Maya migrant youths' experiences with Latinx students in schools

By David W. Barillas Chón 

In the United States, Maya migrant youth from Guatemala confront discrimination from Latinxs students based on their indigenous backgrounds. These are not new experiences; they are a transnational continuation of discrimination they experience in Guatemala.

Photos by James Whitlow Delano, National Geographic.

­­Schooling experiences in the U.S.­­

Education scholars, with some exceptions, have ignored Central American migrant youth in their research. In rare cases when Central American youths are centered, the experiences of Indigenous migrants remain overlooked. The invisibilization of Indigenous Central American migrants reflects a broader neglect in education studies of Indigenous migrants in the diaspora.

Some Critical Latinx Indigeneities scholars, however, are disrupting this inattention by noting the ways schools are complicit in the erasure of Indigenous migrant youth’s identities. For instance, English Learning programs, such as bilingual education, are predicated on the premise that Spanish is the “heritage” or first language of all Latinxs in schools. This presumption fails to recognize K’iche, Mam, and other Maya languages spoken by increasing number of Maya migrant youth in schools.

Some scholars also have noted that Indigenous migrant youth from Guatemala and Mexico are discriminated by Latinx[i] students, including non-Indigenous migrants, due to their Indigenous backgrounds. Maya youth are put down, made fun of, and picked on when Latinx students call them the racist epithet “indio”—an historical word used in many countries across Central America to mean someone who is inferior, dirty, and undesirable. Joaquín, a K’iche’ youth I met in my research with Maya youth in a high school in the Pacific Northwest, recounted how a Mexican coworker called his Guatemalan coworkers an “indio.” Asked whether he thought this was an insult or something negative, Joaquín responded, “no de [sic] algo bueno” or “not something good.” I have written elsewhere how so too, Mexican-descent youth use “oaxaquita,” a similar racist epithet as indio, towards Oaxacan youth, contributing to an unwelcome, even hostile, learning environment. These racist and dehumanizing practices are a transnational continuation of longstanding discrimination against Indigenous peoples across Abya Yala (Latin America) and Turtle Island (North America).

Experiences in Guatemala

To understand the treatment that Maya youth receive from Latinx students in the U.S. requires contextualizing their racialized experiences in Guatemala. Weas, another K’iche’ youth I encountered in my research, succinctly depicts the ways the Guatemalan government treats (or fails to treat) Maya peoples:

UNICEF/UNI328551/Volpe

“Algunos [que hablan k’iche’ fueron] encontraron muerto en la calle y no hacen nada [el gobierno de Guatemala]. No hacen nada porque [los de la comunidad] son indígenos (sic), sólo que hablan k’iche’, y no nos quiere ayudar el gobierno. Ayudan más lo que, lo que hablan español (sic)”

“Some [K’iche’ speakers] were found dead in the streets and they [Guatemalan government] don’t do nothing. They [government] don’t do nothing because they [people in his community] only speak K’iche’. The government helps more those that speak Spanish” (Barillas Chón 2019: 33).

Weas did not specifically refer to race as the reason why the Guatemalan government ignores his K’iche’ community. However, he signals to language as the reason. In this case, language is a proxy for race. (For further discussion of the ascription of race to language, see Flores & Rosa 2015; Salim, Rickford, and Ball 2016). The Guatemalan state has institutionalized neglect and poverty of Maya peoples through the systemic underfunding and under-resourcing of public services, including education and health in largely Indigenous rural Guatemala.

CHQETA'MAJ LE QACH’AB’AL K’ICHE’!

These conditions compel Maya youth to work in order to contribute to household economies, interrupting their schooling, and disrupting Spanish learning of monolingual Indigenous language speakers. As a result, Maya youth do not speak Spanish like monolingual-Spanish speakers. Ladinos (non-Indigenous Guatemalans) then perceive Maya youth as inferior because they lack proper language skills, becoming fodder for making fun of, putting down, and denying Maya peoples jobs and economic opportunities. And so, the structured neglect and poverty continues.

Transnational discrimination

Now I circle back to Maya youth’s experiences in U.S. schools. Maya youth continue to experience discrimination from non-Maya, non-Indigenous Guatemalans, and ladino migrants because the latter bring their ways of thinking into the U.S. Racist epithets and perceptions regarding Maya inferiority travel with them. These youth rely on their previous racial schema to map themselves onto a new context of reception. More specifically, previous racial schema now interact in formidable ways with other racialization processes already present in the U.S. regarding Latinxs. I and other colleagues untangle and make sense of these processes in another essay (Barillas Chón, forthcoming; Barillas Chón, Montes, & Landeros, forthcoming).

In this blog, I provide a brief outline of the discrimination Maya migrant youth experience from migrant and U.S.-born Latinxs. Maya youth and other Indigenous migrants, however, are not exclusively victims. For instance, Oaxacan-descent students and parents have campaigned to make the use of oaxaquita and indio illegal in Oxnard, California. This campaign is an important intervention in the racism that Indigenous migrants experience. Because this racism is transnational and persistent, larger campaigns within and beyond schools are needed in Guatemala and in the U.S. to address it. In the U.S. educational context, our work centers on teaching what is an overwhelming white teaching force the diversity within Latinx experiences. The work within Latinxs consist of unpacking and undoing the entrenched racism perpetuated with the use of indio and other treatments of Maya migrant youth.

David W. Barillas Chón is a Poqomam Maya in the diaspora and Assistant Professor of Education and Indigenous Education at Western University (ON, Canada). His work centers how Maya and other Indigenous youth from Guatemala and southern Mexico in the U.S. make sense of their Indigenous selves. For more on his work regarding Maya migrant youth and issues relating to their labor, language, identity, and navigating colonial codes of power visit Academia or ResearchGate.

[i] I use Latinxs as a gender inclusive term that includes people born across Abya Yala as well as those born in the U.S. who at various historical points have been racialized as Hispanic and/or Latino.

Black Maternal Mortality: The New Child Welfare Issue in the U.S.

by Tammy Owens

Reflecting on her relentless fears of dying as a pregnant Black woman, the author contends that Black women’s high maternal mortality rate is a significant threat to the safety of Black children, thereby making it one of the most pressing national child welfare issues in the U.S.

I had a baby last year as a 34-year-old black woman. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I loathed saying “I’m pregnant” aloud. I hated telling people that I was pregnant. The only people that I told about my pregnancy were the people I could not avoid and the individuals I imagined the medical team would call to inform about my death. There were no baby showers, pregnant-belly Instagram photos, or FaceTime calls to share the exciting news about the sex of the baby beyond an extremely small circle of loved ones. In fact, my loved ones had to beg me to set up a baby registry and accept essential gifts such as diapers and wipes. I was afraid that if I told people I was pregnant then the fact that I was carrying a human being, one that was fully capable of robbing me of my life in the same way that so many babies in utero had taken the lives of other black women, would be real. If I told people, then I could not turn back from the decision that I made to risk my life and have a child as a black woman in America. My fears or personal experience along with the statistics of way too many black mothers dying leads me to contend that black maternal death is one of the most critical child welfare issues in the U.S.

How do you tell people that I am excited to have a child but I’m terrified that this child will kill me? Really, how do you tell someone that as a black woman? Black women do not have space to be seen as living and breathing human beings, let alone as terrified mothers. Black mothers have endured a long history of racial stereotypes that have often depicted them as abrasive, unfeminine, bad mothers that either work too hard and thus neglect their own children or work too little and thus suck up too much of the nation’s welfare resources (Collins 2009).

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Billboard in SoHo, NY erected by Texas-based anti-abortion group. Photo by Hiroko Masuike, New York Times.

Black mothers have not only endured racist stereotypes about their ability to mother the children they birth, but their capacity to “gestate responsibly” is also constantly up for debate in the court of public opinion and in the criminal justice system. Black mothers have been disproportionately imprisoned due to myths such as the crack-addicted mother carrying the crack baby. This myth has taunted black women and their children for decades. The children of alleged crack mothers were deemed falsely as crack babies who could only ever grow up to be “super-predators” or threats to the safety of real American children and families. This myth about drug-addicted mothers and their children emerged during the 1980s crack epidemic, but its effects continue to haunt the lives of black mothers, especially if they seek any sort of economic assistance (Roberts 2016). This myth was accompanied by others that would emerge years later to support abortion campaigns that use pregnant black women as props in their movement while solidifying representations of black mothers as monsters. In 2011, a pro-life organization in Texas created a campaign in which they placed huge billboards around New York City proclaiming, “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” This pro-life group seemingly had no regard for the backhanded message they were disseminating, one that further ensconced black mothers in a web of racially-gendered stereotypes and catapulted them on to a national stage as the epitome of the “bad mother”.

Again, with the stereotypes of black mothers in mind, what is the right way to tell someone that you’re afraid of dying during childbirth in 2020? You can tell people that you are afraid of so many things about children and child birth such as the pain or how you will manage the sleeplessness and excessive thoughts about everything ranging from giving birth while wearing a mask because of Covid safety precautions to affording child care. But you cannot tell people that you are terrified of the child.

The terror that I felt during my pregnancy does not compare to the terror that the black women who have lost their lives in childbirth must have experienced in the moments leading up to their deaths. I’ve read so many stories of black women dying in child birth. My heart breaks every single time. The sting of the pinch never dulls. I read Sha-Asia’s story. I read Dr. Chaniece Wallace’s story. I cried and nearly vomited while reading both. I cried for their families, especially their children that survived. I cried for the black women who could never find anyone to listen to them when they felt that something was off. I cried because they didn’t have that doctor who was concerned enough about their life or the lives of black mothers to simply slow down and take just one more look. My heart doesn’t break for anything related to survivor’s guilt. It breaks because I imagine that they knew, as black women, as black mothers, that they could not tell anyone about their fears.

According to the CDC, black women over the age of 30 are four or five times more likely to die in child birth than white women. In fact, if you are a black woman who, like myself, managed to obtain a college degree, you are 5.2 times more likely to die in child birth than white women.

“Black mothers must be perceived as inherently valuable during their pregnancy and after they give birth. ”

Without valuing black mothers, we cannot value their children. These concepts go hand in hand. We cannot say that we are concerned about the welfare of black children without first being concerned about their mothers. Their mothers are dying to birth them. We must shift our understanding of child welfare issues to include black mothers’ safety as a chief concern in ensuring that black children will be born into safe conditions. If black mothers are not safe, then their children are not safe. Thus, black maternal death is a national child welfare issue. To care for black children means caring first and foremost for their mothers.

Given the number of black women who have died, we must consider the moment they learn of their pregnancy as a potential state of crisis for their families. In this moment, we must begin working to develop a plan to keep them safe and alive with tangible resources and support, including doctors who are trained on culturally-relevant issues that are specific to black mothers. Our social services teams must also plan to keep the mother alive by coming up with case management services that offer supports such as birth advocates and doulas for every black mother to ensure that there are multiple voices present during the prenatal appointments and delivery day. From gestation to delivery, black mothers need people with them who can ensure that the mother is alive when her baby leaves the hospital nursery. Treating black maternal mortality as a child welfare issue with the goal of KEEPING BLACK MOTHERS ALIVE is the only way we can protect their children and their families.

Thankfully, the medical team did not have to call my loved ones to inform them of my death. The baby, Victor-Charlie, and I made it! I apologize to everyone who may be finding out about him by reading this post. Please know that the thought of death seized me more and more each month that Victor-Charlie grew inside of me. As truthful as it is but rarely admitted publicly, that feeling of terror was bigger than the excitement for the baby. I am grateful for him, but I am most grateful that I lived through pregnancy to not only take care of him, but also to serve as a testament during a dangerous time that black women can survive pregnancy.

I did not die, but I did suffer. I’m still suffering. I was induced due to high blood pressure. I hemorrhaged and could not leave the hospital without a blood transfusion. Prior to having a baby, I never had any real health problems. Now, I have blood clots in both of my legs and both of my lungs. I experienced the top three complications that the CDC has identified as the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths—postpartum hemorrhage, severe hypertension, and venous thromboembolism. But I did not die. Yet, my fears have found another way to haunt me as a black mother-survivor. I have to keep my Black and Puerto Rican son alive while living with my new terror—that he can be killed by anyone who perceives him as a threat.

About the author

Tammy Owens is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. Owens is currently working on her book manuscript, Young Revolutionaries: Black Girls and the Fight for Girlhood from Slavery to #Sayhername. Owens’ research has been published in journals such as Women, Gender, and Families of Color and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research.

Shut Down Homestead, Again

By Jamie Longazel and Miranda Cady Hallett

The Homestead shelter for migrant youth in Florida was shut down in 2019. Scholars and advocates have documented the harms of detention centers like this and the overall failure of minimalist humanitarianism. Why, then, does the Biden administration plan to re-open the facility?

In a vigil on June 16, 2019 – Father’s Day – a coalition of activists and community members continued their ongoing fight to shut down the former Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. As an organizer read aloud the names of seven children who died in ICE custody, protesters ceremoniously poured water into a potted plant for each life lost. “We need justice to break through,” said Lucy Duncan of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). “We need to remember those names.”

Activists demanding the closure of Homestead shelter in 2019 protested outside the facility on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Throughout the campaign, advocates used claims of kinship, care, and shared struggle to mobilize. © 2019 Lis-Marie Alvarado of AFSC Florida

Thanks in no small part to these advocates insisting on the humanity of migrant youth by placing them firmly within relations of kin and care, the facility closed at the end of November 2019. But now, nearly two years later, the Biden administration announced that the facility will reopen as the Biscayne Influx Care Facility.

Homestead’s history 

Operating intermittently under both the Obama and Trump administrations, the shelter was, in effect, a for-profit prison that detained Central American youth.

