“Igual Que Como Estaba En Honduras, a Lo Mejor Un Poquito Mejor”. Violence, Dread and Ambivalence in the Settlement Experience of Hondurans Immigrants in Mexico City.

This paper seeks to examine the emotional dynamic of dread in the settlement experiences of Honduran immigrants in Mexico City, and to investigate the impact of this on their ambivalent sense of belonging and its relationship to the characteristics of the Mesoamerican Migratory System (MMS). The analysis is based on eight narrative interviews of Honduran immigrants in Mexico City, examined from a theoretical perspective informed by the sociology of emotions and migration studies (Ariza, 2017; Kemper, 1987; Scribano, 2013; Turner, 2007). To achieve this, first, I present an overview of the biographical method, the interviews, and the analytical framework used to analyze the emotional plot of their narratives (Gabriel & Ulus, 2015). Next, I define emotions as a way platform to analyze the structural arrangements of interactions, immigrants' agency, and belonging in the migratory experience. Furthermore, I define dread as an emotion that reveals the recurrence of scenarios in which power is verticalized and social humiliation takes place. Later, I demonstrate how the extreme violence during the transit through Mexico and the arbitrary actions of immigration authorities have resulted in the emergence of dread, and how this emotion led the immigrants to appreciate their stay in Mexico City as a protective mechanism against such scenarios and develop a sense of belonging in which they feel they <<are not better than before, but they are fine here>>. Subsequently, I elucidate the emotional dynamic of dread as a consequence of particular aspects of the migration governance within the MMS, such as a policy that prioritizes border control, the arbitrariness of migration officials and the involvement of non-state actors in the perpetration of extreme violence. In the conclusion, I discuss the potential of emotions to elucidate the prevalent impact of violence in numerous migratory systems and its long-term effects on the migration process.