This chapter centers on Tapachula in 2022, the principal arrival and containment city for African and other displaced persons entering Mexico through the southern border. It examines how migration governance is experienced on the ground through checkpoints, INM practices, COMAR procedures, and the proliferation of humanitarian and civil society actors. The interlude depicts Tapachula as a paradoxical space: officially a point of protection and registration, but in practice a site of immobilization, overcrowding, and bureaucratic opacity. African migrants navigate long waits for visas or asylum, recurrent police controls, and exploitative housing and labor markets, while building fragile networks of solidarity and information-sharing. The city’s streets, shelters, parks, and offices become everyday arenas where people contest their forced “stuckness” and improvise strategies to continue their journeys north or to reorient their plans. Through vivid ethnographic scenes, the interlude highlights the intersections of race, gender, and legal status in shaping vulnerability and resilience in Mexico’s southern borderlands.