The writer is the Andes bureau chief for NYT
Manuel Monterrosa set out for the United States last year with his cellphone and a plan: He’d record his journey through the dangerous jungle known as theDarién Gap and post it on YouTube, warning other migrants of the perils they'd face.
In his six-part series, edited entirely on his phone along the way, he heads north with a backpack, leading viewers on a video-selfie play-by-play of his passage across rivers, muddy forests and a mountain known as the Hill of Death.
He eventually made it to the United States. But to his surprise, his video began attracting so many views and earning enough money from YouTube that he decided he no longer needed to live in America at all.
So, Monterrosa, a 35-year-old from Venezuela, returned to South America and now has a new plan altogether: trekking the Darién route again, this time in search of content and clicks, having learned how to make a living as a perpetual migrant.
“Migration sells,” Monterrosa said. “My public is a public that wants a dream.”
For more than a decade, cell phones have been indispensable tools for people fleeing their homelands, helping them research routes, find friends and loved ones, connect with smugglers and evade the authorities.
Now, cellphones and social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTokare dramatically changing the equation once again, fueling the next evolution of global movement.
Today, migrants are the producers of an enormous digital almanac of the trek to the United States, documenting the route and its pitfalls in such detail that,in a few stretches, people can find their way on their own, without smugglers.
And as migrants stream their struggles and successes to millions back home,some are becoming small-time celebrities and influencers in their own right,inspiring others to make the trek as well.
Their posts, pictures, videos and memes are not just in Spanish, but also in the array of languages spoken by migrants from around the globe who are increasingly showing up at the southern border of the United States.
In Mandarin, the route from South America to the United States is called“zouxian” or “trek.” In Hindi, Haryanvi and Punjabi, languages spoken in India,it is part of “dunki,” a reference to a “donkey” or informal route. In HaitianCreole, the Darién jungle is “raje” or “ditch.” In Pashto and Persian,languages spoken in Afghanistan, migration through the Americas is often referred to as a “game.”
Ankush Malik, a migrant influencer from India, documented his journey fromIndia to the United States last year, kissing his grandmother goodbye at the start of his multipart YouTube series. His channel has been viewed nearly 7 million times by congratulatory, loyal viewers.
“This looks so much fun. I want to do this too,” says one.
“Eagerly awaiting part 16 of this video,” writes another, “love and blessings from Gujarat.”
Some influencers, like Monterrosa, who studied communications in Venezuela, are bringing in a few hundred dollars a month from companies like YouTube — often a lot more than they were making at home. During a good month, Monterrosa says he has earned $1,000 in payouts, four times the minimum wage in Colombia, where he lives now.
But the content can be more profitable for social media companies, which make money from posts about migration the same way they do from cat videos, experts say: the longer viewers watch or scroll, the more advertisements they can be shown.
“Eyeballs = $$ for Fb,” said Harriet Kingaby, co-founder of the ConsciousAdvertising Network, a coalition of advertisers, technology providers and others.
Spanish-language posts with the tag #migracion on TikTok have nearly 2 billion views, according to figures reported by the platform. So do posts marked#darien, which sometimes appear between ads for H&M and the iPhone15.
On Facebook, migration-related groups flourish — one has more than 500,000members — creating an open marketplace for smugglers who call themselves“advisers” or “guides.”
The company says that offering smuggling services violates its policies, and that it makes an enormous effort to identify and remove such content, including working with the United Nations. Still, The New York Times found more than 900 cases of Facebook users offering passage toward the United States.
“Accompanying you toward your dreams!” read one recent Facebook post, where a group calling itself a “travel agency” advertises several routes through theDarién.
Facebook removed this and hundreds of other smuggler posts flagged by theTimes. A company representative called “the safety of our users” a priority,acknowledging that it was a challenge to keep up with the “mind-melting” amount of information on the site.
“We have every incentive to remove violating content from the platform,” saidErin McPike, a spokesperson, adding that some of the posts did not violate the company's rules.
At the center of this digital conversation is the Darién Gap, the perilous jungle straddling South and North America that has grown from a dense, rarely traversed forest into a migrant thoroughfare.
The Darién is the only way into the Northern Hemisphere by foot. Long trekked by just a few thousand people a year, it’s quickly become a harrowing rite of passage, crossed by more than 500,000 migrants — from more than 100 countries —this year alone, according to the authorities in Panama, where the jungle ends.
Political turmoil and the economic havoc of the pandemic are fueling the increase, but officials from Colombia to the United States say cellphones and social media are undoubtedly accelerants.
“I saw their stories on Facebook,” Irismar Gutiérrez, a 22-year-old Venezuelanabout to venture into the Darién Gap, said of all the posts from friends and family who had made it the United States.
To the alarm of the Bidenadministration, the number of Venezuelans crossing the Darién took off last year as photographs and videos raced across TikTok, Instagram and Facebookshowing Venezuelans who had made it into the United States.
Many migrant content creators say they are acting as citizen journalists and educators, helping others to understand what the route demands and to make informed decisions about whether to risk it.
Monterrosa, the YouTuber, said his family fled to Venezuela in the 1980s to escape violence in Colombia. Then he went back to Colombia in 2017 to escape the turmoil in Venezuela. He said he tried to make a living in Colombia before heading north, at one point selling chocolates and cigarette lighters on public buses and sleeping on the floor of a shared apartment.
He and his family have fled violence and poverty so often that migration is part of his identity, he said, something “I carry with me.”
In the miniseries about his journey to the United States, he passes the body of a man who looks near death and considers the terrible question, faced by nearly every migrant on the route, of whether to stop and aid a person who cannot go on.
“Is it inhuman not to help?” he asks.
Migrants who narrate and share their own journeys “are just a few more survivors” in a world that offers them few other options, he added.
Facebook and TikTok are also flooded with the faces of people who have disappeared or died in the Darién, often accompanied by desperate pleas from family members asking for any information about their loved ones. - The New York Times
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