Become a street dweller in a border city in northern Mexico: deportation, drug use and violence

Abstract

This article addresses the structural processes and contextual factors of the U.S.-México border that framed the decision of some deportees to live on the streets of the border city of Tijuana during the first decades of the 21st century. Based on an ethnographic research and the construction of longitudinal data, the article analyzes how deportation, easy access to drugs, and the increase of violence in the border areas of northern Mexico created a situation of entrapment at the border for those deportees with no social networks in the city. Lacking the possibility of crossing again to the U.S. due to the strengthening of the geopolitical border, the hardening of immigration policies, and violence surrounding drug trafficking, this article argue how some deportees decided to inhabit the streets of Tijuana as an extreme alternative to subsistence.