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

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.