Messy survival is an interconnected strategy built from the disruptive and temporal ways queer folk navigate their lives, causing tumultuous relationships between work and home and self, yet it is this disorienting and intricate heuristic that allows for constant progression of “life”.

These stories can be read in different ways, but here I draw out some points from what they say about making a living, getting by, living on (the work of survival) in relation to three interrelated aspects of the messy survival: disruptive migration/mobility narratives, hyper-precarization/transsexualization, and temporality. For both Brenda and Daniela, leaving their home countries was an almost unintentional culmination of complex, damaging circumstances they had spent long years navigating. While there was no material change in Daniela’s situation in Honduras, her subjective experience shifted in such a way that her life become suddenly intolerable. Her sudden fleeing, initially to Guatemala, was not in response to a particular threat, but rather it was an opportunistic escape from a present – and likely short – future of hardship and violence. So while it came about suddenly, it was an action immersed in a long past, and rooted in a notional future: her “destination” at that time was symbolic, for a life, a chance, somewhere else. Brenda had consistently tried to find ways to deal with things in the hope she could defy the odds and make things work in El Salvador, that something better was around the corner. Making her living there involved constant tradeoffs: I can stay in San Salvador if I can get less dangerous work, I can get that work as long as I present myself as a man; I can be trans and work as a vendor as long as I keep moving house. Brenda’s overriding response to adversity has been to stand her ground (a key part of her narrative is “facing up” to things), indeed she only left El Salvador when her life was directly threatened. The point here is that their migration is only relevant as another step in their complicated survival: certainly significant in opening up new possibilities, but raising new scenarios and challenges to navigate. Their mobility brings myriad material and emotional costs and paybacks. Their mobility also took some unexpected turns. Tapachula is a liminal border space, “southernised” as part of Mexico relative to the US and Canada to the north, and also at a national scale relative to the centre and north of Mexico. It is somewhere that is widely understood as a risky place for migrants in general, and GSD migrants in particular (recall UNHCR sending Daniela to the more “liberal” Mexico City for her “protection”). But as it turns out, for Brenda and Daniela it was somewhere that new possibilities unexpectedly came together. They both found it relatively easy to negotiate that small town’s institutional landscape, they found freedom and safety in anonymity there, and some political capital and practical leverage in being trans. The informality of the space was at times dangerous, and possibilities for prospering were limited, but that same informality opened up new possibilities of a more transformative survival: a new social recognition and vindication as trans women making a living outside sex work. It was a fleeting sensation and possibility that they both still think about now, years later; a feeling – perhaps more than the place itself – they wish to go back to. In moving to their “liberal” norths since then, ironically they have both ended up having to rely again on sex work to survive. This upending of tidy, liberal queer migration narratives of a northward path to liberation, perhaps speaks to Wright’s (2018, 106) hope that a transformational migration and queer politics can emerge, which “will necessitate a shift from a liberal politics of national inclusion to a dynamic theoretical-political framework capable of mapping the ever-increasing spatial sites at which borders are made and contested, and at which illegality and migrant precarity are challenged”. Although sex work has been central to their livelihoods over the years, Brenda and Daniela notably do not identify as sex workers, and both have a complicated and relationship with it (see also Kallock 2018). Their stories are marked by what this work has cost them emotionally and physically, by an on-going struggle to manoeuvre their way out of dependence on it, and also by the kinds of survival it has allowed. Certainly, sex work for them was a way to make money on being expelled from the family home, to rearticulate their lives in many of the new spaces they came to inhabit and to take responsibility for their survival (Prada et al. 2012), and in some ways (sometimes) it was also a (trans) space where they felt recognized and validated (see also Howe, Zaraysky, and Lorentzen 2008). Yet the transsexualization of sex work naturalizes their presence, feeding into the social imaginary that this is all they are good for (Prada et al. 2012), and makes it especially hard for them to carve out a different living. Their working lives can be seen as hyper-precarious, but not only in the sense of epitomizing the instability, unpredictability and temporariness lived by the migrant worker (Anderson 2010), but also more particularly in terms of the precarity of their short-lived, sporadic inroads into other, “decent” work. Their sense of self is deeply tied up with work, and they determinedly do not want sex work to define them, or to have to depend on it in the future.10 So, getting by in the short-term wrangles in their narratives with a longer-term resistance, a deeper desire to be socially seen through their labour. This leads to a final, related point, about the uncertain rhythms of the marginal (trans) lives: the fleeting opportunities, the interminable waiting, daily grind, the sudden ruptures. Time has been an underlying theme from the outset (indeed, it was what prompted me to start working longitudinally in the first place). Temporality here is queer not only in the sense of being an oppositional queer time (Halberstam 2005), but also in its messiness; it is not about past-present-future, but a staggered, irregular temporality. Uncertainty as an inspiration and constraint for action (Bjarnesen 2009) resonates strongly, but predictability may also have the same effect. In the sense of social navigation (Vigh 2006), the on-going struggle of perpetual marginal displacement – while acutely uncertain – is more about how the friction between uncertainty and all-too known constraints creates a kind of aliveness, of pushing the boundaries and testing the water. Daniela has particularly struggled with institutional time: she arrived in Mexico too soon (when nothing was in place), and tried to leave too late (after unknowingly exceeding an arbitrary period of eligibility). Her day-today life, in the city she has tried many times to leave, is in many ways a precarious rhythm of hand-to-mouth survival. In this sense, mobility and lack thereof may be temporal as well as spatial, such that time may itself come to be harmful, a cycle of daily precarity stretching into the future: a kind of temporal violence. Yet both Brenda and Daniela not only constantly seek new ways to chip away at the barriers to their goals, but they also resist the routine distancing of hopes and desires that comes with marginal mobility, through making a point of assuming responsibility for their actions, and regaining control of their imagined futures. Survival is on-going, messy and – in the face of such profoundly harmful injustice – radical work, but in Brenda’s words, “just as I survived all the times they have tried to kill me, I will survive this too”.