It was a hot day in May 2023, when one of the coordinators of Casa Tochán, an independent, nongovernmental migrant shelter in Mexico City texted me “if you come here tomorrow, try to bring coffee and sugar. We're almost out.” In that shelter, with capacity to comfortably house up to 40 people, there were then nearly three times as many thanks in part to a recent wave of Venezuelan migrants who were being turned back at the US border. People were sleeping on mats that were laid out on the rooftop, in the dining area, in recreation areas. There were not enough clean blankets and mugs, but at least, until that moment, there was always coffee in the morning. Now, low on foodstuffs and supplies, the shelter put out a call on social media for help. “We are past capacity, and our resources are dwindling,” the coordinator told me. A few days later, they received another private donation and bought, among other things, several large tubs of instant coffee that they served, unsweetened, with breakfast in the morning.
Shelters like Casa Tochán are a crucial part of the migrant and refugee trail in Mexico, a country that serves as a point of passage for an estimated 18 percent of the world's populations on the move (CONAPO 2021). Shelters—not to be confused with government-run detention centers—are charitable institutions, many administered by the Catholic Church or other nongovernmental organizations. Described as “oases” by Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), these shelters provide migrants with a safe space to sleep and rest, basic medical attention, legal counsel, meals, and sometimes workshops or educational programs. Some shelters have limits of 24- to 72-hour stays and are intended to serve people who are quite literally on the move, while others allow for extended stays of weeks or even months for migrants and refugees who need to stay in Mexico in order to earn money or obtain legal status or papers. For most of these institutions, which depend on private and charitable funds and volunteer support in order to sustain themselves, resources are scarce and daily logistics challenging.
Given that one of the most important functions of shelters is providing meals to hungry populations on the move, food provisioning represents a major everyday challenge for shelter administrators, workers, and volunteers. People need to eat every day, after all, usually multiple times a day, which translates into a series of relentless economic and logistical demands on shelters as they strive to feed the populations they service. Despite this fact, there is surprisingly little research on the subject, and little is known about the specific conditions and challenges faced by shelters in terms of food provisioning. Motivated by this gap in current knowledge, and with an eye toward helping develop policy recommendations that can improve food access and security for populations on the move, a group of researchers in Mexico City, of which I am a member, convened a workshop in March of 2022 with representatives from five shelters of different sizes and types in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area to discuss issues related to food provisioning. The purpose of the workshop was to learn from the shelters themselves about their struggles and strategies in food provisioning. In what follows, I first present a summary of existing literature on migrant food insecurity and the role of shelters in mitigating this condition, and a description of some of the instruments used to measure food security in the general population. I then present some of the key findings and conclusions from the workshop conducted with shelters, emphasizing the dimensions of their struggles that indicate institutional food insecurity. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for how scholars of migration and policy-makers can approach the question of food in their work.
Food Insecurity in Populations on the Move
The right to food is considered a basic human right by the United Nations and many member states. Mexico, for example, enshrines the right to food in Article 4 of its Constitution and has passed legislation guaranteeing that right. One of the key ways in which the right to food, or lack thereof, is measured and operationalized is through the concept of food security. Food security, according to the commonly used definition from the Food and Agriculture Organization, exists when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (Food and Agriculture Organization 2006). In many countries around the world, survey instruments are used to measure household food security, since lack of food security is correlated with negative indicators for health, dignity, and well-being. In most of these surveys, food insecurity can be characterized as severe, moderate, or mild. Severe food insecurity generally exists when people are unable to eat for an entire day at a time. Moderate food security may be seen when people skip meals or reduce the quantity or quality of food that they are able to eat on a given day. Mild food insecurity may exist when people face uncertainty about when or how they will be able to eat. Even mild food insecurity is associated with compromised quality of foods—for example, substituting cheaper, industrial foods for fresh items or proteins—and with making cuts in food or other expenditures. In most places, disadvantaged populations, such as women-headed households, youth and children, or Indigenous households, are particularly at risk for food insecurity.