Its status as an “emergency influx facility” allowed Homestead to circumvent regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement for the protection of children in government custody. Over two thousand teenagers were held at a given time for 67 days on average. Most already experienced the trauma of traveling to the U.S. on their own, or of being forcibly removed from their family under the Trump Administration’s “Zero Tolerance policy.”

The shelter became a flashpoint of controversy during the Trump administration, epitomizing the doublespeak that characterizes contemporary migration governance: the shelter purported to protect vulnerable children yet in actuality subjected them to further risks and harms.

Youth at the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children. Source.

These facilities epitomize “minimalist humanitarianism,” which characterizes contemporary migration policy. That is, officials do just enough to avoid blame and moral culpability for human rights abuses. Journalists who have visited the facility receive sanitized tours; facility staff boast of “holiday parties, talent shows and pizza and ice cream for good behavior.” In contrast, lawyers accessing the facility report that many children are “extremely traumatized.” “Some… sit across from us and can’t stop crying over what they’re experiencing,” said Leecia Welch of the National Center for Youth Law.

Racism, militarism, and materialism

As we argue in our forthcoming book, Migration and Morality, the case of Homestead should be understood in relation to larger systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Such a lens reveals both the systemic violence of current migration policies, and the potential of suffering to mobilize critical resistance and solidarity. From this perspective, Homestead epitomizes what Dr. Martin Luther King called the evil triplets of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

Book cover with artwork © 2019 by Sandy Rodriguez, published as part of the exhibit “You Will Not Be Forgotten”

Homestead reflects extreme materialism in that its owners profited from incarcerating children. The government facility contracts out to service providers who use our tax money: Caliburn International Corporation and its subsidiary Comprehensive Health Services (CHS) gobbled up more than a half billion dollars of public money when the facility opened.

In terms of racism, Homestead is a manifestation of the recent revival of anti-immigrant politics, which are built on false and xenophobic narratives. The forced separation of families by the U.S. Border Patrol likewise replicates genocidal acts of seizing children from their parents in US history—the separation of Black families under slavery, and the taking of American Indian children from their families to force their assimilation at boarding schools from 1869 to the 1960s.

Compounding matters, children there are quite literally exposed to premature death due to toxins at the site. The site’s toxicity was publicly known as early as 1999. As AFSC documents, Homestead exposes children to 53 dangerous chemicals including arsenic, lead, and mercury. Situated at the intersection of racism and militarism, the toxins the children take in exist as “imperial debris,” left over from U.S. military munitions testing at the neighboring Airforce base. Detained youth also endure the unbearable sound of F-16 fighter jets taking off at decibel levels capable of causing lifelong cognitive impairment.

Then there are historical reasons why Central Americans cross borders. For over a century, the United States’ militarily and economically has destabilized the region. The bloody investments in “counterinsurgency” in Guatemala and El Salvador and extractive regimes consolidated by neoliberal reforms have helped to produce a region full of U.S.-made weapons and wracked by violence and social distress.

Time to mobilize

At one and the same time, Central America has been the epicenter of a new transnational social movement for migrants’ “right to have rights.” Organizing within the Central American exodus—supported by allies among human rights advocate networks—goes beyond demanding the recognition of the rights of asylum seekers to challenge the entire paradigm of border enforcement.

Once again using the cloak of minimalist humanitarianism, the Biden Administration claims that opening the shelter temporarily is the “best option” to keep the youth “safe.” Yet, the history of Homestead and other “mass influx” sites shows that these places not only further traumatize youth but do so fundamentally through the reproduction of systemic racism, militarism, and extreme materialism. In other words, minor reforms and more liberal language aren’t going to protect the rights of migrants.

It’s time to mobilize around the abolition of these facilities. We can look to organizing models like the AFSC campaign of 2019, or the recently-successful campaign to shut down the Berks County Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania. Faced with the systems of social death that characterize current immigration enforcement, these mobilizations enact a kind of social resurrection. By insisting on public enactments of grief, righteous rage, and solidarity, they point away from minimalist humanitarianism and towards a recognition of the right to movement, and of the right to live in the broadest sense of that term.

About the authors

Jamie Longazel is associate professor of law and society at John Jay College and of International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (2016), the coauthor of The Pains of Mass Imprisonment (2013), and the cofounder of Anthracite Unite, a working-class collective fighting for racial and economic justice in Pennsylvania.

Miranda Cady Hallett is associate professor of cultural anthropology and research fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of Dayton. She has published a number of articles centered on Salvadoran migrants’ diasporic experiences in such journals as Latino Studies, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Journal of Working Class Studies.

The authors’ forthcoming edited volume, Migration and Mortality (June 2021 from Temple University Press) documents and denounces the violent impacts of restrictive migration policies in the Americas, linking this institutional violence to broader forces of racial capitalism.

‘They can’t see you, but they can hear you’. Listening to the Sonic Space of Community Radio

By Eleanor Chapman

After facilitating a community radio project with teenage refugees and asylum-seekers in Cambridge, UK in 2019, I consider the value of the sonic medium of radio for building translingual communication confidence and challenging the top-down, reductive narratives of victimhood often foisted on young migrants.

Inside the recording studio. Photo by Hiraeth project volunteers.

The stories of children on the move exist on multiple scales of visibility – visceral and topical, spectacle and shadow. Polarised tropes of the young migrant, whether the vulnerable child seeking refuge or the unaccompanied teenager, typically male and portrayed as hardily resilient and a potential threat, are hyper-visible, strategically deployed to justify more intense forms of border policing. While certain images of young border-crossers, such as those in orange life jackets or on the backs of lorries, are highly mediatised – at the expense of the complicated, dynamic and agential individuals that migrant children actually are – the racialised violence of the borders they cross is made invisible, naturalised and dispersed.

Challenging this reductive (and deliberate) juxtaposition was one of the principle aims of Hiraeth, a community radio project I coordinated with teenage forced migrants in Cambridgeshire, UK. Running for six weeks over the school summer holidays of 2019, the project brought together young migrants resettled in Cambridgeshire under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (SVPRS), unaccompanied asylum-seeking teenagers under the care of Cambridgeshire’s Virtual School for Looked After Children, Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign, researchers from the Linguistics department at the University of Cambridge and community radio station Cambridge 105. Through the medium of community radio, the project had dual aims: providing an opportunity to build translingual communication confidence and practise English in a non-judgmental and non-formal educational setting, and allowing participants to offer alternatives to the narratives of victimhood that are often foisted on forced migrants.

“The aim wasn’t to ‘give participants a voice’, but to amplify and multiply their already powerful, eloquent and creative voices.”

Hiraeth logo. Designed by a participant.

Rather than being asked time and time again – by journalists, immigration officials, researchers, service providers, neighbours – to repeat (re)traumatising asylum narratives, this was a space to play their favourite songs, share words and stories, and discuss the odds and ends of daily life.

As weeks went by, the young participants became more and more comfortable behind the microphones, most notably as they started to assume the role of radio host themselves. Here, they directly addressed the listeners and asked questions—not only of each other, but also of myself and other project volunteers. In a matter of weeks, two of the shyest girls went from sitting in the recording studio, quietly listening in at the beginning of the project, to spontaneously asking to sing a nasheed [a typically unaccompanied Islamic song] on air. Another girl praised radio as a medium for self-expression and a way to build confidence in her English ability, explaining that radio audiences ‘can’t see you, but they can hear you’.

This observation has stuck with me since the project ended in 2019. How do the politics of visibility and invisibility translate into a sonic context? How do the invisibility and ephemerality of sound impact our – typically visually imagined – understandings of testimony, representation, agency and relation? For a fifteen-year-old asylum-seeker, what might it mean to be heard and not seen?

Inside the recording studio. Photo by Hiraeth project volunteers.

The purely audio medium of Hiraeth might have offered a welcome alternative to the highly polarised visual tropes of young migrants described above. As a radio listener, you typically have no image of the source of the voice in your ears. Speaking on the radio, you have no idea how many people are tuned in listening to you, who they are or what they think of you. Can this lack of vision, these voices speaking and listening to each other in the dark, enable a more speculative, imaginative form of empathy? I am interested too in how these sonic relations are shaped – enabled or hindered – by and through language and language difference. While varying degrees of competency and confidence in English did significantly impact the extent to which Hiraeth participants could direct the conversations, there were generally enough languages and patience in the recording studio for a degree of meaning to be created and communicated collaboratively. Translations and equivalences were suggested, whether across different languages or within a common language, as, for example, when a Syrian thirteen-year-old, confronted with the void of my video game knowledge, offered Fortnite as an equivalence for PUBG.

There were also, of course, times when translations couldn’t be found or wouldn’t be provided, but listening to the sonic space between language as a means of communicating shared meaning and language as sound was generally a space of empathy, creativity and playfulness. As I recognised from having fumbled my own way through botched translations into a foreign language on a previous radio project with forced migrants in Italy, there can be a sense of validation in the belief that your grasping for the right words, however frustrating they might be, on some level are being heard. In practical terms, music was an invaluable way of navigating the more impactful language barriers and engaging those with less confidence in their English – one participant with weaker English came along every week essentially to DJ. While some of the older teenagers linked their song choices to particular memories or discussed their interpretation of the lyrics, the younger ones tended to play us music such as ‘The Chicken Song’, a novelty tune comprised entirely of chicken squawks and cockadoodledoos, and sidestepped my attempts at elicitation with the simple and obvious explanation: ‘It’s fun.’

Challenging the position of migrant children as ‘seen and not heard’ requires a willingness to listen to the voices, stutters, giggles, memories (and chicken squawks) that move invisibly through the air between us. This entails an understanding of voice and language as more than a conduit for the linear shuttling of meaning, but as a messy means of affective, playful and care-filled relation.

About the author

Eleanor Chapman is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, researching multilingualism and minoritised languages in the contexts of forced migration. She can be contacted at e.chapman.1@research.gla.ac.uk or on twitter @sensitive_bore_. More information about the Hiraeth project and links to edited recordings of the radio episodes are available at www.hiraethproject.weebly.com and www.cam.ac.uk/nowwearetalking.

Bad Reputations: Class, Race, and Resentment in Transnational Senegal

By Chelsie Yount-André

In Dakar, migrants’ children who grow up abroad are sometimes called “little tubabs” (white people) by their Senegal-based relatives, a racial metaphor that suggests that they are foreign and spoiled. In an effort demonstrate to Dakarois how the behaviors they view as problematic among migrants’ children may be rooted in confusion and misunderstanding, I organized a children’s theater workshop in Dakar. This exercise opened a space for discussion about the ways moral judgements are rooted in assumptions about what other (ought to) know, revealing how children’s behavior shapes their relatives’ perceptions of the transnational circulation of resources.

Among Senegalese, migrants’ children have a reputation for being spoiled. Adults roll their eyes at stories of youth who visit from Europe, only to sit on the couch absorbed in their phones. Dismissing these youth as “little tubabs” (white people), Senegalese suggest that migrants’ children’s (mis)behavior is the natural result of growing up in Europe. Scholarship on youth migration reveals the diverse processes of racialization migrants’ children encounter in their (parents’) country of immigration, highlighting the subtle ways stigmatization is encoded in host countries’ language, law, and educational systems (Fernando 2014, Rosa 2019, Statz 2018). But we know little about the sorts of stereotypes these children might encounter when they return to their parents’ country of birth.

At the theater workshop in Dakar, a boy plays a “French cousin” by wearing glasses and a button-down shirt and sitting immersed in his phone, at a distance from the rest of the family. Photo credits: Author

When I began fieldwork in Senegal in 2014, I perceived these assertions that migrants’ children act like “little tubabs” to be unrelated to the transnational socioeconomic relations I was studying. Although accusing an adult migrant of acting like a tubab can be a serious insult—a claim that one has "forgotten" one's family and failed to send adequate material support—when it is aimed at children, the term is usually an affectionate tease. But as I examined the role of “second generation” children in transnational class and kinship-making (Yount-André 2018, 2020), my attention returned to the term “little tubab” and its racialized meanings, which are bound up with assumptions about wealth and morality. I began to see the term as encapsulating the frustration and resentment that brews beneath the surface in transnational families’ negotiations of resource redistribution.

In Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar alike, value-laden expectations regarding material obligations, what I call “economic moralities,” often emerged in critical terms. Transnational relatives regularly voiced frustration with stingy migrants and their spoiled children, on the one hand, or with greedy relatives whose demands for gifts surpass migrants’ salaries, on the other. Traveling between France and Senegal, I saw these frustrations as rooted, in part, in transnational kin’s difficulties imagining their relatives’ lives abroad.

Enacting Economic Moralities

These tensions motivated me to return to Dakar to share my research with the Senegal-based relatives of migrants, like those with whom I worked in Paris. Supported by a Wenner Gren Foundation and the Chaire UNESCO World Food Systems, I organized a children’s theater workshop in Dakar with the aim of highlighting how migrants’ children’s behaviors, which in Senegal appear to be marks of selfishness, often result from unfamiliarity with the social expectations of children in Dakar. Members of the Kàddu Yaraax theater troupe led 12 youth (aged 8-16) in acting out scenes that depicted the confusion and frustration that Senegalese children in Paris experience when they visit their families in Senegal, encountering new expectations regarding how they “ought” to give and share. Transcriptions of stories that Senegalese children in Paris had recounted during my dissertation research provided the script for the scenes that the youth developed at the workshop. By embodying the perspectives of migrants’ children, I hoped that youth in Dakar would gain new insight into European children’s struggles. 

