Transnational Homelessness: Finding a Place on the US-Mexico Border

To date, research on homeless people has neglected three issues of growing importance: transnationalism, biculturalism, and the emergence of neoliberal security regimes. Homelessness is a complex and open-ended phenomenon that is too often imagined through narrow pre-existing categories or essentialized conceptions that are transcended by the actual experiences of people living in cultural and political border zones. This article attempts to address this gap in the homelessness literature through an ethnographic study of transnational processes along the US/Mexican political and cultural borderlands in El Paso, Texas and adjacent Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. We argue that being homeless in border areas, in spite of the rise of emerging new mobility restrictions, presents many opportunities and options-especially as a result of border crossing and the dense proximity of two countries-that are unavailable to monocultural homeless people living in the interior of nation-states. Transnational homeless people present challenges to traditional and new or "revisited" concepts of homelessness, as well as neoliberal international boundary enforcement, because they take advantage of the resources and cultures of two countries simultaneously. They essentially live or find a place in two nations not one, thus significantly expanding their possibilities for sustenance and shelter. We feel that this transnational phenomenon is likely to grow in importance in the future in relation to processes of globalization, international migration and the heightened significance of international borders and boundaries as security matters and as sites of cultural hybridity and cultural differentiation. Our study can help us deepen our understanding of the effects of asymmetrical neoliberal security measures and the dynamics of social marginality in the 21st century.