Researchers have analyzed the relationship between migration and food (in)security in several ways. Scholars have pointed out that food insecurity in countries of origin may be a push-factor, one that is especially exacerbated by worsening agricultural conditions in the context of global climate change, as well as conditions of conflict and unrest (Carney 2015; Crush 2013; Nawrotzki et al. 2015; Warner et al. 2012). There is also a body of literature that suggests that migrant communities in destination countries may face higher rates of food insecurity in certain contexts, and that food may play a major role in processes of identity formation, social insertion, and adaptation in new contexts (Abraido-Lanza et al. 1999; Agyeman & Giacalone 2020; Bailey 2017; Carney 2015; Crush 2013). Given the importance of food security for physical, emotional, and social health and well-being, it is clear that understanding the relationship between human mobility and ways of eating is essential to understanding contemporary migration.
Currently, however, there is very little research on the food insecurity of populations on the move. In migration studies, there is growing recognition of the need to understand “transit” processes, especially as these are increasingly long and precarious due to the militarization of border regimes around the world (A. D. de León 2023; J. De León 2015; Frank-Vitale 2020; Gil Everaert 2021). Emergent literature has indicated that migrants in transit are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity—that is, a lack of sufficient and regular access to nutritious food—which has implications for their health, dignity, and well-being (Aragón Gama et al. 2020; Orjuela-Grimm et al. 2021). Precise measures for food insecurity in populations on the move are difficult to come by, however, since most existing instruments focus on the household scale and look at populations who live in a particular territory. Moreover, survey instruments themselves are not designed with an eye to the particular challenges mobile populations face. For example, migrants often lack basic access to spaces in which to prepare food, to running water, or to storage spaces. They may also not be familiar with ingredients and places in which to procure food in unfamiliar contexts. For this and other reasons, some researchers are now calling for greater attention to the food insecurity of migrant populations and have suggested that new instruments are necessary to effectively assess them (Orjuela-Grimm et al. 2021).
Beyond simply quantitatively assessing food insecurity, however, new research also points to the fact that being in transit implies different types of food environments, options and subjective experiences of hunger and satisfaction when it comes to eating and feeding (Hayden forthcoming). In general, it is clear that for populations on the move, access to adequate, regular, nutritious food is a major challenge, and that shelters are key spaces in procuring access to food. While there is a small body of scholarly work about food in shelters from the perspective of people on the move, most of this literature is based on state-run shelters in the Global North. This literature suggests that state-run migrant “shelters” or detention centers are in fact carceral in their logic, such that food is used as a mechanism for controlling and disempowering migrants (Carney 2013; de la Reguera Ahedo 2021). To date, there is little understanding of the particular challenges and conditions faced by non-state shelters in general, and by shelters in the Global South in particular. How do these spaces procure food? What are the logics undergirding their understandings of how to best feed migrant populations? What challenges do they face? What strategies do they employ? These are but some of the questions facing scholars and practitioners interested in the question of food for migrant populations. These questions allow us to center shelters, both theoretically but also to visibilize them methodologically. It was with these questions in mind that we convened the workshop with shelter representatives, which I will describe in what follows.
The Workshop: Challenges and Strategies of Shelters in Feeding Migrants in Mexico City
In September 2022, a group of researchers in Mexico associated with the MiFood Project (Migration and Food Security in the Global South) convened a workshop with representatives from five different shelters in the Mexico City metropolitan area. The objective of the workshop was to gain an understanding from shelter administrators and workers firsthand about their experiences, struggles and strategies with food provisioning for migrant populations. The shelters were quite varied in terms of their size, approach, and population served. The smallest among them has beds for 25 people while the largest can house up to 200. Some of them, those located close to the train and road routes traveled by migrants, generally only allow people for stays of 24 to 72 hours, while some of those in Mexico City itself allow for stays of several weeks or months. Three of the shelters are run by the Catholic Church, while the others are independently run. All depend on some mix of public and private funding, and all have found themselves overwhelmed beyond capacity in recent years, as ever larger numbers of refugees and migrants pass through—and stay in—Mexico City.
The workshop was run based on a group discussion/informal focus group model. I and the other facilitators posed questions to the representatives about their general operating conditions, about how they procured food, what difficulties they faced, how they managed to work through these, and suggestions that they had for how to improve the situation. We recorded the session and used sticky notes and posterboards to organize and categorize answers together with the workshop participants. These are some of the key points to emerge from the workshop:
Shelters often have unpredictable or inadequate funding to service the wildly fluctuating populations they serve, making planning and budgeting for food challenging.
