Journey without End

Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of “extracontinentales”—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes an engrossing, sometimes surreal, narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.

The book begins with Kidane, an Eritrean migrant who has left his pregnant wife behind to make the four-year trip to North America; it then picks up the natural disaster–riddled voyage of Roshan and Kamala Dhakal from Nepal to Ecuador; and it continues to the trials of Cameroonian exile Jane Mtebe, who becomes trapped in a bizarre beachside resort town on the edge of the Darién Gap—the gateway from South to Central America.

Journey without End follows these migrants as their fitful voyages put them in a semi-permanent state of legal and existential liminality. Mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecks—Quito’s tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panama’s Darién Gap, and a Mexican border town—into spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with racial, gender, and class exploitation. Throughout this struggle, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.