Youth playing the role of Senegal-based family members explain to their “French cousins” that there are no individual portions when eating around the communal platter, but rather, "We share it all!" Photo credits: Author

The youth at the workshop immediately grasped the sorts of misunderstandings I highlighted and quickly contributed stories of their own. One child described a cousin from France who was troubled by the fact that there was only one large fish in the middle of the communal dish and asked how they would evenly distribute it if it was not divided up beforehand. This story was incorporated into the play, in a scene where the boy playing the “French cousin” repeatedly asked how much of each ingredient he was allowed and the other children emphatically replied, “We share it all!”

In this scene, workshop participants enacted a dance circle, dancing and discreetly handing cash to their "griot" accompanists, while those playing migrants' children avoided paying the griots for their songs. Photo credits: Author

There were other moments, however, when the stories I shared as evidence of migrants’ children’s confusion took on different meaning for the workshop participants. In one narrative, a girl in Paris described a trip to Senegal when she was approached by a woman in the street who began to sing her praises, complementing her family’s generosity in strident tones the way a griot might (members of the bardic caste, remunerated for praise songs). Embarrassed, the girl awkwardly waited for the woman to stop, until finally her aunt handed the woman some money. Realizing that it was cash that the woman was after, the girl concluded saying that this event taught her that sometimes, you must play dumb, or pretend to not understand Wolof, to escape the overwhelming demands for money in Senegal.

On trips to Dakar, migrants encounter so many requests for money and gifts that one could go bankrupt. The migrants I spoke with all listed tactics they used to selectively avoid requests and mitigate expectations. But at the workshop, watching the children’s somber expressions upon hearing this story, I had the sinking feeling that I had broken an unspoken rule that (in Senegal at least) one shouldn’t name these strategies aloud.

A girl playing a Senegal-based relative reprimands her "French cousin" for refusing to offer money to the griots in the previous scene. Photo credits: Author.

The next morning, I asked some of the children what they had understood from the griot example. They summarized: the girl didn’t want to give, so she waited for her aunt to pay in her place or lied, claiming to not speak Wolof. They did not recall that, at first, the girl had no clue the woman expected money. In Paris, I reminded them, there are no griots singing praises. “There are so!” a 10-year-old protested, confident in her knowledge of France through relatives and television. I specified that the griots in Paris do not usually approach people in the street expecting money. The children’s surprise gave me a chance to emphasize the girl’s honest confusion, having never observed such an exchange. If the girl’s bewilderment had escaped them, how much more difficult was it to imagine her sense of betrayal upon realizing that the griot’s words of praise were a veiled attempt to ask for money? To the children in Dakar, the griot’s right to request support – particularly from someone from Europe – seemed so evident that they would need greater context before they could grasp their cousins’ frustration with these frequent demands.

To call migrants and their children tubabs is to liken them to white Europeans, a racial metaphor that not only suggests that all Europeans are wealthy, but also makes a moral evaluation about their (lack of) generosity and commitment to values like solidarity among kin. My goal of revealing the confusion migrants’ children experience in Senegal was hindered by my difficulties imagining which parts of life in France might escape youth in Dakar, who have an otherwise impressive understanding of life in Europe despite having never left Africa. The workshop gave me an opportunity to discuss with the youth these assumptions about what others do and do not understand, but moral judgements of others’ behavior rely on assumptions about what they (ought to) know that are made in a fraction of a second. At the workshop, I saw how quickly migrants’ children’s innocence could be overlooked, taken as evidence of their (failed) upbringing and (lack of) moral character, as “little tubabs.” The vast global inequalities that drive adult migrants’ remittances and prompt them to redistribute substantial sums on return trips simultaneously shape their children’s interactions with transnational relatives. By attending to the stereotypes that transnational youth encounter when “returning” to their parents’ country of origin, we gain insights that not only can help these youth to make sense of their experiences of movement between countries, but also can reveal how unspoken assumptions about children mediate their relatives’ perceptions of the transnational circulation of resources.

About the author

Chelsie Yount-André is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy on the ERC “Hau of Finance” project. Her work, situated at the intersection of economic and linguistic anthropology, examines how global reconfigurations of class and belonging become relevant in families’ everyday lives, analyzing children’s role in reproducing socioeconomic relationships among transnational kin. Her work has been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Africa Today, Signs and Society, and Food and Foodways. You can find her at academia.edu and follow her on Twitter @cyountandre.

Abolitionist Childhood Now

By Lauren Silver

This blog is fueled by my outrage at the state’s violent and forcibly separation of families at present and across more than 400 years of U.S. history. I make a case for abolition and transformative justice now.

545.

A number.

A Universe.

Symmetry.

Horror beyond measure.

I write this propelled by rage. Last week, media sources across the U.S. and world reported that parents of 545 migrant children, currently in the United States, could not be found. These children were forcibly separated from their families at the U.S. border under 45’s terroristic 2017-18 “policy.”   

I can play with the numbers—the surreal reality of 45’s placement within 545—but that will not change the horror at play. When I try to connect with 545, I feel a sense of panic and an utter inability to imagine.  The compulsion, and it is a shameful one, is to disconnect. The stories behind this number are buried somewhere in the bodies and psyches of the living who I cannot reach. 

I am accountable for this harm. 

We are accountable for the harm.

It is not enough to feel broken-hearted at our sheer incapacity to imagine the lives and narratives of these disrupted families. We must make amends to the children, their families, and the webs of community that will be pained for generations from these violent ruptures of care and relationship.  

Reckoning. It is time for racial reckoning.

Family breaking is part of this nation’s fabric.

In her recent work, Laura Briggs shows how for over 400 years, U.S. state terrorism has taken different forms under slavery, in Indigenous boarding schools, in the foster care system, detainment at the U.S. boarder, and through mass incarceration. Briggs makes visible how U.S. economic and political interference in Latin America is largely responsible for the harsh conditions, which have pushed out-migration of the now-separated families.

It is time for abolition.

Dorothy Roberts calls for the abolition of the “family policing system” across schools, health care, and the so-called justice system and child welfare system. Across time, poor communities of color have always and continue to resist and organize in the face of anguish and terror. These are the transformative justice (TJ) practices that historic and contemporary abolitionists draw upon. TJ works to rectify the conditions that make harm possible, and calls attention to state violence, which must be healed, not restored, so that society can be actively transformed. I find abolitionist movements and TJ motivating because these strategies work hand-in-hand, giving us guidance for how to dismantle oppressive systems and policies but also how to imagine loving care webs that include all of us. The abolitionist movement has gained cultural traction in the U.S. in the wake of Black Lives Matter and most recently, in the torrid aftermath of the execution of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Walter Wallace, Jr. by the police. #AbolishPolice, #AbolishPrisons, #SayHerName, #AbolishICE have entered mainstream lexicon.

Photo credit: the author, Philadelphia, June 2020

Where do I find hope? I find vision and draw inspiration from the Black, Brown, and queer young people and educators I’ve collaborated with across eleven year of feminist ethnography in Camden, New Jersey. As a childhood studies scholar and professor, I trace the intersection of childhood studies, abolition, and queer kinship. At these crossroads, my work and teaching look critically at concepts of protection, vulnerability, responsibility, capacity, and the family, in order to imagine more just and inclusive ways to build lives together.

Photo Credit: the author, Camden Night Gardens, May 2015

I also draw from the intimate space of my home: my practice as a queer feminist ethnographer is deeply informed by my transracial family and the queer kinship web we are crafting. The book I’m writing, Abolitionist Childhood: Forging Freedom at the Rifts of Racial Capitalism, shares this fieldwork at the crossroads of critical childhood studies, abolitionist practices and queer kinship.  Together we engage in experiments in educational and creative freedom, “shapeshifting” and crafting spaces of liberation in the cracks within neoliberal capitalist confinement.  

Camden is a besieged city of paradox—Camden’s history is recorded in the collective leger of Northeastern urban deindustrialization, demographic migrations, racial strife, white flight, and state takeover with corporate occupation. The political disenfranchisement of the city’s largely Black and Brown residents is the result of historic and ongoing racist policies and practices. The young people I learn from and with are from the “other” Camden—the heavily surveilled, segregated, low-income urban space that is largely erased from the acclaimed corporate waterfront, the “Camden Rising.” And still, these participants engage in freedom, self-creation, community building, and resistance. What I found at a small public high school inspired me to understand transformative justice (TJ) practices and to name them as such: teachers alleviating harm from an underfunded public transportation system by driving their students to work or taking them to extracurricular activities. Or, a student dealing with homelessness and a parent’s drug addiction staying on a best friend’s couch and becoming an honorary member of the friend’s family.

The divide between the corporate white Camden and the “other” Black and Brown part of the city continues to be incomplete. Following one of my teacher collaborators and some of her students, I now partner with a community-based nonprofit youth arts center. Interestingly, this center is largely funded through the corporate sector in Camden and has recently relocated to a facility in the waterfront district. The mostly Black and Brown leadership and youth artists travel to the location from the “other” Camden. The landscape is never fully determined, and this artistic community is forging new pathways of creative freedom. The Independence Public Media Foundation supported project, “Johnson Park: A Gallery of History Reimagined,” is just starting to create media and art in relation to the racist and contested frieze, as well as other monuments in Johnson Park. Together, we plan to center his/her/theirstory and will share the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous perspectives that otherwise have been and continue to be erased.

Abolitionist Childhood guides scholars, activists, and practitioners to take accountability for the structural and intimate spaces that cause harm to subjugated children and families. Transformative Childhood Studies (TCS) is a way of imagining and enacting a world where the relationships, institutions, and environments that harm children could be undone and built anew to promote healing, freedom, and wellbeing.  TCS is urgent because harm has been and continues to be disguised as care or love (e.g. “child protection services”). Radical love—love as guidance for uprising and collective justice—continues to be misperceived as rowdy and harmful (e.g. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia”). Black children are misperceived as many years older than their age, which feeds the ways officials, teachers, and law enforcement mistreat them. In Abolitionist Childhood, I ask: how can critical insights from young people and childhood studies counter myths and clarify visions for abolition? How can the momentum from abolitionist movements radicalize childhood studies and center our scholarship in the lives of Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and queer youth? 

None of us are innocent of the carceral realities that rip 545 migrant children from their families and disproportionately criminalize queer, Black, and disabled child bodies. Adults claim that “children are the future,” and this sentiment enables us to avoid accountability for these harms.  If we are going to make this claim, we must look beyond the children living in our nuclear family—we need to practice collective queer kinship. All of our children must count. 

About the author

Lauren J. Silver is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. As a critical ethnographer, her work lies at the intersection of the anthropology of youth, feminist methodologies, Black and queer urban studies, and analyses of young people’s freedom strategies. She is the author of System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation (UNC Press, 2015).

Archiving Transborder Communities Through Murals and Social Media

by Maurice Rafael Magaña

This blog entry considers how young people archive and make visible the historical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic entanglements of transborder Indigenous communities through the production of murals and their circulation on social media. In the process, artists and social media users create decolonial antiracist counterpublics that challenge tropes of “the bad/good immigrant” and reject antiblack racism as the cost of US belonging.

Portrayals of racialized youth disproportionately focus on tropes of urban criminality, pathology, and deviance. When these problematic depictions converge with those about migrants, especially those from Latin America, the result is dangerous rhetoric that dehumanizes, criminalizes and is used to justify state and vigilante violence against vulnerable communities. These offenses include well-documented human rights abuses committed by the United States government such as ripping families apart, caging babies and children, forced sterilizations, killing unarmed teenagers, and incarcerating people in COVID-invested jails. Responses from those sympathetic to migrants, on the other hand, often focus on simplistic narratives of the “good immigrant,” highlighting their economic contributions or lower rates of crime. When speaking of undocumented youth, even well-meaning supporters often reproduce narratives that blame migrant parents and exalt the “Americanness” of young people raised in the U.S.

What these depictions share in common is a profound lack of voice and agency for migrants themselves, a basic premise that migration is not a human right but a privilege based on merit, and an astounding ignorance of the geopolitical context of migration. As an anthropologist, my research examines how young members of transborder communities in Mexico and the U.S. challenge these problematic depictions through art and activism. One powerful way they do so is through murals that depict migrants and their communities as dignified and complex. While the mobility of these artists and their communities has been severely limited by the entrenchment of racialized regimes of citizenship, borders, and containment in recent years, their murals continue to shape the contours of urban space in the U.S. Photographs of them circulate globally on social media.

“South Central Dreams” by Tlacolulokos. Photo Credit: The artists, 2016

The mural “South Central Dreams” (SCD) is a compelling example of how murals can transform space, create counter-publics, and archive community histories. The mural was painted in South Central Los Angeles by a collective of Indigenous (Zapotec and Mayan) artists from Oaxaca, Mexico who call themselves Tlacolulokos. Zapotecs (and Mexicans more broadly) have been making their homes in significant numbers in South Central, which has long been considered the heart of Black Los Angeles, since the 1970s. The rich histories of multiracial community formation that take place in such neighborhoods push the boundaries of how we understand, talk about, and mobilize race, indigeneity, migration, and belonging. Murals like SCD archive these histories and make Indigenous Mexicans and migrants visible in public space where such bodies are highly surveilled and policed.

The symbolism deployed in “South Central Dreams” indexes decades of cultural and political exchange across borders and difference. The Black Panther and Black Power tattoo on the woman’s forearm, for example, are clear references to the rich history of African American settlement and political organizing in the area. The young women also has a tattoo bearing the acronym ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), which is a common refrain among anarchists, punks, and antifascists globally. When put in dialogue with the other symbols in the mural, as well as the mural’s location, this can be understood as a gesture to the long history of rebellion and resistance against racialized police violence in Los Angeles, which date back to the first murder of a Black person by LAPD in South Central in 1927. South Central was also the site of the Watts rebellion in 1965 and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Both were triggered by particular acts of police violence but were in actuality the result of accumulated rage and despair over generations of antiblack state and vigilante violence, economic and social disinvestment, and political abandonment. SCD honors the legacy of Black struggle in South Central and signals the global circulation of an anarcho-punk-inspired antiauthoritarian and antifascist political culture.

