How the Soconusco became a space for migrants, political organizers, and economic opportunity.
Say “the border” and minds jump to the Rio Grande, Arizona’s desert, or lines of cars stretching for miles in Tijuana. Yet recent headlines remind us that Mexico also has the Suchiate River, the jungles of Chiapas, and Tapachula’s busy plazas to demarcate its boundaries. The Trump Administration’s efforts to stop migrants from Central America – and Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean – draw international attention and U.S. resources southward, expanding the U.S.-Mexico frontier to encompass two non-contiguous borderlands. The U.S.-Mexico border —Trump’s erstwhile wall, inhumane detention facilities — remains at the center of most reporting on migration. Yet with new policies like “remain in Mexico,” it becomes ever clearer that Mexico itself, from Ciudad Juárez to Tapachula, is now part of the U.S. borderlands. The Mexico-Guatemala border has seen blustering national politics confront messier, more porous local realities before. Today, migrants seeking asylum, stranded without funds, or rebuffed at the other border, use Tapachula as a base for planning next steps. Their experiences build on a long local history of refuge, one unlikely to be ended by current anti-immigration policy.
The Soconusco, of which Tapachula is the district seat, has been a transitional space for centuries. In the 1820s, the in-betweenness that marked the region’s Aztec and then Spanish colonial experience led to temporary autonomy. Local plebiscites to determine its future as part of either the new Mexican nation or the Central American Federation were inconclusive. National governments shrugged, and the region reverted to municipal governance. When Santa Anna rode south and claimed the Soconusco for Mexico in 1842, he drew no definitive line. The borderlands remained anybody’s country.
Across the 19th century this autonomy made the region a space of asylum and political organizing. Just as endemic violence and corruption drive Central Americans northward today, civil wars and political instability in the 1800s caused many to seek refuge beyond their nations. While the border was not yet fixed, it could still be crossed to reach safety. Some municipal governments interpreted autonomy as neutrality, leading to declarations of asylum for all or refuge for none. Others took sides and supported refugees as they organized resistance to the politicians who had driven them out. Multiple would-be presidents of Guatemala and governors of Chiapas staged their coups from the borderlands.
Politics and personal danger were not the only reasons to seek out the Soconusco. The murky nature of mid-19th century legal regimes in a region claimed by two polities but governed by neither also presented economic possibilities. Contraband has long been one of these, as Rebecca Berke Galemba’s SUP book makes clear. So were legitimate undertakings, particularly the planting of export crops like coffee. The uncertainty of legal regimes made the borderlands unattractive to foreign investors, but villagers took advantage to lay their own claims. Planters and local politicians encouraged these settlements as potential sources of seasonal labor, a stance that continued well into the twentieth century.
As in the current moment, it took national politics and international tensions to bring this porous and legally ambiguous status quo to a crisis. Investment in coffee, with its slow maturation and long potential for productivity, led locals to desire more stable legal regimes. So did the military raids, both politically sanctioned and personally motivated, that the uncertainty of the frontier invited. Yet complaints to national officials bore little fruit until the interests of Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States clashed on a hemispheric stage.
Grandstanding on the part of all three countries almost led to war in the early 1880s. With the territorial losses of the Mexican-American War still fresh, Mexican politicians had no desire to concede the historic indeterminacy of the Soconusco. Guatemalan elites, on the other hand, called back to the plebiscites of the 1820s and the autonomous Soconusco’s inclination toward Guatemala as reason to assert the region’s place in a restored Central American Federation. The United States, seeking a stable isthmus across which to build an interoceanic canal, thought such a federation was its best option. Guatemalan and American diplomats approached their Mexican counterparts with an offer of mediation. Recognizing where American interests lay, Mexican officials absolutely refused.
While these national and international interests set the terms for fraught political dealings, stories from the borderlands provided moral heft to Mexican arguments. Stories of pillage, rape, and destruction, as well as accusations of fraudulent taxation and bureaucratic overreach, filled newspapers. Diplomats pointed to Guatemalan-born villagers who nonetheless turned to Mexican courts for redress against violence and theft. In translation, such stories made their way as far as the U.S. Senate. When it became widely known that Guatemala had offered to give the Soconusco to the United States, Mexico’s continual assertions of righteous national integrity found even greater purchase.
Yet even as the border became fixed, it was never impermeable. Nor was it meant to be.
The assassination of U.S. President James Garfield provided an escape hatch to increasingly hesitant and embarrassed American and Guatemalan officials. In July 1882, Mexico’s chief representative in Washington, D.C. and Guatemala’s president, both of whom owned coffee plantations in the borderlands, hashed out a treaty that cemented Mexico’s hold on the Soconusco. The surveying of the new line took more than 15 years, as the same jungles that now facilitate migrant crossings impeded the transit of engineers and their crews. Villagers and laborers who claimed citizenship in their towns of birth rather than either nation often provided the deciding voice in the border’s delineation.
Yet even as the border became fixed, it was never impermeable. Nor was it meant to be. The border treaty allowed those resident in the borderlands to choose their nationality, an identity only newly salient. Officials and elites encouraged the continued movement of labor and commerce across the declared but still porous line. Mexican politicians granted property to Guatemalan refugees and laborers who moved north in the 1880s and 1890s, creating new towns to encourage migration. In the 1930s and 1940s, Guatemalan-born coffee workers declared themselves Mexican and claimed land through national redistribution programs. Mexico granted asylum to large numbers of refugees from Central America’s civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s. Seasonal labor for the Soconusco’s coffee economy remains almost entirely Guatemalan. Though regularly discriminated against, migrants still find opportunities in the region.
Today’s migration policies attempt to counter this history of refuge and possibility. While threatening to withdraw aid if the government does not stop U.S.-bound migration, the Trump Administration nonetheless allied itself with Guatemala’s president as he killed a U.N. backed anti-corruption organization whose activities sought to address the underlying reasons people flee the country. Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has positioned himself on the moral high ground, proposing a Marshall Plan for Central America and calling for humane treatment of migrants in the face of regular evidence of local and federal police abuse. Yet he has also cut the budget for the national refugee commission and promised additional military forces to secure a space stretching from the border deep into the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Mexican efforts to police migrants have invited the U.S. into a space it was once expelled from and expanded the border back into a contested borderland.
Tapachula today is crowded with asylum seekers, those in transit, and those with no means left to continue their journeys. They organize, not to lead coups back home, but to find safety in numbers and assert their rights to fair treatment. While the Soconusco currently offers little succor, its long history as a borderland where even legal fixity never meant closure is unlikely to be undone by the exclusionary embrace of hard borders that dominates today’s politics.
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