Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 366
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Immigrant children and youth have been crossing the U.S.-Mexican border for at least a century. The conditions of their crossings reveal a long history of inequality between countries that connect poverty and the conditions that create violence, with the reasons migrants flee U.S. sponsored dictatorships that foster historical and current structural violence across and within Latin American countries. The high numbers of immigration to the U.S. in 2014 remains a contrast in comparison with the constant trend through the years. Thus, the stories of immigrant children and youth detained and deported have remained in silence for years, absent from legal documents, yet present in transnational families testimonies; more so, the immigration of children and youth has been witnessed by thousands of volunteers, shelter directors, religious institutions and government officials. An exploration of how being a witness of children and youth's crossings is analyzed. In a relational manner, the focus is on how their lived experience weaves with children and youth's transnational journeys; which, currently is marked by institutional encounters that shape their migratory experiences. Therefore, the centrality of this educational research explores the ways in which nationalistic discourses between Mexico and the U.S. construct and maintain relational inequalities and contradicting subjectivities for immigrant youth. One of the contradictions involves contrasting the rights of children regardless of their place of origin, and current institutional practices of detention and deportation. Drawing from Latin American and Chicana thought, testimonio methodology informs critical discourse analysis in dialogue with LatCrit and Borderlands theories. A transnational, multisite dialogical interview of each participant is presented as a first layer. In the second layer, a pair of witness testimonios is presented in order to identify contrasts and bridges, which help us provoke a transnational dialogue of solidarity across countries via their pedagogies of what is possible. Key words: immigrant youth, transnational feminism, dialogical tensions, critical discourse, borderlands, witness-testimonio, Latina feminist methods, borderlands critical pedagogies.