Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of extracontinentalesAfrican 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 disasterriddled 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 Gapthe 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 as mercurial policy creates profit opportunities that transform migration bottlenecksQuitos tourist district, a Colombian beachside resort, Panamas DariÉn Gap, and a Mexican border towninto spontaneous migration-oriented spaces rife with race, gender, and class exploitation. Even then, migrant solidarity allows for occasional glimpses of subaltern cosmopolitanism and the possibility of mobile futures.
