Julia Pauli: "A Safe House? Feeling Home in Transnational, Rural Mexico"

Home can be experienced as a safe shelter, but also a troubling trap. In February 2026, during my annual return visit and fieldwork in the transnational community of Pueblo Nuevo in the Central Mexican Highlands, I was surprised how many families told me that they always stayed inside, siempre adentro. Only their houses, behind high walls, felt safe. But staying inside was also an isolating and lonely experience, especially for women. Focusing on several middle-aged women and their families whom I have known since the mid-1990s, I trace how narratives and practices based on consoling or disturbing experiences frame complex, even contradictory home feelings. While plants, babies, food and saints eased life in the women’s houses, a knock on the door after hearing that the neighbor’s son had been kidnapped created a feeling of being stuck and locked in. These fluid feelings of home were shaped by the possibilities and cruelties of transnational migration, changing kin and gender constellations, and – most recently – an increase in violence related to organized crime. Working at the intersection of migration studies and the anthropology of house and home, I discuss how the experiences and narratives of being at home in one’s own house has changed over the last three decades. Conceptualizing the experience of house and home as a contradictory social and affective space unravels how life in rural Mexico continues despite multiple threats and anxieties.