“El Sueño” mural by Lapiztola at SPARC. Photo Credit: The artists, 2015

Murals by Mexican artists in the United States also counter the visibility paradox for immigrants and racialized youth whereby they are made invisible in terms of not seeing themselves represented in affirming ways in the media, politics, and society in general, while simultaneously being hypercriminalized. South Central Dreams is one of dozens of murals painted in Los Angeles neighborhoods by Mexican artists, including several by another Oaxacan collective called Lapiztola. Both Tlacolulokos and Lapiztola are based in Oaxaca and traveled to the United States to paint murals in the diverse neighborhoods where the Oaxacan diaspora live and work. In addition to countering dominant regimes of visibility and U.S. whiteness, they challenge the racialized geographies found throughout Latin America and reproduced in Latinxs spaces in the U.S. whereby mestizos and whites dominate the public sphere.

Instagram post by Los Angeles-based member of the Oaxacan diaspora. Photo Credit: Screenshot used with permission from user (Daniel), 2016

The murals also exist digitally on social media and other online platforms where digital photographs and conversations about them circulate. Social media becomes a site for the articulation of transborder community and identity formation as users plot transborder locales by placing the names of LA neighborhoods like South Central together with the names of specific Zapotec pueblos with a large presence in Los Angeles (#Zoogocho, #Tlacolula). Through the savvy use of hashtags, South Central becomes #SurCentro but does not erase #SouthCentral, instead they are placed together to signal dynamic place-making. These hashtags are combined with shout-outs to Black social movements (#BlackPanthers #BLM), and hip-hop culture (#BlackLove #BrownPride) signaling the relational formations of race that structure Indigenous Oaxacans’ experience in Los Angeles.

Through murals and use of social media, members of transborder communities challenge ideas of who belongs and who has the right to be seen in public. South Central Dreams in particular refuses antiblackness and assimilation as the cost of U.S. belonging for Mexican migrants by giving form to solidarity and mutual recognition between Black and Brown people. These murals do not offer simple or triumphant narratives of migration or of migrants. Instead, they call attention to the social toll that generations of migration has taken on the fabric of communities, while also paying homage to the dignity and creativity found in migrant communities across borders.

About the author

Maurice Rafael Magaña is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the cultural politics of youth organizing, transnational migration, urban space, and social movements in Mexico and the United States. His research provides a transnational perspective on historic marginalization, racialization, youth political culture and the role of art in activism. Maurice’s first book, titled Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, is scheduled to be published by University of California Press in Fall 2020. You can find him at mauricermagana.com, academia.edu, or follow him on Twitter @ProfeMauMagana

Love, From Iran

by Nava Behnam

After 23 years of living in North America, I travelled to my homeland Iran for the first time and felt inspired to document my trip. Reconnecting with my family who I hadn't seen since childhood was invigorating, as was walking the city streets of Tehran that I once called home. Plus, I got to visit the magical city of Isfahan. 

About the author

Nava Behnam is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and educator who lives in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally from Tehran, Iran, she migrated to North America when she was five years old. The devastating impacts of cultural assimilation and erasure in her own life have led her to embrace critical and culturally relevant pedagogy as essential for valuing and empowering all students’ voices and identities. Currently she is pursuing a Masters of Dance Education at Rutgers University and will become certified to teach dance in public schools. Nava’s creative practice includes writing, painting, composing, making films, dancing and choreographing. She also engages in liberation work through community-based counseling.

The Assassination of an Aj'qi'j: Wisdom cannot be burned when fire is wisdom/El Asesinato de un Aj'qi'j: Quemar la sabiduría no es posible cuando el fuego es la misma sabiduría

 By Henning Sac

Photo by Henning Sac

(Translated by Anna White, Español abajo)

Domingo Choc Che was an Aj'q'ij (a Mayan spiritual leader and herbalist). He was a keeper of the Maya calendar, a husband, father, grandfather, brother, guide, counselor and scientist.  He was accused of witchcraft and killed by fellow members of the Chimay community, in the municipality of San Luis, Department of Peten in Guatemala.  They beat him, sprayed him with gasoline and then lit him on fire. That is how his life ended.

For over 500 years, since the arrival of the Spaniards and the Catholicism they brought with them, Mayan spirituality has been devalued. According to historical documents, the King of Spain was told that the practices found in this territory were satanic and demonic. Everything about the Maya was judged through short-sightedness and ignorance. Without study or understanding, the colonizing Spaniards believed they alone perceived the divine truth.

Mayan spirituality has existed for centuries.  It is still practiced today and is essential to the way of life of the Maya people.  It affirms one's identity as a human being and reaffirms one's belonging to their group.  Since my first experience with the Mayan fire ceremony, I felt something special; something ignited within me.  Since then, every time I perform this Mayan ceremony, I feel full and complete.  I carry the memory of our ceremonies—the memory that the grandparents of my grandparents also lived—inside me. I think we all carry that memory within us; it is at the core of who we are.

Photo by Henning Sac

For years I studied in religious institutions, Catholic and Evangelical, but I never felt part of them. While I was there, there was something else inside of me that I didn't understand.  It was calling for the love of fellow human beings, which , for me, was notably different from how the Catholic priests, Evangelical pastors and the members of their congregations acted.  As a child, it wasn’t easy for me to understand this Book that talked about an owner and a master of creation.  And it was painful to hear that people with the same color skin as mine, who looked like me and spoke like me, believed that Mayan spirituality was evil.

When I had the opportunity to hear an elder, an Aj'q'ij, explain how we were all an equal part of creation – that no one person is more nor less than other – I felt more at peace.  It felt right hearing that a stone in its place accumulates energy, that a plant is wiser than a human because of the time it has spent growing in the cycle of life, and that animals are our family in another form. I felt liberated, filled with respect and power to be part of something so great.

This is the Mayan worldview, the way we see the cosmos, how we perceive and co-exist with our surroundings. The entire universe is outside of and within each individual—every element in the universe influences our personal experience and energy within it.  We are part of something grand and beautiful, full of color, life and joy.  All of us are part of the cycle of life and, at any given moment, we are here to provide for each other. This truth persists even in times of struggle and survival, fighting and competition.

Held at sword point and beaten, our Mayan ancestors were prohibited by colonial forces to continue their practices and ancient dress. They forced us to attend church, to adore their god—the very one their ancestors killed for being radical and different. They built their temples on sites of sacred energy. They tried to erase our memory.  But to this day, when we go to these churches, we know there are ashes from past ceremonial fires, connecting us to life and to the wisdom of our people. Under the guise of development and religion, they continue to push us aside and steal our land. They’ve taken fertile lands, which are now infertile due to their mismanagement.  Now they see that the mountains where we live are rich in minerals, and so these too they want to destroy.  

Photo by Henning Sac

There has been a lot of discussion about different belief systems, ways of thinking and living in the world. Although each group has evolved according to  their own world views, there is a general belief that, with respect and tolerance, we can coexist together.  However, there is still a long way to go. In the midst of this struggle, we received the painful news of the death of an Aj'q'ij, Domingo Choc Che; someone who knew how care for himself and provide for the community through nature.  Someone who understood natural phenomena, the effects of the sun and moon, and how to live by the Mayan calendar. They have deprived us of someone who took care of our community.

It is essential to understand that for more than 500 years there has been a desire to erase the Mayan people, but they have not and will not. We are people who migrate, we adapt. We build beautiful temples on land that supports our communities and we do this with sustainable technological systems. They say that the Maya have disappeared, but we are here. We are the fruit of ancestors who authored the Pop Wuj (ancient sacred text), who built Takalik abaj, Uaxactun, Palenque and many other sacred places.  We are the progeny of ancient Aj'q'ij  who created calendars by studying the movement of the sun, moon, and planets, weaving their way of life into the energy of each cycle.

Ceremonial fire is how we communicate with the universe: the means through which we connect ourselves mentally and spiritually with our ancestors and where we speak with the energy belonging to each day. It is a space where we reflect on our path through life and commit ourselves to the ideas and feelings that move us from within, ideas that excite us and upon which we can concentrate our own energy.  This is my experience of the ceremonial fire. It makes me proud to be K'iche', proud to see my mother wearing her güipil (traditional blouse) and corte (skirt) full of color and history, and proud to remember my grandmothers dressed in the same traje (traditional dress).

They wanted to burn away the wisdom of Domingo Choc, but through that fire they simply returned the wisdom to where it was created.

About the author
Henning Sac is a Maya K'iche' in Quetzaltenango. He is a documentary photographer, a researcher, and a merchant with a degree in civil engineering from the University of San Carlos, Guatemala. He is a student of social anthropology at the Central University of the Occidente.  He has worked with producers and vendors in southwest Guatemala and has documented his experiences for international organizations.  He spends his time researching the ancestral practices of the Mayan people with specific interest in the semiotics of Mayan weaving and Mayan worldview.

El Asesinato de un Aj’qi’j: Quemar la sabiduría no es posible cuando el fuego es la misma sabiduría

Por Henning Sac

Foto por Henning Sac

(English above)

Domingo Choc Che era, Ajq’ij, contador del tiempo, esposo, padre, abuelo, hermano, guía, consejero y científico. Fue asesinado por un grupo de personas que lo acusaron de brujería en la Comunidad Chimay, del municipio de San Luis, Petén. Lo amarraron, lo golpearon, lo rociaron con gasolina y le prendieron fuego. Así terminó su vida.

Desde hace más de 500 años desde la llegada de los españoles se ha desvalorizado la espiritualidad maya, trayendo una nueva religión, el cristianismo católico. Según los documentos de la época, se relataba al rey de España que las prácticas de los encontrados en este territorio eran satánicas y demoníacas. Todo lo juzgaban desde su corta visión, desde su ignorancia, creyendo que traían la verdad suprema, sin entender, ni investigar lo que veían.

La espiritualidad maya tiene siglos de existir, se practica en nuestros días y es esencial para la vida maya. Es un elemento que afirma la identidad como ser humano y reafirma la pertenencia a un grupo. Para mí, desde la primera experiencia frente al fuego, sentí algo especial, algo que se encendió dentro de mí. Ahora cada vez que practico una ceremonia maya, me siento pleno y me lleno de energía. Pienso que todos traemos ese recuerdo en nuestro interior, algo impreso en nuestra esencia, ese recuerdo que los abuelos de mis abuelos habían vivido y que está dentro de mí.

Foto por Henning Sac

Estudié muchos años en establecimientos religiosos, católicos y evangélicos, pero nunca me sentí parte de ellos. Había algo en mí que no entendía; se hablaba de amor al prójimo y era notable la diferencia entre los sacerdotes o los pastores y los miembros comunes de la iglesia; no era fácil en mi mente de niño entender que en un libro se mencionara al dueño y señor de la creación; era muy fuerte escuchar que lo que las personas (que eran iguales a mí por color de piel, vestimenta e idioma) pensaban y creían que era algo malo.

Al tener la oportunidad de estar cerca de un abuelo, de un guía y escuchar que todos éramos parte de la creación, sin nadie ser más o menos; me sentí muy bien, escuchar que una piedra tiene energía acumulada por su tiempo en un lugar, que una planta era más sabia que un humano por el tiempo que lleva en su ciclo de vida y que los animales eran hermanos con diferentes formas, me sentí libre y contento de respetar y poder ser parte de algo tan grande.

Eso es la cosmovisión maya, la forma en que vemos el cosmos, la forma de percibir y convivir con el lugar que habitamos, el universo entero que está fuera y  dentro de cada ser, que cada variación en él, define la personalidad y energía con la que vivimos. Somos parte de algo grande y hermoso, lleno de color, vida y alegría; todos somos parte del ciclo de la vida, y en algún momento nos alimentamos de otro ser y también seremos alimento para otro, aunque claro, no se puede dejar de lado que como humanos tenemos momentos que nos llevan a competir y luchar para sobrevivir.

A punta de espada y golpes prohibieron las prácticas mayas y nuestras antiguas costumbres; nos obligaron a ir a la iglesia, a adorar a su dios, ese que ellos mismos mataron por ser diferente y radical. Construyeron templos sobre nuestros lugares energéticos, quisieron borrar nuestra memoria, pero incluso cuando hoy se va a una iglesia sabemos que ahí están las cenizas del fuego que nos conecta con la vida, con la sabiduría de nuestro pueblo. Nos siguen robando la tierra, esa a la que nos arrinconaron cuando se apoderaron de las tierras fértiles y que ahora son infértiles por el mal trato que les han dado. Ahora ven que las montañas donde vivimos están llenas de minerales y las quieren destruir.

Foto por Henning Sac

Se ha discutido mucho sobre las creencias y las formas de pensar de los diferentes grupos que habitan y viven en el mundo y aunque cada uno ha ido avanzando de acuerdo a su forma de entender su entorno hay un entendimiento general que, con respeto y tolerancia, podemos convivir juntos. Sin embargo, hace falta mucho por avanzar y en medio de esta batalla, hemos recibido la dolorosa noticia de la muerte de un guía, alguien que sabía cómo cuidarse a sí mismo y brindar bienestar a la comunidad por medio de la naturaleza. Alguien que sabía ver los fenómenos naturales y contar el tiempo, ver los cambios provocados por la luna y el sol. Nos han despojado de alguien que cuidaba la comunidad.