As I mentioned above, many shelters patch together their budgets and resources based on a mix of government support, private donations, in-kind donations, volunteer labor, and migrant labor. Each of these inputs is relatively unstable in itself and proves particularly challenging given that migrants often arrived in somewhat unpredictable “waves,” such that shelters may go from being half-empty to crowded at twice or three times capacity in a matter of days. This makes it particularly challenging to allocate budgets and have stockpiles to serve all of the people to whom they open their doors, more so because perishable foodstuff cannot simply be kept in reserve for when more people come but needs to be freshly acquired in a timely manner.
In order to address these issues, shelters reach out to a broad range of networks of support. They use social media and direct messages to get the word out when they are in particularly dire straits. They foster relationships with local figures such as political representatives, wealthy patrons, or organizations such as food banks and markets. In the case of the religious organizations, they rely on church support but also on the power of prayer. Indeed, even among the secular shelters, the language of prayer and faith appeared over and over again as a strategic response to unpredictable conditions.
Shelters have inadequate facilities for storing, preparing and cleaning up after foodwork.
One of the major problems identified by shelters is a lack of adequate infrastructure for food storage, preparation, and clean-up. Refrigerators and large gas ranges are costly to acquire and maintain. Potable water needs to be filtered or purchased. Sponges, detergent, and dish rags are needed in large quantities. On top of all of this, inadequate infrastructure generates additional logistical difficulties for shelters, since lack of sufficient storage space means that they need to continually be arranging food deliveries and shipments. These challenges resonate with findings of studies from various parts of the world that have pointed to the connection between lack of access to adequate cooking facilities and food insecurity at the household scale. That is, insofar as people lack access to adequate cooking facilities, they are more likely to be food insecure.
Shelters address these inadequacies as best they can by soliciting help in maintenance payments for electricity, gas, and other services. They request donations of refrigerators and other appliances. They use and reuse sponges and cleaning supplies until they disintegrate. They may cook or serve meals in shifts to be able to reuse cooking and eating spaces, plates, and cutlery, which they have in insufficient quantities.
Shelters struggle to provide food that is considered culturally acceptable and desirable for heterogeneous migrant populations.
One of the dimensions of food security according to the FAO's definition is that food need not only be adequate in quantity and nutritional quality, but that it also needs to be culturally appropriate or acceptable. In the context of shelters, this poses a significant problem since, as the representatives of all shelters mentioned, they are often unable to provide foods that migrants find appealing or satisfying. In part, this has to do with the scarcity of resources described above, which means that shelters need to cook with what they receive, often with very little choice in the matter. Even if they are able to acquire appropriate ingredients, another challenge is that those in charge of cooking–sometimes professional staff, other times migrant volunteers themselves–may not be familiar with recipes or modes of preparation that appeal to people from diverse backgrounds. Even in conditions of extreme scarcity and deprivation, people exhibit reflexivity and agency regarding their food intake (Hayden forthcoming). Thus, shelter representatives recount cases of migrants tasting food and throwing it away, refusing certain dishes, complaining and otherwise manifesting discontent with what they are served. While some shelter workers articulate discomfort with such “ungrateful” attitudes, most expressed empathy and a desire to be able to better accommodate heterogeneous populations through purchases of familiar ingredients or by teaching cooking staff to prepare things that appeal to the populations they serve.
In fact, many shelters try to address the question of culturally appropriate food in some way. In one of the Catholic shelters, there is one day a week where a member of one of the national communities who is in residence comes in and cooks a traditional meal for everybody. They share in the food and teach other residents about their culinary cultures. In other shelters, they strive to hire cooks who come from one of the main migrant group backgrounds and who is familiar with how to cook for a non-Mexican population. In other shelters, they try to educate migrants on Mexican cuisine, explaining how to eat food with corn tortillas, or what cactus paddles provide in terms of flavor and nutrition. In all of the shelters, there are treats—fruits, candies, cookies—which are given on occasion, especially to children.
