Migrant struggles in the Darién Gap-Tapón: Rethinking a more-than-human border

Abstract

The Darién rainforest between Panama and Colombia has been commonly conceived as a wild, inaccessible, and lawless borderland marking a social and territorial rupture in the Americas. Yet, recent precarious migration journeys have challenged its imagined function as a “natural border” between the “South” and the “North” of the continent. Amid migration management anxiety, authorities and institutional actors have sought to re-instate the border, by positioning the rainforest as both a dangerous place and a place in need of conservation. In this text, I advance a More-than-Human framework to approach mobility-related complications in this context, which are meaningful in assessing how people on the move navigate re/bordering throughout their trajectories. Conceptually, I rely on the bilingual term Darién Gap-Tapón (“clog”) and assess how migrant struggles are mediated by the agencies of non-human lives, geomorphic bodies, and things. In so doing, I comment on a thematic analysis of an eclectic virtual dataset produced between 2021 and 2024, including 19 portrayals of migrants' journeys on YouTube. Using the metaphors of unclogging and reclogging in my analysis, I approach the complicated, overlapping, and often diffuse ways in which the Darién both borders migrants’ mobility and struggles along with migrants for mobility. I hence contribute to the dialogue between Critical Border Studies and More-than-Human ontologies aiming at imagining viable analytical alternatives on dominant unequal forms of global migration management.