Es necesario entender que son más 500 años de querer borrar a los pueblos mayas, pero no han podido y no podrán; somos pueblos que migramos, nos adaptamos, levantamos templos hermosos en tierras idóneas para vivir, con sistemas tecnológicos para asegurar nuestro existir. Aseguran que los mayas desaparecieron, pero estamos aquí, somos el fruto de esos abuelos que escribieron el Pop Wuj, que construyeron Takalik abaj, Uaxactún, Palenque y muchos otros lugares más. Somos fruto de esos abuelos sabios que crearon los calendarios estudiando el movimiento del sol, de la luna, de los planetas y que adaptaron su forma de vida de acuerdo a la energía de cada ciclo.

El fuego es la forma como nos comunicamos con el universo, el medio para conectarnos mentalmente y espiritualmente con nuestros ancestros. Es el lugar donde le hablamos a la energía de cada día, el espacio donde reflexionamos sobre nuestro camino en la vida y el momento donde nos comprometemos con las ideas que nos mueven adentro, que nos entusiasman y en las que concentramos nuestra energía. Eso es lo que yo he vivido en el fuego, eso es lo que me hace hoy sentirme orgulloso de ser k’iche’; ver a mi mamá con su güipil, con su corte, tan llenos de color, de historia, y recordar a mis abuelas con la misma ropa con la que veo hoy a mi madre. Quisieron quemar la sabiduría de Domingo Choc con fuego, pero solo la regresaron a donde la sabiduría ha sido creada.

Sobre el autor 

Henning Sac es Maya K’iche de Quetzaltenango, fotógrafo documentalista, investigador social y comerciante, con licenciatura en ingeniería civil de la Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, maestrante en Antropología Social del Centro Universitario de Occidente.  Su trayectoria incluye trabajo con productoras/es y comerciantes del suroccidente de Guatemala y la documentación gráfica de diferentes procesos con organizaciones internacionales. Se dedica a la investigación de las prácticas ancestrales de los pueblos, con interés específico en semiótica de los tejidos y la cosmovisión.

Queerness and Trauma in Postcolonial Education in Trinidad

by Scott Marchack

 Having grown up in Trinidad, I have come to understand it as a postcolonial society where there is limited but an increasing understanding and acceptance of gender and sexuality. Here, I reflect on identifying as LGBT+ within an educational system informed by religious doctrine and its cumulative impact on mental well-being.

In the Caribbean region, education and religion historically have been closely intertwined. During the colonial era, education was a privilege only afforded to the white planter class; eventually British missionaries began giving oral instruction to the enslaved population about Christian doctrines. In the post-emancipation period (1834 onwards), denominational schools served as a mechanism to reinforce race and class divisions. Religious institutions (Christianity in particular) and education created an intersecting space in which to socialize young people into a certain sexuality and prescriptive gender identities. In Trinidad, religious schools in particular remain revered by many parents because they are run by religious boards rather than the State. Seen as more prestigious, parents celebrate when their child is accepted.

Christian protesters stand at Trinidad and Tobago’s second annual Pride Fair, Fun Day and Parade. © Photos by the Silver Lining Foundation/ Brandon Kalyan. Used with permission.

Christian protesters stand at Trinidad and Tobago’s second annual Pride Fair, Fun Day and Parade. © Photos by the Silver Lining Foundation/ Brandon Kalyan. Used with permission.

As an openly queer person, my experience in secondary school challenging and was filled with significant mental and emotional trauma. This was due, in part, to the struggles I faced coming to terms with my sexual orientation which contrasted with Judeo-Christian beliefs about sexuality and gender. Perceived as “deviant,” I was constantly told that God and the rest of the society condemned me. Imagine living in fear and shame for feeling attracted to the same sex although it feels natural. Imagine praying every day to just be “normal.” Imagine the mental toll this takes not only as a queer person, but as a male pressured to uphold notions of traditional masculinity where boys are taught to be aggressive, tough and to suppress their emotions. These messages were communicated in the school yard, in popular genres of music like Jamaican Reggae and Dancehall which hold homophobic and sexist undertones. For example, Buju Banton’s popular song “Boom Bye Bye” promotes the murder of homosexual men. Now imagine daring to let your walls down and to just be yourself. The privileged educational opportunity that you and your parents had celebrated? It now devalued and punished you. 

This was my experience when I posted photos of me and my then boyfriend, which subsequently led to my “coming out.” A simple display of affection would almost cost me my educational opportunity. After applying for the continuation of my final two years at secondary school, I waited while many of my peers received phone calls of acceptance. Eventually, my mother would call the school to inquire, only for my parents and I to be called to meet with the school principal and two of the school’s deans. I was told to be careful about what I posted online and think about how my online activity reflected on the school and my peers. I interpreted this to mean, “We can’t have an openly queer male in an all-boys Catholic school. Your queerness makes your peers very uncomfortable.” Discrimination and structural violence were coded as a concern for discussion of social media (ir)responsibility. After apologizing and vowing to never do it again, I was then told the science subjects I wished to take were filled to capacity and that my grades did not make the cut. I later found that some of my peers who received similar or even lower grades were granted access.

Attitudes of The State Towards Sexual Minorities

My experience is not an isolated one. In “Charting a Buller Man’s Trinidadian Past” (buller man is a derogatory term referring to men who have sex with other men), Wesley Crichlow argues that community members who object to same-sex relationships often make use of religious discourse as a way to condemn these as “sinful” and “immoral.” In a study on religious attitudes towards HIV/AIDS, participants described homosexual persons as “sickening” and in need of “redemption.” This type of terminology echoes through post-colonial religion but also legislation. For instance, the Immigration Act of Trinidad and Tobago prohibits homosexual persons from entering the country and describes them as having “immoral purposes.” This demonstrates how religion shapes the heteropatriarchal values within state institutions and likewise filters into educational systems, posing inequalities for those who do not subscribe to these beliefs. 

Research on the psychological state of sexual minorities is lacking within Trinidad and Tobago and usually has been conducted by a handful of non-government and non-profit organizations. A 2010 study in neighboring Jamaica found that the prevalence of negative attitudes towards sexual minorities had implications for mental health. Sexual minorities were found to be at a higher risk for major depression and substance abuse as a result of homophobic attacks and negative family relations. This demonstrates the severe impact homophobic culture can have and should be a call to action for both an institutional and cultural reform. In 2018, Decides TT, a project aimed at combatting gender based violence and LGBT+ discrimination in Trinidad and Tobago published a report that intended to “collect data and relevant information to accurately portrait the current situation, while developing a methodology that can be a model for future research and training of local researchers.” However,  it was not specific to mental health.

At the time, I did not know what I wanted for myself beyond access to this privileged educational space nor did I have the will to contest the system. Instead, I suppressed a part of my identity and responded complacently to this discrimination. Now, four years later, I am equipped to critically analyze this experience from a gendered perspective. Now, I understand clearly and viscerally that the colonial past of the Caribbean echoes in structures as fundamental as education. If we do not learn to recognize and address these biases, we are destined to hinder the life chances of young people like me.

 About the author

Scott Marchack is an activist and aspiring mental health practitioner with an interest in the intersections of gender, sexuality and mental health. He is an undergraduate student at the University of the West Indies and writes a blog called The Psychtivist.

Problematizing “Dropout”: Zanzibari Youth Narratives on Being Pushed Out of School

By Emily Morris

 Educators, policymakers, researchers, and the media alike use “dropout” to describe a young person who leaves school before completing their requisite grade or education level. This categorization assumes youth leave on their own volition when this research shows that most young people are pushed out of school. Through narratives and theater performances, Zanzibari youth resist the stigmatizing label and its enduring effects.

Photo credits: Emily Morris

In kiSwahili, “dropout” is translated as “mtoro” and literally means a runaway or truant. In Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous archipelago in the United Republic of Tanzania, mtoro is an all-encompassing term for a young person who does not complete ten years of basic schooling (through Form 4). According to Zanzibar’s education policy and international development reports, youth “drop out” of school because of a deficit of motivation, skills, family support, and financial resources. For girls, early marriage and pregnancy are assumed factors (see World Bank and UNICEF). My youth-centered research challenges this deficit approach and asserts that young people rarely leave by choice. Zanzibari youth are pushed out for a myriad of reasons, including failing the high-stakes exam, needing to earn money for their families, falling ill, caring for an ailing relative, or not receiving needed educational supports. Moreover, a very small proportion of girls in this study are pushed out after they get pregnant.

Drawing on critical race and critical feminist scholarship from the Global North, and postcolonial and decolonizing education scholars from the Global South, I argue that we need to replace the term “dropout” with “pushout.” Simultaneously, I propose that we must stop pathologizing youth by assuming they are falling short, and instead recognize how education systems rarely provide environments and supports that enable marginalized youth to thrive and succeed.

When I started this research thirteen years ago, I used the term “dropout” without question. It is a label commonly used by ministries and departments of education around the world, and a statistic regularly reported by UNESCO, academia, and beyond. However, as education scholar Monique Morris (2016) argues in her work Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, this normalized term not only stigmatizes but also actively pushes young people into situations of further marginalization. This label likewise shifts the responsibility from an education system laden with historical class and gender biases onto youth themselves. When we as educators, researchers, policymakers, and advocates embrace this term, we reproduce harmful assumptions and fail to interrogate the systemic factors that push young people out of school.  

As an educator-researcher-activist committed to longitudinal research, I have worked closely for the past two decades investigating young people’s educational pathways in Zanzibar. With my colleagues from Zanzibar’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, Abrahman Faki Othman and Ahmad (Bello) Ali Mohamed, I have followed a group of 1,100 students from preschool in 2007 through the end of their secondary schooling. In 2016, we began participatory and youth-centered research with 41 rural, urban, and semi-urban youth at the time they took their high-stakes exams, which determined whether they could continue to upper secondary school. During two ten-day workshops which utilized a popular theater approach, 41 young people (19 rural and 22 urban and semi-urban) collectively authored and staged vignettes on the pains, hurdles, and triumphs they encountered in pursuit of a secondary school certificate. In a performance for their peers, they enacted the gendered forces that push or pull youth out of school, as well as the ways in which they resisted being labeled a mtoro. Over the course of six months, youth collaborators wrote individual narratives about their school experiences and journaled about their visions for the future.

Among the 19 rural youth who told and performed narratives about their schooling, six were pushed out of school before obtaining a secondary school certificate. Three young women, Jokha, Halima, and Pili (all pseudonyms), were pushed out after failing the exams. As detailed in her journal, Jokha lost her own mother as a child and was the main caregiver for an infant niece. Jokha was also a first-generation secondary school student and described being routinely stigmatized because her mother had never been to school. She wrote, “Others say, ‘your mother never went to school and even if you pass, you will never continue on, you will marry whether you like it or not.’” Even though Jokha studied four hours a day while in school and tried her best to attend free after-school tutoring sessions, it was still not enough to master the exam in English, her second language. After being pushed out of school, she learned to sew from neighbors and tried to earn money through tailoring gigs to help her family survive. Two years after the exam, Jokha described how her aspiration to become a teacher was crushed after being pushed out.  

On the first day of our theater workshop, Khamis described to Abrahman, Bello, and I that, “my brain doesn’t work well.” What he meant was that he could not compose a complete, written sentence in his native language of kiSwahili.  With no learning specialist in his community to consult, Khamis endured eight years of schooling by memorizing notes his classmates read to him orally and copying sentences from the board. He was told repeatedly that his “head was thick” and that he should just try harder. Khamis wrote in his journal about the many setbacks in his schooling, including long bouts of illnesses where he missed months of school and skipped class to search for food. “On the days that my parents don’t have money, I go to the bush to forage coconuts and then I sell them to get food,” he recounted.

Khamis also wrote about wanting to be a pilot. He co-authored and performed a scene where a female neighbor degraded him for going to secondary school, claiming that it was a place for women only. “She often tells me that there is no reason for me to go to school… she urges me to go fish, to go to the beach and earn money.” When Khamis eventually failed the exam and was pushed out, he described feeling embarrassed and ashamed. Four years later he is working gig jobs as a mechanic but the label mtoro has remained. Without a secondary school certificate, he had to reimagine his future from becoming formally employed as a pilot to picking up gig labor.

Graphic design: Txiki Txoko

Labeling young people as dropouts reinforces a pathologizing narrative that they are failing, when we as educators, policymakers, and researchers are failing them. The youth in this study implicitly and explicitly challenged and resisted being classified as a “dropout” and performed how this label harms them. Their performances demonstrate that grouping young women and men into a single statistic reveals little about why they have been pushed out and further marginalizes them. If we want youth to succeed, then we need to rid the educational vocabulary of “dropout” and redress the forces that push and pull young people out of school. This includes removing high stakes testing barriers, creating more accessible and relevant guidance and counseling programs, and establishing financial safety nets that young people and their families can access in times of hardship. If we are committed to becoming conscientious educators and advocates, then we must shift our energies from labeling young people to working together to change systems so that they can thrive.

About the author

Emily (Markovich) Morris is a scholar, educator, and research practitioner of comparative education and international development. Her research explores questions of social justice and equity in formal and nonformal education. She is currently a Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University and Director of International Training and Education Program, and serves on several global, inclusive education tasks forces.

Youth Circulations: #100Posts100Days

Youth Circulations remains deeply grateful to the artists, scholars, students, and activists who have contributed to this site. Here, we share our ongoing campaign #100Posts100Days that celebrates their important contributions to unsettling discourses about global youth and to creating counter-narratives that reflect young people’s own perspectives and experiences. A special thank you to Leslie Espinoza who thoughtfully and artfully assembled the #100posts100days campaign. We hope you'll utilize and share this powerful work!

Youth Circulations #100

By Lauren Heidbrink and Michele Statz

As anthropologists, we conceptualized Youth Circulations from a shared commitment to make our discipline more publicly relevant, and to create accessible, dynamic resources for ourselves and others who teach on migration and global youth. The site was also fueled by a mutual frustration with so many static depictions of young im/migrants as victims, threats, economic migrants, or model minorities. Indeed, the strength and urgency of our collaboration emerged from what at times felt a heretical position, namely our deep impatience and even reproach for how these depictions are commodified for the sake of political agendas, media clickbait and even altruistic causes by institutions and actors tasked with – and often celebrated for – “caring” for young migrants. 

