Mujeres en el Cruce: Remapping Border Security through Migrant Mobility

There is little doubt that the migration of women out of Latin America has been steadily increasing since the 1980s. Their increased participation in the labor market is best understood in the context of global restructuring in what been referred to as the feminization of international migration (Ramírez, García Domínguez, and Miguez Morais 2005). Yet, little is known about their actual migration experiences. We know, for example, that migration for women is becoming increasingly hazardous. Recent research on human remains recovered in the Tucson sector since 1991 by researchers at the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona1 has not only determined that migrant deaths due to exposure have increased since 1994, when harsher measures to enforce the border between the United States and Mexico border were implemented, but also that women migrants, when controlling for age (younger than 18 years of age), are 2.70 times more likely to die of exposure than all other causes when compared to men (Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006). The hazards inherent in the migration process were also brought to public attention in March 2007 with an outbreak of armed violence in Arizona, allegedly between rival bands of human smugglers. Five undocumented immigrants, two of them women, were killed in these incidents (Quinn and McCombs 2007). Other types of risks including greater reliance on coyotes (Donato et al. 2008), abandonment in the desert (O’Leary 2008, 2009a) have also only recently become more visible. Since 1993 there have been several high-profile cases of sexual assault against migrant women by Border Patrol agents (Cieslak 2000; Falcon 2001; Steller 2001; Urquijo-Ruiz 2004). These highly publicized cases have been instrumental in raising public questions about the risks migrant women face and how common they are. These issues inspired the research project “Women at the Intersection: Immigration Enforce-