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This paper, based on qualitative interviews realized between 2014 and 2022 with 36 Central American migrant women captured by drug cartels when they transited through Mexico, aims to examine the different repertories used by criminal organizations to capture, exploit, and subject the victims to a condition of sexual slavery. It is concluded that criminal groups have developed four different repertories, which aim to tame the body and mind of the slaves to achieve total submission: kidnapping, deception, recruitment in the country of origin and extortion. Inside these organizations the roles of victim and perpetrator are interchangeable, and enslaved women are not always passive victims, but some rescue themselves using both astuteness and brute force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the experiences of vulnerability and the development of resilience in trans women and gay men from Central America who transited through Mexico to the United States between 2017 and 2020. Based on interviews conducted in a shelter for lgbt+ migrants in Tijuana, it is shown that vulnerability is expressed in acts of violence and discrimination by authorities, criminal organizations, and other migrants, in response to the sexual orientation and gender identity of trans women and gay men. In contrast, resilience developed thanks to the support provided by networks of the lgbt+ community itself in the form of chosen families and civil society spaces. From this, it is observed that even within vulnerability, mobility enables the development of resilience through new ways of living gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the impact of the international trade on employment of the northern border states of Mexico and its integration with the economy of the United States during 2007-2020. In order to analyze the effect of commercial penetration on the evolution of employment in the region, a dynamic panel model is used to estimate the effect of exports and imports. The results indicate that at the level of total exports there is no clear correlation of the penetration of exports on employment in the region. In contrast, the penetration of manufacturing exports and imports showed a positive and statistically significant effect on manufacturing employment in the northern border region of Mexico. The coefficient of average manufacturing wages showed an inverse coefficient suggesting that the employment dynamics are limiting the growth of wage income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temperature is perhaps the most important seawater property. It is a measure of the energy content in the ocean and it affects the metabolic rates, distribution, and abundance of species that are important from the economic and ecological points of view. Satellite-derived oceanographic data have been widely used to assess spatiotemporal variations of sea surface temperature on broad scales; satellites, however, are unable to reach subsurface levels, and obtaining reliable subsurface water temperature data is achieved by either numerical modeling or direct observations, the latter representing a very high-cost alternative. In this paper, a method for modeling temperature profiles is presented. A generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) with a gamma error distribution and an inverse link function was used to model shallow (<200 m) temperature profiles in the Pacific Ocean off northwestern Mexico. The dataset included 656 profiles that were linearly interpolated at depth, which resulted in 127,595 observations. The database covered an area from 18.5° to 25.8°N and from -114.5° to -105.9°W in a time span from June 2007 to November 2016. The model included temperature as response variable; depth, surface dynamic topography, wind stress curl, latitude, longitude, and the Oceanic Niño Index as covariates; and month as random effect. The final model explained 86% of the total deviance of the dataset used to fit the GAMM. Although important deviations between the observations and the predictions of the model were observed, the results of the validation process and of predictions made on an independent dataset (correlation of observed vs. predicted temperature, -0.93; root-mean-square error, -1.5 °C) were comparable to the results obtained with more complex modeling techniques, suggesting that this statistical approach is a valuable tool for modeling oceanographic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]