Vol. 8 No. 15 (2025): Routes, dynamics, and responses to migration: from the Darién to Tapachula

With this issue, Encartes celebrates seven years of accumulated achievements. This 2025, the journal was evaluated and indexed by Scielo Mexico. Over time, we have sought to achieve a balance between publishing quality science, and at the same time challenging production times to publish current topics. The journal Encartes has strived to ensure that research in the humanities provides ideas, debates and accurate information on issues and problems that shape current affairs. We are very pleased because we believe that this issue fully achieves this goal.

The dossier that makes up the Themes section is dedicated to a very topical issue: migration to the United States, which, on the one hand, is threatened by the policies of Donald Trump -the new president of that country-, who intends to tighten immigration policy; and, on the other hand, by organized crime, since the routes leading from south to north are a territory of unimaginable violence and extortion that migrants must face. The study of this topic makes it an acute and difficult subject. It is, as Pierre Bourdieu defined Sociology: a combat sport. The dossier deals with migratory experiences that take place along a route from Darien (Panama and Colombia) to Tapachula (Chiapas). When I told a colleague about the subject we would be discussing, he said to me with some incredulity: “But how did you do research in the Darien if it is an impenetrable zone? That is the greatest merit of this dossier, since it tests a novel methodology that we could call “ethnography en route”, which includes starting points and bottlenecks, as well as places of destination (where they may never arrive).