Rescaling Food Insecurity: The Shelter as a Household and a Home
The challenges and strategies outlined above demonstrate that what sociologists of food call “foodwork” (Beagan et al. 2018; DeVault 1991), namely the work involved in planning, acquiring, preparing, and cleaning up meals, is an problem for shelters every day. Related to the challenges enumerated above, during the workshop it became clear that migrant shelters in general suffer varying degrees of food insecurity. In order to make this claim, we need to shift the scale at which we conceptualize food insecurity in order for it to be applicable to an institutional setting, since, as mentioned above, the household or individual tend to be the units at which food insecurity is measured and for which policy interventions are designed.
The proposition, then, is to consider institutions, such as migrant shelters, as a scale of analysis for which thinking about food insecurity should be pursued. Consider, for example, the sample Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), published by the FAO, which asks:
During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:
You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
You were unable to eat healthy or nutritious food?
You ate only a few kinds of foods?
You had to skip a meal?
You ate less than you thought you should?
Your household ran out of food?
You were hungry but did not eat?
You went without eating for a whole day?
This survey, of course, is designed for households and is used to measure household food insecurity, but if we were to apply the questions to the shelters that participated in our workshops, their answers to the majority of questions would be a resounding “yes,” with the exception of the final question (8). That is, shelter representatives expressed concern about not having enough food to serve, about not having healthy or varied food to serve. They sometimes have to reduce quantity or variety or skip full meals. They sometimes serve food to hungry people who nonetheless do not eat because they find the food unpalatable.
Why would it be useful to think about foodwork and food insecurity at the scale of the shelter? In part, because shelters act as “households” for populations in transit who lack a fixed home. Scholarship on transit migration that showed that for migrants, shelters are not only oases but can be homes of sorts. Migrants take actions to appropriate and inhabit shelter spaces, ranging from hanging photos up on their bunk beds, always sitting in the same seat, or gaining access to the kitchen in order to prepare foods (Gil Everaert 2021). Shelters function as “homes,” as spaces of residence and care for people on difficult journeys. Indeed, “scaling up” to the institutional space makes sense if we think of these as being a household in the sense that households are often defined—as a group of people “who eat from the same pot” (Crea et al. 2015; Wallman 1984).
In shelter settings, of course, there are a diversity of experiences and inequalities, such that we cannot speak of the shelter as a homogeneous unit. The same can be said, however, of the “household,” since we know that food insecurity and access varies within families and households in many contexts. The general point, however, is food insecurity poses threats to health and well-being for its members as a whole. The same argument, I believe, can be made for shelters. Where these spaces are unable to provide adequate, appropriate, and nourishing food on a regular and predictable basis for the populations in movement that they service, the food insecurity and well-being of those populations as a whole is compromised.
Understanding that shelters are vulnerable to food insecurity can provide pathways to better informed public policies with regards to the needs of shelters and their residents. Namely, that providing food is a complex, continual task that requires stable budgets, adequate facilities, and skillful knowledge and awareness of dietary needs and preferences, and that feeding migrant populations entails treating food as the culturally and biologically complex thing that it is. Indeed, recent scholarship on humanitarian food assistance has shown that the contemporary ways that hunger and malnutrition are measured and populations fed in many humanitarian contexts increasingly takes place in the language of universal principles, with standardized metrics used to assess need and standardized inputs (based on calories and nutrients, often prepackaged) used to attend to these needs (Scott-Smith 2020). Yet the challenges of shelter food insecurity described in the workshop we held speak to the need for holistic and purposeful approaches to foodwork in an institutional setting. That is, shelter food insecurity cannot be solved by sporadic donations or standardized food aid packages but rather by supporting the local forms of knowledge and networks that shelters have developed over the years and ensuring that they have the financial support to be able to provide for their extended households adequately. To this end, further research on how shelter settings provide for populations in movement is essential.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the representatives of Casa Tochán, Casa Mambré, Cafemin, and the other shelters who shared their experiences and knowledge with me during this research. Thank you to Guenola Caprón, Salomon Gonzalez, Fernanda Vazquez, Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, Alejandra Díaz de León, Jessica Najera, Nathaly Llanes, and all the other colleagues who shared comments and feedback.
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