From migrancy to “migrancia”: phenomenological approaches to the social process of the migration experience of the United States-Mexico migration camp

Abstract

This article discusses the experience of migration through the concept of “migrancia”, thus making it possible to articulate the complex and diffuse category of “experience” in migration analysis. Without a viable concept in Spanish to explicitly reference the experiential repertoire of migration, I propose a new interpretation of the English concept of “migrancy”, through a reflexive conceptual deconstruction, revisited as “migrancia”. To arrive at this, I discuss major phenomenological arguments and the implications of thinking and working from “experience” in migratory contexts in order to highlight the formative role of experiences in migratory processes. In this, I highlight the importance of “de-migrantizing” migration analysis and its importance of articulating experience from a “third way”, that is, hetero-phenomenologically. Next, I address the importance of “thinking through the body”, from feminist epistemic and methodological points of view, in order to corporealize the migratory analysis and thus revisit the concrete of “migrancy” and then introduce “migrancy” as a concept that encompasses the phenomenology, embodied, of migratory experiences. Taking the field of Mexico-US migration as a reference, I frame “migrancy” from a feminist phenomenological perspective that allows not only to return agency to migrant bodies, but to bring phenomenology to migration analysis. Finally, I argue that working with “migrancy” is fundamental to understanding migratory phenomena and promises to make a valuable contribution to the analysis and ways of describing and narrating migratory processes.