The reconceptualization of agency through ambiguity and contradiction: Salvadoran women narrating unauthorized migration

• Conflicting dominant discourses about migrant agency exist in Latin America.
• Salvadoran women migrants draw on these discourses in narrating their journeys to the U.S.
• Narrators use speech practices that constitute individual and collective subjectivities.
• Constructed subjectivities are contrasted to create ambiguous accounts of agency.
• The contradictions of these accounts momentarily disrupt the hegemony of dominant discourse.

SynopsisThis article examines women's understandings of their agency under conditions of extreme oppression, exploring narratives told by Salvadoran migrant women about their hazardous unauthorized journeys to the United States across 2000 miles and three international borders. The analysis focuses on the specific speech practices these women use in creating meaning from their experiences, suggesting that this careful attention elucidates the conceptualizations of agency that undergird the narratives. In telling their stories, the women take up two dominant discourses about migrant agency, weaving these discursive formations together through the use of collective and individual framings. These narrative frameworks constitute and juxtapose overlapping subjectivities, both shared and personal, with differing levels of agentivity and victimization, thereby drawing out the points of conflict between dominant discourses of migrant agency. Through these contradictory and highly particular accounts, the hegemony of dominant discursive formulations is momentarily disrupted, and new conceptualizations of agency are made possible.