Affective governmentality of migrations and borders

Abstract

Introduction: This article examines the affective governmentality of migration at the interior frontiers of Arica, a Latin American border city in northern Chile. Drawing on the intersection of critical migration, border studies, and affect theory, it argues that affects of control do not merely accompany the urban segregation of irregularized migrants but actively constitute the interior frontiers that produce it. Method: The analysis is based on a pragmatist ethnography carried out between September 2024 and December 2025 in Cerro Chuño, an informal land occupation ( toma ) inhabited primarily by undocumented Venezuelan families, and combines participant observation, ten in-depth ethnographic interviews, and a complementary, ethnographically integrated discourse analysis of 494 online comments on two evictions reported by local digital news media. Results: Conceptually, the article articulates two strands of critical migration and border scholarship: the politics of exhaustion, which theorizes everyday violence as a biopolitics that wears down bodies and the infrastructures of life without killing directly; and the literature on affective control, which examines how migration regimes govern through disciplinary emotions such as fear, frustration, and uncertainty. Empirically, the analysis is organized into two affective situations. From within the interior frontier, everyday life in the toma is marked by chronic fatigue and the fear of a triple dispossession—deportation, eviction, and state-led separation of children—while evictions accelerate this slow violence, turning fatigue into exhaustion and fear into despair, met by practices of endurance sustained through faith, humor, and persistence. From the “exterior” of the interior frontier, online hate speech mobilizes hatred, disgust, and fear to present Venezuelan migrants as a contaminating and threatening other. Discussion: The article offers a situated ethnographic elaboration of the interior frontier as an affective zone, advances migration studies by specifying how border regimes are enacted through bodies, emotions, and urban space, and expands Latin American debates on migration governance by foregrounding the affective dimensions of control and resistance.