to came for him,

I mean, it’s nothing special but this mattress is mine. I can sleep how I want with my feet whatever direction I damn please. With my cousin, I always slept outside in a hammock. With my aunt, I slept outside on her terrace. Whatever happened, I was already dressed and ready to run. I slept with my shoes on, fully clothed. Here? Just in my underwear. So, yea, it feels good to have your own place. You don’t realize how important that is until you have it. When you have your own things, you know what they cost and so you take more care of them.

In Monterrey, Rolando could revel in the little things, like getting undressed before going to sleep. For the first time in many years, he felt that he could get comfortable. However, this sense of settlement was tentative at best. When I asked him what he might do with the photos he had taken, he explained that he had sent many of the images to his sisters in El Salvador with the hope that the photos would offer proof that he had changed and that they could trust him.

I was an addict. I was around gangs. I stole. But I’m not like that now. And it hurts to say that, to say that I’m an addict, but it also makes me proud to say that I’m no longer involved. My sisters wouldn’t talk to me. But now that they see me in these photos with nice shoes, good clothes, I’m sending money home to my kids, they see that I’m changing, that I’m starting over. They say, “That son of a bitch is really changing!”

When I asked him if he thought about sending the photos to anyone else, Rolando let me know that he had also sent them to Manuel, a family friend from back home who now lived in New York. In El Salvador, Manuel owned a bakery with a back room where he let Rolando stay when he needed a place to go. When Manuel became the target of gang extortions, Rolando returned the favor by convincing his gang-affiliated brothers to cut Manuel a break. As Rolando put it, “I took an extortion off him.” Instead of being dispossessed of his property or killed, both common consequences of not paying an extortion (Fontes, 2016), Manuel was “allowed” to sell his property. With the proceeds of this somewhat benevolent shakedown, Manuel paid a smuggler and made the journey north, eventually arriving in New York.

Amid speculation about how the Trump administration might intensify border enforcement and immigration raids, Rolando was looking for Manuel to return the favor and help him get across the border before Trump could take office. While Rolando wanted to get across the border, Manuel was preparing for the possibility of deportation. He let Rolando know that he was hoping to buy back some of the property he had been forced to sell several years earlier. According to Rolando, Manuel had offered to pay for Rolando to hire a smuggler in the hopes that he would convince his brothers to treat Manuel favorably if he were to be deported. “How do you think Manuel sees you?” I asked him, “You know, knowing who your brothers are?”

I’m like insurance for him, but it’s not open like that, you know? He’s never going to say it, that I’m connected. But he knows that whatever favor that he needs, I can probably do it. Well, I can’t actually do it. I can put in word for him. Manuel knows that he has me. It’s not about money, it’s about people. I mean, with money you can do what you want. You can get someone killed in prison for 100 dollars in El Salvador. And if the person is out of prison, it’s only ten.

As much as Rolando’s photos reflected the self-transformation that Rolando had gone through while migrating through Mexico, he was also using them rekindle and sustain social obligations between his aspirational future and his past. The photos, Rolando explained, were key to demonstrating that crossing Mexico had changed him, that he was no longer using drugs, and that he had landed a job and his own apartment. In order to continue migrating, he had to show that he had arrived.

The way Rolando used the photographs he had taken to rekindle his relationships with his family in El Salvador speaks to the importance of tracing the unintended uses of photographs made in the context of participatory photography over time. His story also emphasizes how the representational tensions involved in making photographs in collaboration with migrants within shelters echo beyond those particular organizational contexts. I also want to stress that Rolando’s story should not be taken out of context as evidence that “asylum is a scam” (Leary and Salama, 2019). Instead, it emphasizes the limits of formal humanitarian frameworks that provide legal protections without addressing social and economic wellbeing (Heidbrink, 2019). This in turn can lead asylum seekers like Rolando to mobilize photographs in an ethically ambiguous effort to maintain their own safety and the safety of family members who continue to face the threat of violence.

Conclusion

In this article, I have reflected on unexpected dimensions of my efforts to integrate participatory photography into ethnographic fieldwork with people who access migrant shelters while making undocumented journeys through Mexico. In particular, I have focused on how a shifting landscape of immigration enforcement that has been shaped by a broader railway-centric visual regime led to a significant reconfiguration of my original plan for integrating participatory photography in conversation with organizers at La Casita. In my initial conversations with shelter workers, we thought of participatory photography as a way to visually represent what the migrant journey is really like beyond the border spectacle that is La Bestia while maintaining an ethic of migrant anonymity. However, as the shelter’s priorities shifted in the wake of the Southern Border, this initial plan felt increasingly out of touch, in spite of the plan’s initial aim of avoiding the kinds of representational dynamics satirized in the video that I described in the opening of this paper. These shifts brought up ethical tensions related to my role as an anthropologist and shelter collaborator as my photography became implicated not only in shelter work, but also migrants’ survival strategies while en route.

Through three case examples, I showed how migrants appropriated participatory photography to shape increasingly uncertain migration pathways. Given that intensified policing meant that journeys often took longer than expected, Daniel saw photographs as a means of reassuring family members that he was alive and on the move. For William, photographs were useful for cultivating an image of health and well-being in order to maintain support from family members, an approach that was very different from that of humanitarian aid workers who sought to pressure immigration authorities to more speedily grant formal humanitarian recognition. And for Rolando, while photos were mechanisms for demonstrating self-transformation in line with a discourse of asylum as a process of escape and recovery, constructing this new self depended to a certain extent on referencing and relying on the violence that he hoped to leave behind.

By situating these tensions in the context of photography’s historical role in both social work and anthropology, this paper aims to affirm a shared commitment in both disciplines to prioritizing reflexive attention to the often unintended and unexpected impact of the research process. By taking deviations from my original research plan as a window into the shifting politics of humanitarian aid along migrant routes through Mexico, my aim has been to counter what social workers note as a recent tendency to implement participatory photography methods formulaically and with only a cursory attention to representational tensions. The unexpected twists and turns of research and practice are important pieces of data that speak to opportunities and challenges associated with conducting research at the intersection of social work and anthropology, particularly in uncertain policy contexts.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for researh, authorshipr, and/or publcation of this article: This research was support by a Wenner Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, a Fulbright Garcia-Robles Fellowship, The University of Michigan School of Social Work, and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan.

ORCID iD

John Doering-White

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