SINHAS Vol 28 No 1 Andrew Nelson

Going to “Let-in America”: Transit, Imaginative Geography and Labor in Nepali Migration to and through South America

Andrew Nelson

Abstract
Over the past fifteen years, Nepalis have joined an increasing number of migrants from South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Caribbean entering northern South America with the goal of reaching destinations in North America or southern South America. The liberalization of immigration policy in select South American countries opened the region to Nepalis, among other nationalities, for transit migration, particularly in between the years of 2008 and 2019. While many have migrated north toward the U.S., some have moved south to Chile. Of people who have found work and stayed in Chile, most have refused to see the country as a destination, rather imagining how their current location and job could be leveraged for continued migrations. This situation provides unique insight on the role of labor abroad to enable further transit. Emerging from a larger ethnographic-journalistic collaboration on global migration in the Americas, this article focuses on two Chilean workplaces: Indian-owned stores in a free trade zone, and Chilean-managed fruit farms to analyze the relationship between labor relations and transit possibilities. The exploitative labor conditions of the free trade zone and farms extend the structural violence and spurious claims of the migration industry in both the sending spaces of Nepal and transit spaces of Ecuador and Bolivia. At the same rate, the dependency of boss-worker relations in the free trade zone and possibility of formalizing immigration status at the farms also allow for migrant laborers to expand their imaginative geography to seek continued migrations and assert incremental claims for better work conditions. 

Keywords: Transit Migration, Migrant Labor, Imaginative Geography, Nepali Diaspora, Global South-South Migration