Now in our 100th post and with an international audience of over 50,000 discrete viewers, Youth Circulations has truly exceeded our expectations as a collaborative and participatory site. In the six years since launching Youth Circulations, we have learned from the rich and diverse perspectives of scholars, activists, artists, and youth. These are lessons that have meaningfully shifted how we engage with wide publics as scholars and advocates. Acknowledging that we are still learning about how to conduct research with – and effectively represent the experiences of – youth, we offer some modest reflections on Youth Circulations as a creative experiment.

Lessons learned

.Statue of What. Artist: Bo Thai

First and foremost, there is a pressing need to engage young people as ethnographers of their own lives. As the experts of these lived experiences, youth are critically and dynamically equipped to reflect on the varied structures, institutions, discourses, and social forces that shape their everyday realities and the communities where they live. In contrast to the disparaging ways that young people of color generally, and young migrants specifically, are discussed, we enlist an asset-based approach that resolutely affirms youths’ resources and skills as they meaningfully negotiate—and thereby shed light on—local and intersecting realities of inequality, legality, and belonging. As an example, a 2017 Youth Circulations blog features the compelling artistry of Bo Thai, a young man who immigrated from Thailand to the United States at the age of 13. In his mixed-media series, aptly entitled “(B) C(o)nscious,” Thai narrates the story of a young boy as he grows up and reflects on his immigration to the United States The series engages in an intimate yet simultaneously social process of healing by calling viewers to reflect on how people from different backgrounds share similar journeys, sorrows, and thoughts. “[I] use my art as a healing process by expressing [my] emotions, ideology, identity, and stories,” he explains. 

By facilitating the explicit recognition and regard for youths’ lived experiences in the United States —and in Thai’s case, for youths’ masterful artistic and poetic expressions of these experiences—Youth Circulations effectively democratizes expertise. That is, it enables us as scholars of global youth to harness our privilege and platform to advance the unmediated voices, critiques, and causes of young people. In so doing, youth demonstrate their capacities and concerns not only to an expansive public but likewise to community leaders and policymakers.

“Our response must also employ the experiences and expertise of the communities with which we work to address or even bypass the detrimental outcomes of these policies and practices.”

Of course, it is not enough to critique the intended and unintended consequences of public policy and institutional practice. Our response must also employ the experiences and expertise of the communities with which we work to address or even bypass the detrimental outcomes of these policies and practices. As Youth Circulations evidences, community members can be critical guides to conducting socially relevant and culturally appropriate research and mobilizing findings to affect social and structural change. For instance, Heidbrink’s multilingual series “Migration and Belonging: Narratives from a highland town/Migración y Pertenencia: Narrativas de un pueblo del altiplano” features her collaborative, community-based research with an interdisciplinary team of Guatemalan and Guatemalan-American scholars. Over eight unique posts, these individuals share their diverse personal and professional experiences of conducting community-engaged research in a town called Almolonga. The series offers a unique way of conducting collaborative research and likewise showcases the voices of Guatemalan scholars, many of whom remain excluded from the largely English-only academic presses. 

The series has since blossomed into an interactive art exhibit featuring photography, narrative, a güipil (traditional garment) woven by one of Almolonga’s master-weavers, and an interactive Maya ceremony circle crafted by a local spiritual guide. From conceptualization to dissemination, these efforts link individual and community-based experiences to larger structural, institutional, and discursive processes. And, by scaling up and beyond the virtual space, we are experimenting with alternative modalities to share relevant research locally, internationally, and virtually.

Image from Migraiton and Belonging Art Exhibit. Photo credits: L. Heidbrink

As we have found, anthropologists are uniquely poised to challenge and expand the narrow parameters by which young migrants, their parents, and their cultural contexts are covered in the media. At its best, this is a truly collaborative endeavor. In our individual experiences as researchers and together as co-editors of Youth Circulations, we work within – and consistently benefit from – an international network of colleagues conducting critical and timely research around and with global youth. 

Youth Circulations is a manifestation of our deep commitment to translate our teaching and research into accessible and timely formats that reach broader and more diverse publics—and that likewise facilitate, or perhaps demand, new ways of evaluating professional “success” and credibility. These include blogs, podcasts, photo journals, digital stories, art exhibits, public lectures, and engagements with popular media. With an audience size and geographic span well-beyond our imagination, this now includes policymakers. To that end, we have extended our work to op-eds in the Los Angeles Times and in professional association publications such as AnthroNews; organized collaborative webinars for scholars and activists working with undocumented students and immigrant communities; and co-edited a series on “Im/migration in the Trump Era” that showcases the transnational and community-engaged efforts of scholars, students, and activists. 

Taken together, what we know and what we do must be presented as rigorous and creative across diverse platforms. Indeed, it is this final aspiration, namely to steadily, collaboratively, and differently create that continues to motivate our work. Recognizing that research alone cannot confront the pressing global issues of our time, we deeply affirm the reflections of Mohammed, a 17 year old youth from Afghanistan who arrived unaccompanied in the United States: “Activism is not just reacting or dismantling the current system. We must use our imaginations to create.”       

About the authors 

Lauren Heidbrink is Associate professor in Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She is author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families and the State: Care and Contested Interests and Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. She is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations. 

Michele Statz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus. She is author of Lawyering an Uncertain Cause: Immigration Advocacy and Chinese Youth in the US. She is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations. 

Child and Nation in Latin America: Research and Action

By Elena Jackson Albarrán

Child and Nation in Latin America is a website featuring public scholarship created in Spring 2020. It is the product of semester-long, multi-disciplinary research projects undertaken by upper-level undergraduates enrolled in the capstone course in Latin American, Latino/a, and Caribbean Studies at Miami University of Ohio. The students spent the first half of the semester learning critical theories of childhood studies and becoming familiar with some of the narratives that define Latin American childhoods, both from within the region and externally imposed upon it. To prepare for their public-facing scholarly interventions, students conducted substantial behind-the-scenes work. They formally reviewed the literature on their chosen topics, and defined the structures (states, agencies, institutions, policies, laws, and discourses) and agents (individuals, groups, actors, or victims) that emerged in each respective study. They also collaborated to identify the critical theories—key terms and concepts borrowed from other scholars that contributed to a deep reading of the forces at play. These included childhood as (under)development, infantilization as a project of empire, semiotics and the power of propaganda, the adult/child binary, the white savior complex, the suffering stranger trope, the revolutionary redeemer trope, and the “useful” versus the “useless” child, among others. Intentionally interdisciplinary in scope, this project draws from perspectives and methods in history, medical anthropology, cultural studies, literature, journalism, visual culture, and legal studies in order to gain an appreciation of the many professional fields that are engaged with issues of child rights, protection, regulation, and exploitation. 

Issues related to children and childhood are often associated with the private realm of the family. As a collaboration on politics and representations of childhood in Latin America and the Caribbean, this project sheds new light on the ways that childhood intersects with macro forces driven by the nation-state, international organizations, and global capitalism. On a metaphorical level, historically marginal nations and peoples have been subject to infantilization as a way of minimizing their access to resources and political power. On a practical level, children themselves have often borne the brunt of structural injustices in the region. In particular, these pieces attend to the constructedness of childhood in historical and cultural context. Most modern assumptions about what a “good” childhood should look like—well-intentioned rights-based discourses—have been generated in Western circles and do not consider the realities, challenges, and preferences that prevail in countries of the Global South. The blog pieces here ask what happens when the ideal educational, labor, or recreational models for childhood are implemented in Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, or the southern border of the United States. They ask the reader to consider other childhoods, ones perhaps unfamiliar or uncomfortable, to add nuance to and expand our global definition of childhood as a universal experience. 

Here, I share a selection of student work:

Behind Bars: The Criminalization of Migrant Youth

By Jordan Proce

Photo credit: Cedar Attanasio / AP

As of November 2018, there were over 14,000 unaccompanied minors being housed in immigration detention across the U.S, with many more being apprehended at the border each week. While many of these minors did, in fact, come to the U.S. alone, other children became unaccompanied minors in the eyes of the immigration system after being separated from their families at the border due to the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. In the media and across the U.S., images of children locked behind bars spread like wildfire. As a result of gang violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity, there are numerous children migrating to the United States each year. While these youth engage in this often-dangerous journey, they are seen as very adultlike, facing harsh realities that, to the Western world, no child should have to endure. However, once they enter U.S. immigration system, youth are criminalized similarly to adults and are denied the assurance of children’s human rights. By drawing upon public policy analysis, statistical data published by immigration enforcement and various research organizations, and the works of childhood studies scholars, this project explores the ways in which the U.S. immigration system treats unaccompanied migrant youth as criminals and how the definition of “child” is fluid as children migrating pass through many different spaces. Ultimately, the treatment of migrant youth defines how the United States, very differently from how it views its own youth, views children from the Global South under an outdated, colonial lens. ​Read Full Post.

"It'll Stunt Your Growth! Or Will It?" Child Labor vs. the Working Child on Guatemalan Coffee Farms

By Hannah Stein

Photo credit: Hannah Stein

In the rural communities of Guatemala, the realities of childhood are different from the ideals established in Western international rights discourse. Guatemala relies on coffee production for its economy. Children accompany their parents to work on coffee farms, starting as early as infants strapped to their mother’s back. Families get paid for the amount of ripe beans they pick, and children assist their parents at a young age to increase the household income. This piece analyzes the difference between working children and child labor in contemporary Guatemala. This research includes interviews with Guatemalan coffee farmers and delves into the national school system as means to provide evidence that, in many cases, children working on coffee farms should not be considered child labor. Rather, children working is a part of rural Guatemalan culture. A case study of Guatemala’s coffee farms suggests the need to update international and domestic laws to include diverse realities of childhood. Read Full Post.

The Evocative and the Endangered: Climate Change and Children in Mexico

By Dora Milan

Photo credit: Dora Milan

Climate change awareness narratives warn that due to neoliberal development, the impacts of high carbon footprints, pollution, and environmental degradation do not stop at the borders of each nation-state. Recent data has proved that children are disproportionately affected by climate change, despite their minimal carbon footprint. Contemporary southern Mexico serves as an excellent case study of this phenomenon due to the region’s geography and exclusion from Mexico’s infrastructural systems. The communities remain politically isolated from the rest of the country and are especially susceptible to floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Children’s biological and cognitive lack of preparedness for these natural disasters make them extremely vulnerable, and in many cases, victimizes them in the face of environmental catastrophes. Mexico’s disaster prevention agency (CENAPRED), created after the earthquake of 1985, is tasked with preparing the public for these disasters and administering aid in their aftermaths. This piece investigates the rights of children in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges through climate change litigation, statistical data of climate change-related child mortality and the presence of children in disaster preparedness and relief policy. Children are often seen as a reason for action to mitigate climate change, and have become a voice for this crisis, but they have virtually no visibility in government adaptation plans for multi-national environmental and human protection policies. How can children simultaneously have a voice in important matters, keep their “childhoods,” and be protected from disaster? Read Full Post.

The Question of Educational Justice for Mapuche Youth in Chile

By Hanna Vera

Photo credit: Susana Hidalgo

This project focuses on how Chile’s indigenous students can be better served by the national public education system today. With really no other viable option than to participate in the traditional Chilean education system, Mapuche students are forced through mechanisms of assimilation that are covert at some times and more obvious at others. This form of educational hegemony forces native students to see their personal culture and language as less valid than what is normally deemed as important academic curriculum. Even more tragically, fewer and fewer Mapuche children are learning their native language, as parents encourage Spanish as form of protection from existing ethnic prejudices. This interdisciplinary piece utilizes academic sources from History, Educational Theory, and Cultural Studies. It also draws evidence from Chilean educational statistics and documents from youth activists demanding educational equity. This project aims to shine a light on the ways that Chile's official national curriculum hurts indigenous students, and makes suggestions for ways to more meaningfully integrate indigenous students into mainstream education. Recommendations include better funded culturally-conscious teacher trainings, increased Mapuche teaching incentives, and more emphasis on native culture and language in the classroom. Read Full Post.

The projects undertaken here reveal some of the larger structural inequalities that disproportionately affect Latin American childhoods, burdens that are shared by many children throughout the Global South.  The challenges can seem insurmountable, and the diversity of perspectives on each complex issue make it hard to find moral clarity, at best, or frustration at the futility of our actions.  A Meaningful Actions page of the website supplements the public scholarship project to channel readers’ concern, charity, rage, or interest into acts of engaged citizenship. Here we intend to signal some of the everyday decisions we can make to improve conditions, restore dignity, reduce precarity, and promote agency for children of the Global South.

About the author

Elena Jackson Albarrán is Associate Professor in the History Department, and the Global and Intercultural Studies Department, at Miami University.  She is author of the book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska 2015; María Elena Martínez Book Prize 2016), and a founding member of the Red de Estudios de la Historia de las Infancias en América Latina. 

A white midwife’s letter to tonight’s black baby

by Emily Fitzgerald

Photo by New York Times.

Dear new baby,

Today will be your birthday. Our city, our country, the world– is grieving the murder of George Floyd and too many others gone too soon. Your new life would be a different kind of hard if you were born an ocean away. Your life would look different if you were born on the southern end of the Mississippi River. But here you are, on your way tonight to be born into the land of the Dakota and Ojibwe.

Outside the walls of this hospital masses have gathered. Masses of broken hearts, raised hands and marching feet have taken to the streets. They brave a pandemic to face the more established and more deadly force of racism. They are marching for George Floyd. And they are marching for you.

