Knowing how to wait: im/mobilities and the entanglement of temporalities in shelters along the Mexico–U.S. border

Abstract

This article examines how asylum seekers incorporate the sociotemporal order of two shelters in Mexicali during prolonged waiting at the Mexico–U.S. border. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews, we analyze how daily and weekly routines shape the experience of waiting, producing a specific sociotemporal order in which personal, organizational, and political-migratory temporalities are co-produced through situated bodily practices. We propose the concept of ‘temporal entanglement’, informed by Barad’s agential realism and the material culture paradigm, and develop the notion of a ‘pedagogy of waiting’: the active bodily incorporation of waiting through which asylum seekers navigate the shelter’s sociotemporal order. We show that this pedagogy is gendered, as the sexual division of labor configures differentiated temporal experiences between kitchen coordination and threshold vigilance. Shelters function as spaces of oscillation between temporal domination and particular forms of sociability.