Setting Lives in Motion: Brokers of mobility in Senegalese migration to Argentina

In recent years, West Africa has become the scene for a wide range of European interventions with the purpose of restraining sub-Saharan migration to Europe, creating an accelerated moment of control and confinement that is closely linked to the production of illegality and markets for illicit transnational movement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Argentina, this article seeks to explore the entangled nature of irregular mobility out of Senegal by focusing on the different forms of ‘border work’ (Rumford 2008) that take place in Senegal before migrants start to engage in transnational mobility to Argentina, to ensure that long-held practices and hopes of social and material advancement through mobility, are kept alive. I highlight the role of three key ‘mobility brokers’: the migration brokers, religious Sufi guides, and family members, as I see them as key to our understanding of how intersecting forms of border work influence the migrants’ decision to go to Argentina. By focusing on the actors who move people rather than on the migrants themselves, I draw the contours of the particular infrastructure that facilitates and makes mobility to Argentina possible.