Today will be your birthday and I wish I could give you so many gifts. I wish I could promise that a few years from now you’ll have a safe school and a motivated, well-supported teacher who sees your potential and guides you in a journey of learning. I wish I could promise you that as you come of age, your neighbors will see you for who you are, and not see you as a threat because of how you look. I wish I could promise you that when you call 911 because you need help, that help is what you’ll get. These, and so many other things, I cannot promise you.

But today, on your birthday, within the four walls of this birth room, I can promise you these things. I promise to listen to your mother. I promise to include your father. I promise to treat your parents with respect. I promise to use everything in my brain, and heart, and hands to keep you and your family safe. And as your mother births you into my hands, I will silently welcome you to this air breathing world as you listen to your parents’ familiar voices. And I will leave you in the safety and warmth of your mother’s chest.

And when I wake up tomorrow I will use my voice and my vote so that you may indeed have a safe school for kindergarten, a safe city in which to come of age, and first responders who put you first. Because although I cannot promise these results, I can try. I can do better than I have done. I have work to do from now until forever. And that is a promise I can keep.

You and I may never meet again. But we might. Maybe a generation from now, when all my hair is gray, you’ll be in labor and will give birth to your own baby. And maybe when that day comes, you’ll return to this city center, to the place of your birth. And maybe I’ll still be here. My hope and my job in the coming years is that when that day comes, that this is a place you feel welcome. Because we will have torn down these four walls and rebuilt them by your design. When that day comes, at the place of your own birth, may you indeed feel at home.

About the author

Emily Fitzgerald is a nurse-midwife and sees patients at East Lake Clinic and the downtown campus at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the chair of the Committee for Equity and Justice of the Minnesota Affiliate of the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Emily believes that access to decent and respectful health care for all is a hallmark of a fair and just society.

Mobility, Youth Livelihoods and Wellbeing in the Time of a Pandemic

By Joan DeJaeghere and Consuelo Sánchez Bautista

Restrictions to mobility, used to ensure the security of health and wellbeing for many, have resulted in economic, social, and other kinds of physical insecurities for mobile youths.

Mobility is filled with contradictions, and these are particularly apparent in this time of shut-downs, lock-downs, travel restrictions, and closed borders related to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Rather than presuming a ubiquitous and celebratory ideal of mobility, we need to ask: Who is mobile for what reasons right now, and who isn’t?

Venezuelan migrants waiting to board buses in Bogotá, in Colombia, in hopes of returning to their home country. Credits: Raul Arboleda.

As globalization has made travel and trade more ubiquitous, many white, middle/upper class Americans have taken this freedom of mobility for granted. Mobility is our physical ability and need to move from one place to another, but socio-economic status mediates different kinds of mobility. Those with their own car, a second home, or a yacht can move from one home to another, one country to another, one safe-haven to another. But many people don’t have the material and social means to be mobile and safe. For many, their economic situation requires them to travel considerable distance to earn a living, even one that is not dignified. Or, they are regarded as “essential” workers and they must travel for work. For many youths, mobility has long been a part of their lives as they move in the hopes of a better life. Now, COVID-19 has both limited this mobility and, at the same time, restricted even short-distance travel to satisfy basic needs such as food, shelter, security, education, or employment.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, a widely circulated opinion is that children and youth are among the less affected by COVID-19 compared to other groups. This idea has recently shifted as more youths are getting ill from the virus. In addition to the direct effects of the virus on youths’ health, much of the media coverage and data have not shown how young people’s wellbeing is likewise impacted by restrictions on mobility that are aimed to prevent or slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. Youths already affected by structural inequalities, poverty, and conflict face a paradox of survival, decreasing mobility to prevent the spread of the virus and needing to be mobile to earn a basic living, evade poverty and conflict. And the effects of their limited mobility have longer term repercussions.

Credits

In most countries around the world, youths have higher unemployment rates than any other age-group. Disparities in employment rates are greater for young women than men; and for lower economic groups. Because of shifts in the global economic system in the past decades in which stable jobs are becoming rarer, with fewer benefits and health protections, youth are working more in the informal sector, nicely termed the ‘gig economy’. Economic growth that has occurred in Africa, India and Latin America is often on the backs of young people doing precarious work. For instance, in a study on youth livelihoods in East Africa before the pandemic, we found that many youths were only "getting by" five years after participating in livelihood and entrepreneurship training. They used mobility as a strategy – moving from rural to semi-urban and urban places to find jobs, get customers and seek better educational opportunities. This mobility, out-of-necessity, allowed them to work and pay for basic needs. But the pandemic has limited the mobility needed just to get by, and their lives have become even more precarious.

In Latin America, where unemployment and informality are common situations for youth, government responses to COVID -19 have complicated access to temporary, part-time, and informal jobs. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) estimates that, as one of the pandemic’s impacts, some formal jobs might become informal, limiting youth’s access to social security and health services. Informal youth workers have been affected by the immobility measures implemented due to the pandemic. In Colombia, for example, where 47% of the people were working in informal sectors as of December 2019, restrictions on mobility have impacted street vendors, who depend on people’s circulation to earn for their daily survival. Furthermore, tourism, transport, and delivery, often services for the middle-class, are possible because of youth labor, which is now restricted. For instance, numerous Venezuelan migrants, who mostly worked in informal economies in countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, have been returning to Venezuela due to the lack of access to the already precarious jobs they had before the pandemic. This situation has left them without the means to pay for rent and food.

Mobility has been a livelihood strategy for youth whose efforts to build sustainable livelihoods in places of origin have been thwarted by structural inequalities, war, violence, and lack of employment opportunities. For Syrian refugees, whose lives are often in limbo between states in conflict and those that don’t allow them to work, the lockdown has limited possibilities of making a daily living and even compelled them to reduce the amount of food they consume. Forced immobility has created or exacerbated other risks for the already vulnerable youths. However, survival is an unstoppable driving force, and, interestingly, mobility as a livelihood strategy persists despite restrictions on it. Youths’ limited access to earning income amidst the pandemic has generated returning movements to places of origin where relatives or friends might offer access to shelter and a care.

Army and police officers stopped a man who violated curfew on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador: Credits: Johis Alarcón.

The ‘freedom’ to be mobile (travelling for leisure) and immobile (staying and working from home) are a luxury for some, but for many youths, mobility is a livelihood strategy, necessary to survive and to develop one’s futures. Restrictions on mobility, used to ensure the health and wellbeing of many, have resulted in economic, social, and physical insecurities (home violence, food insecurity, and housing insecurity) for the world's most vulnerable people. For youths, these temporary and potentially protracted changes will have considerable effects on their sense of self and wellbeing, their economic and social independence, and their trajectories into adulthood. We should all be concerned about their futures and they should be heard and participate in the decisions that would impact their present and future lives.

About the authors

Joan DeJaeghere is a Professor of Comparative and International Development Education at the University of Minnesota. Her professional work focuses on redressing educational inequalities to foster sustainable livelihoods, wellbeing and inclusive citizenship for youths.

Consuelo Sánchez Bautista is a doctoral student in comparative international development education at the University of Minnesota. Her research explores the relationships among education, forced migration, and inclusion in conflict-affected zones, particularly in Latin America.

We Are Here & We Will Be Seen: 5 Tips for Youth On The Front Lines of Advocacy, Change & Justice

By Grant E. Loveless

In America we are young, tired and traumatized. We are tired of validating our space, our existence and the reason why we should have a seat at the table. Youth are continuously ignored, dismissed, and unheard. Stereotyping youth as “too young” or “not experienced enough” has been a consistent strategy to devalue the movements that we create.

Youth are dying. Bullets piercing our skin, the hands of our “​protectors​” bruise us, while the weight of our own communities burden us with expectations that we, as a future generation, are expected to embrace.

Not only do we confront our internalized trauma while witnessing the oppressive realities of our world, we also resist the tendency to reduce youth experiences into pure statistics, devoid of socio-political meaning. We know that if we die at the hands of police, justice will not be served within the “​justice​” system and will be left as a number to the added list of Black and brown bodies whose blood is stained in our streets at the root of America’s issue: racism. We should not have to experience the moments that are supposed to be the cornerstone of our lives in fear and uncertainty.

Solidarity march.

However, we conjurged our power to disrupt the day-to-day uncertainties, disadvantages and injustices. We as youth have blossomed into an impalpable force to where youth advocates like Nahjah and Nashon Wilson in Stafford, VA; the four women who built the Teens4Equality organization in Nashville, TN; Mical Juliet, Franki Phoenix, Zauvier Fenceroy and myself in Austin, Texas continue to push for public and social policy reform, collaborative change and economic justice. With our efforts being recognized it is imperative that we continue to prepare youth for what is to come. As U.S Senator Cory Booker said, “​You don’t have to be one of those people that accepts things as they are. Every day, take responsibility for changing them right where you are.”

Below are five tips for youth I have created from my experience as a Youth Advocate and Student Leader in the City of Austin to begin their journey into advocacy, community activism and social entrepreneurship.

1.   Understand You Are Your #1 Priority: If you do not take care of yourself, how can you serve others at the best capacity you can. Self care is about self-reflection and it's a journey. Learning and establishing a self care routine does not happen overnight, it takes time. You may be thinking, what does self care mean? Well, self care is ambiguous. Self care means knowing who you are and understanding your limits; developing a good sleeping pattern and eating habits; constructing ways to decompress and realign your mind, spirit and energy; taking time to know yourself, your goals and how you want to manifest the change-maker you want to be; identifying what you love and hate or what motivates and discourages you. Self care can be simply defined as self love, but on that journey to that you first must identify your “why” and thrive.

2. Find Your “Why” and Your Vision!: To find your “why” and your vision you must: (1) Identify your core values, (2) Discover who inspires you, who motivates you to be the catalyst of change in your community and (3) Understand that your vision takes time to develop and grow. It will change, shift and possibly renew itself over time. With developing your “why” and vision you cannot put your hands in multiple pots, overwhelming and stressing yourself. Take your time and volunteer with local organizations, reach out to community members whose interests align with yours and ask questions or do a journey of self-discovery and read books, articles or blogs to gain knowledge on your interests and whichever topic you feel touches your soul start pursuing it. However, with this journey you must understand not everyone will agree with your stance nor stand with you when you need support.

3.  Be Aware of Who Is For You and Against You: In the world of advocacy and on your way to achieving justice and change you will have your allies and opposers. Not everyone will agree with your values, ideas or your right to have a seat at the table. You must be prepared for that realization and “no” to your cause. However, this should never discourage you. Utilize your colleagues, close peers, past and current employers, teachers or anyone who is interested in investing in you and form a community. Once you have a community backing you up, you will be unstoppable. If you are not given a seat at the table build your own table and create the change you want to see. Your existence does not need validation, you are a force and a resistance.

4. Time Management: Do not overwhelm, stress or burden yourself trying to take advantage of every opportunity and the issues damaging your communities. Establish a foundation for your brand and the issues you want to solve in your community as well as using your local community members and organizations to further your goals. When you use time managing tools like Trello, Asana, Google Calendar or even the Reminders app on your phone you can then begin implementing strategies to your success on how much time you are allocating for the issues you want to solve and the commitments you are going to take on.

5. You Are ​NEVER​ Alone: Whatever country, state, city or town you reside in there are organizations and individuals who will support, uplift and cherish the work you do. Remember it doesn’t matter what platform you use, it's about the work you produce and the presence you create when you walk into a room. You will never be alone; we are here always.

In conclusion, use the tips and my words of encouragement to be the change. I urge you to utilize these tips and start generating the momentum you want to see your community taking in approaching and addressing structures of ageism, racism, xenophobia or any sign of inequity. Start now …

• Author a call-to-action plan.

• Engage with your communities.

• Mobilize and create change.

In Solidarity Say & Remember Their Names

Brad Levi Ayala | Cameron Tillman | Carey​ Smith-Viramontes | Diana Showman | Dillon McGee | Emantic "EJ" Fitzgerald Bradford Jr | Elijah Tufono | Jeffrey Holden | Joshua Dariandre Ruffin | Justin Howell | Laquan​ McDonald | Levi Weaver | Roshad McIntosh | Sarah Grossman | Sean​ Monterrosa | ​Tamir Rice | ​VonDerrit Myers Jr. | ​Zauvier ​Feneceroy

About the author

Grant E. Loveless is a social entrepreneur and activist at Austin Community College and in the City of Austin. He is a rising junior at Austin Community College. As a spoken-word poet and well-recognized public speaker, he focuses on discussing and creating dialogues on: social and economic equity, cultural preservation and representation, Black and Brown student success and pathways to promote professional / academic opportunities for students of color. This piece was previously published by the Black Business Journal and is reprinted with permission of the author.

Animating Children's Views: Can adults learn from and about kids via large-scale surveys?

By Anna Bolgrien

Kids’ opinions and perspectives are often missing or overlooked because surveys are ill-designed to include them.  The Animating Children’s View methodology is an efficient, low-risk, and accessible way to survey youth ages 12-17 so that their views can affect policy.

Often young people have the opportunity to share their experiences with adult researchers; to discuss their own interpretations of their experiences; and to express how they would like to be treated. But even when researchers write about youths’ understandings and perspectives, there is often a disconnect between the scholarship, policies, and funding ostensibly created to assist youth. Why?

