Changing Mobility Regimes and Gender: Practices of Care Circulation in Processes of Migration Settlement in the Southern Mexican Immigrant Receiving Communities

After the humanitarian crisis of 2015 the mobility regime of people fleeing violence in Central America has been changing. Particularly women migrants and their children have to settle in Mexico due to violence on migration routes and the lack of financial resources in order to migrate up north. One strategy of survival is looking for access to formal rights through refugee protection status in Mexico. Yet this legalizing processes requires time, knowledge and care provision from other members of the family. This paper looks at the particular experiences of refugee claimants in the southern Mexican town Tapachula. Based on fieldwork in the southern Mexican town Tapachula in 2017 and drawing on earlier research in 2013 and 2014, this paper looks at the particular experiences of women during this process, their strategies put into practice in order to manage this situation and the role of the extended family network. It looks to analyse how processes of re-victimization due to segmented labour markets and other aspects of structural and gender based violence impact women’s agency during this process.