Lucía Suárez, Amélia Conrado and Yvonne Daniel (eds.), Dancing Bahia: Essays on Afro-Brazilian Dance, Education, Memory, and Race (Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2018), pp. xv + 228, £25.00; $33.00, pb.
contingent space built upon continuityand change.Themigrant passage has been a historical experience within the Central American region since at least the mid-1980s, when Salvadorean and Guatemalan refugees traversed the corridor looking for protection. Migrants, smugglers, enganchadores and border agents were already shaping the corridor; yet, there have been unquestionable changes. New characters have appeared, like deportees,mareros (members of a gang calledMara Salvatrucha) or zetas (members of a cartel called Los Zetas), who have reconfigured the political economy of the transit corridor. Though risk and violencewere always present in the clandestine passage, nowadays they are exacerbated. The leading regional migratory policies of control belts and toughness for deterrence, together with the proliferation of drug cartels and criminal gangs, have resulted in the increase inmass graves ofmigrants. Against this increasingly violent space, migrants’ improvisations and performances turn out to be part of a daily political struggle deployed by women and men on the move to survive. This book is a portrait of underground globalisation in action and hence a counter-hegemonic narrative of undocumented migration in the Americas. It is a definitive contribution to transnational migration scholarship, which has overlooked what long-distance transits entail and mean politically. Though focused on Central American experiences, this book speaks to a wider US, Latin American and global audience. Transit corridors, such as the one studied in this book, proliferate on a global scale. Yet, as Brigden concludes, they do not necessarily take migrants to their destinations, but to unimaginable violent ordeals. We should be receptive therefore to Brigden’s call for a new understanding of sovereignty, beyond a border security approach. Her call for route studies means focusing on mobility and on the sovereignty that people have to set themselves into motion as a way to cope with layers of violence and to struggle for their lives. Her call to understand the power of social sovereignty materialised on the route must be embraced as a way to critically identify possible new spatial transformative paths in our violent times.