Deborah Levison, my doctoral advisor, has studied youths’ work for many years. She observed that child labor policies failed to take into account excellent studies of small groups of young workers, such as those by Bourdillon (1999), Bromley and Mackie (2009), Orkin (2011), and Woodhead (1999). Levison suspected that the disconnect reflected policymakers’ biases and propensity to base decisions on large-scale survey data. These datasets generally collect information from adults above age 17. All information is about children, rather than from children. Is the child in school?  Did the child get vaccinated?  How many hours per day does the child do sports or other activities?  Adults respond for children, even older teens who are better informed about their own situation. Questions about opinions, views, or perspectives are often excluded altogether. For children’s own perspectives to affect policy creation, the methods of survey data need to adopt some aspects of qualitative research while maintaining the large-scale representativeness that policy makers insist on.

Seeing the disconnect between research and policy development, Levison proposed the following question: If big surveys also included youth as respondents, and somehow captured their views and perspectives, would that catch policy makers’ attention?  In response, we created the Animating Children’s Views (ACV) project in 2017.  The goal of ACV is to develop a survey mechanism that grants youth (ages 12+) an opportunity to describe the situation of youth in their communities.  

The goal of Animating Children’s Views is to improve survey methodologies for engaging youth about their lives. The survey method must be (1) understandable to youth age 12-17, regardless of their culture or ability to read or write; (2) a low-risk opportunity for kids to share their perspectives and (3) compatible with adult-focused surveys already conducted around the world. 

Drawing credits: Hillary Carter Liggett

ACV uses short, animated cartoon videos to tell a story or pose a dilemma. After watching the video, youth respondents are asked a series of questions about the characters in the video.  What should the cartoon boy do?  What is the best outcome for the cartoon girl?  What will happen next to the cartoon girl? These types of questions allow the respondent to think about the situation and react to the difficulty faced by the cartoon character. The cartoons show situations that are well-known dilemmas in the respondent’s community.  This makes the stories familiar and something that respondents may have observed or experienced. Thus, by answering survey questions about the cartoon character, researchers can learn what youth think about particular situations.

The cartoon + question approach can be adapted to collect information on a wide variety of topics. So far, we have explored stories on:

• Migration

• Education

• Health

• Friend and family relationships

• Domestic violence

• Sexual and reproductive health

• Work and labor

The main requirement is the topic must be relevant to kids and policy makers. Success with kids depends on creatively making the ACV method accessible and low risk. Success with policymakers depends on the results being compatible with data from other sources and efficiently implemented using tablet computers in the field.  

Accessibility 

Photo of field researcher (holding the tablet) talking with a respondent in Nepal. The pair was sitting on the rooftop of the girl’s family but facing away to have privacy. Credit: Author.

The cartoons (videos and images) are created in collaboration with a California-based artist, Hillary Carter Liggett. Because we want to use the same characters and stories across many different cultures, characters have few distinguishing features such as race, ethnicity, religion, or class. This helps the respondent view the cartoon character as possibly being a part of their own community, and not attributing other stereotypes onto the image. We are establishing a library of images that can be adapted into new stories and topics.

Stories must be simple but focused in order to make survey responses understandable to adult researchers. The cartoons must be engaging enough to hold respondents’ attention and allow the respondents to thoughtfully answer questions about the story. Videos can be quickly and affordably created or adapted for use across languages, cultures, countries, and subjects. Using voice-overs makes the videos more accessible to kids with limited literacy skills.

Low-risk

It can be uncomfortable and risky for some young people to participate in surveys that ask for sensitive information, especially when they cannot talk in a private place. Using videos shown on tablet computers lowers the risk to youth respondents.   Respondents wear headphones to watch the video while listening to a voiceover recording in their language. Stories and questions are asked in a way where respondents are answering questions about the cartoon kid’s experience, not about their own experience.  This is important because it may not be safe for a respondent to answer directly about her or his own life on particularly sensitive topics.  But a respondent can still communicate her or his perspectives and opinions about the topic by talking about how the cartoon kid should and would respond to a situation. 

Image: Photo of field researcher talking with a respondent in Tanzania. Credit: Deborah Levison.

Compatibility

Many large survey organizations are using tablet computers to conduct surveys. This major technology shift in data collection means that there is ample room for innovative and creative ways to engage with respondents.

The ACV methodology can be used with surveys used by large survey organizations working to collect data in many countries such as the Demographic and Health surveys, the UNECIF MICS, and Performance Measurement for Action.  Organizations that are interviewing households can create stories and have a small module that includes children as respondents.  This small addition fills a major gap in data collection. New survey methodologies like ACV can provide policymakers with a source of large-scale representative data about children’s views and perspectives that has long been missing.

Levison and I, along with local collaborators and field teams, have piloted the methodology with 12-17-year olds in Tanzania, Nepal, and currently in Brazil, and we are looking for new partners interested in implementing the ACV methodology.  The ACV method of asking questions can be a resource for organizations, large and small, to include children’s perspectives in a survey. 

About the author

Anna Bolgrien is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota - Humphrey School of Public Affairs.  She and her advisor, Professor Deborah Levison, are currently working on multiple publications on different aspects of the Animating Children’s Views methodology.

How Are They Now?: Youth in the Wake of 9/11, A Call for Research on the Implications for Uneven Citizenship

By Raimy Khalife-Hamdan

Examining the harmful impacts of detention and deportation of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim parents on their citizen children immediately after 9/11, Raimy Khalife-Hamdan asks: What are the implications of this on inconsistent citizenship?

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 startled the world, leaving many fearful and horrified. In response, the U.S. government intensified policing of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim populations, and particularly those with fewest protections: noncitizens. Legislation, such as the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, was ostensibly passed to prevent future terrorist attacks. It granted the government increased authority to detain noncitizens through expanded powers to surveil, investigate, and apprehend any suspected domestic or foreign terrorist. Many of these detained and deported individuals experienced heightened fearfulness, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, and hypervigilance.

Past research reveals that family separation has psychological and embodied effects. A 2010 study considered 190 children in 85 immigrant families in which at least one parent was deported and concluded that many of these children experienced behavioral shifts in eating and sleeping habits. They also experienced emotional changes such as increased sadness, anxiety, anger, aggression, fearfulness, and social withdrawal that persisted six months after deportation. These changes persisted even after family reunification. Due to its traumatic nature, family separation is also a source of PTSD, with varying levels of severity depending upon the age of the child during separation from one or both parents.

Furthermore, paternal detention and deportation leads to figurative household reconstruction, as familial roles shift to compensate for the loss of a parental figure. “Suddenly single mothers,” as characterized by anthropologist Joanna Dreby, often take on new economic responsibilities by working longer hours, which consequently lessens their contact with their children. This decreased attention to youth tends to worsen their mental health. However, rather than simply or exclusively being victims of a robust immigration enforcement system, these children also may adapt to their transforming family circumstances. Youth adapt to their new home structures by mentally reconstructing the conception of their family as their cognitive ability adjusts to a new reality. Social scientists observe that many children overcome such serious hardships, especially if their sense of stability is restored.

After studying the impact of 9/11 on immigration enforcement, research is needed on the experiences of these Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim individuals’ families—and particularly on the experiences of their children. It is important to better understand the social and developmental effects of parental separation on youth’s wellbeing after increased immigration enforcement—in other words, how they are now? Moreover, such research has the potential to reveal deeper implications for membership and belonging in the United States and other places where individuals now live.

Thus far, scholars have demonstrated how spouses and children of detained and deported individuals after 9/11 are subject to heightened Islamophobia. Drawing from the personal narratives of thirteen deported Muslim men, the ACLU emphasizes the profound traumatization of haphazard arrests experienced by families. Sunaina Marr Maira (2009) argues that while national-security legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 targeted both aliens and citizens, there is a peculiar repression reserved for U.S. citizen Muslims and Muslim converts. Furthermore, a 2007 study interviewing 12- to 18-year old Muslim Americans revealed that these individuals faced at least one act of discrimination in the previous year. In the face of such ethno-religious discrimination, a 2011 study examines the methods of coping with stressful interpersonal events, such as Islamophobia, experienced by Muslims in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks.

Now, almost two decades after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the children of detained and deported Arab, Middle Eastern, and Arab noncitizens are now young and middle aged adults. Social scientists and medical professionals must continue conducting research with these adult children and must investigate the long-term health, developmental, and psychological impacts of the family separation that occurred in 2001. Empirical research could also analyze whether or how the religious and cultural upbringing of these children influenced their experience of family separation. This research could inform the work of NGOs that support children of detained and deported parents and further expose the effects of family separation that results from contemporary U.S. immigration enforcement. While the youth of 2001 are now adults, there are currently thousands of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border who are pulled from their parents. The harmful health effects of family separation will certainly apply to these children.

Photo by Ridwan Adhami

Many of the children separated from their parents after 9/11 were U.S. citizens, which encourages us to consider their unique experiences of citizenship. The psychological shock of parental detention and deportation likely informed these American children’s interpretation of the U.S. as exclusionary, violent, and family-rupturing. While citizenship seems to render full and equal belonging to a nation-state, not all U.S. citizens enjoy the same privileges of membership. Rather, citizenship is a dynamic mediator of experience that intertwines with various social factors and identities, such as ethnicity, race, and religion. The violent experience of family separation devalues citizenship, especially as citizen individuals—particularly minor citizens—who are legal members are undermined by the particularities of their social situations. By separating families, entangling experiences of citizenship with those of non-citizenship, the U.S. government devalues the citizenship of those from mixed-status families instead of envisioning an extension of membership to families.

As the effects of post-9/11 immigration policing continue to compound, it has become more important than ever to conceive of, design, and conduct related research. Exploring the question—how are they now?—could provide key insights into the experiences of those of Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim heritage in the United States or who left after September 11th. Moreover, it would permit greater understanding of the ways in which citizenship is not a determinative aspect of membership and does not secure all national members with equal privileges and protections. Such research would be crucial to reflections on the traumatic experiences of family separation to which the U.S. government has subjected thousands of its minor citizens, and the reorientation of immigration enforcement, such that it would protect those that most deserve protections: youth.    

About the author 

Raimy Khalife-Hamdan is a second-year student at the Robert D. Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. She is majoring in Romance Languages and International Studies, with a concentration on migration, refugees, and displacement.

Migration and Africa’s eternal lockdown

by Iriann Freemantle

The unprecedented distress of momentarily locked-down lives should prompt Europeans to realize how much their leadership curtails freedom of movement on a permanent basis on the African continent.

Migrants waiting for permission to disembark. Photo credits: F. Gentico.

As for many people around the globe, the world has become much smaller for Europeans over the last months. From Norway to Italy, populations are in various forms of “lockdown,” principally confined to their homes for an as of yet indeterminable amount of time. Freedom of movement, a right many Europeans consider the EU’s greatest achievement, has suddenly become extraordinarily limited: not only is travel into Europe largely on hold, but many countries have even restricted domestic movement. This includes delimiting even the most mundane mobilities of work, exercise, leisure or socializing. No longer can people freely move through time and space as they wish. Now, they can only move in line with what is officially sanctioned as absolutely “essential.” When entering public space, everyone’s movement has become potentially illegitimate, threatening, and subject to punitive measures for transgression.

As their geographies painfully contract, many Europeans discover how maddening it is to be collectively confined. For many, this may be the first time they learn what it feels like to become subject to punishment for “unauthorized” movement; how draconian it is to be confined to their home, and how limiting it is to have the terms of what is and is not “essential” in life determined for them.

To be sure, the current shock to global and European freedom is extreme. Yet, the unprecedented distress of these momentarily locked-down lives should prompt Europeans to realize how much their leadership, with their consent, continues to curtail the freedom of movement on a permanent basis in Africa. In fact, Europe’s ill-conceived “management” of African migration—a euphemism for containment and carried out in profitable collaborations with partners across both continents—increasingly confines Africans to a form of continental lockdown.

Many of the same European leaders who recoiled at the thought of closing internal borders to halt the pandemic are the ones that progressively undermine vital patterns of regional mobility and integration in Africa, foster exclusionary and territorialized forms of African citizenship, and deliberately endanger the lives and dignity of Africans on the move. Using barbed wire, bogus rescues and an often blatantly patronizing “concern” for the well-being of poor Africans, Europe stipulates that most Africans must stay in their own countries and make do with what they have. With active or passive endorsement by the EU or individual member states, those who move “irregularly” often end up trapped in exasperating limbo and suffering in detention centers, refugee camps, or rescue boats without permission to disembark.

As they are locked down to halt a pandemic, Europeans now too get a sense of what it feels like to have a multitude of different kinds of movements crudely re-categorized into legitimate and illegitimate forms. Momentarily deprived of the right to move freely, they grasp, perhaps more viscerally than ever before, the full meaning of freedom of movement. Accordingly, many insist they can only endure this for the time being and keep a close eye on any potential attempts to finagle present-day measures into a new, post-pandemic permanence. As German chancellor Angela Merkel stated, the restrictions during this crisis, indispensable as they may be right now, are “dramatic” and must be strictly “temporary.” With many governments edging towards easing restrictions, Europeans breathe a sigh of relief. Although new lockdowns may become necessary until there is a cure and a vaccine, they have always known that they won’t be confined like this forever. Moreover, many Europeans agree in principle that current measures are necessary for everyone’s protection.

Africans however, locked down indefinitely on their own continent, are not so lucky. Unlike social distancing in the times of COVID-19, claims that preventing Africans from leaving their homes promotes their or their countries’ safety and security remain spectacularly unsubstantiated. In fact, it serves neither their nor Europe’s “protection,” but in many ways the exact opposite. The risks and punishments of “illegitimate” movement are infinitely higher for Africans too.

As Europeans currently experience these short-lived restrictions on movement, it is an exceptional time to reflect on what Africans endure permanently in all of Europe’s name and the significance of freedom of movement to everyone in the world.

About the author

Iriann Freemantle (PhD) is a migration researcher associated with the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her current work focuses on the role of the European Union and international organisations in the governance of mobility within and out of Africa. Originally published on Africa Is a Country, this contribution is reprinted with permission from the author.