Article Type: Recap

Recorded on December 3, 2024, this video features an Authors Meet Critics panel on Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Stephanie L. Canizales, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Professor Canizales was joined in conversation by Kristina Lovato, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and Caitlin Patler, Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Sarah Song, Professor at Berkeley Law, moderated.

This event was presented by Social Science Matrix as part of the Authors Meet Critics book series, which features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public. The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Latinx Research Center.

About the Book

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone.

“Sin Padres, Ni Papeles” illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.

Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a Resident Scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Stephanie’s research specializations include international migration and immigrant integration; children, youth, and families; inequality, poverty, and mobility; and race and ethnicity. She uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic research methods to understand the causes of Latin American-origin migration to the U.S. and how immigrant children, youth, and families fare once there. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles inform her scholarship and motivate her commitment to public scholarship.

Podcast and Transcript

Listen to the presentation as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CHUCK KAPELKE: Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. I’m Chuck Kapelke, the communications manager here at Social Science Matrix. Our director, Marion Fourcade, could not be here today, which she regrets. So I’m filling in her place, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this Authors Critics Panel on the book Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Professor Stephanie Canizalez.

Just a few quick words before I kick things over to our moderator. First, I want to thank our co-sponsors for this event, including the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, or BIMI, the Center for Race and Gender, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and the Latinx Research Center.

And I also want to invite you to join us here on Thursday at 4:00 PM as the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative will present a book talk featuring Marion Fourcade, Director of Matrix and Professor of Sociology, who will talk about her recently published book, The Ordinal Society. Now, let me introduce our moderator for today’s panel.

Sarah Song is the Milo Rees Robbins Chair in Legal Ethics, Professor of Law, and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science here at UC Berkeley. She is a political theorist with a special interest in issues of democracy, citizenship, migration, and inequality. She teaches in the PhD program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law, including courses in political and legal philosophy, citizenship and migration, and feminist theory and jurisprudence.

She is the author of Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism, published in 2007, and Immigration and Democracy, which was published in 2018 and explores the values and principles that shape and ought to shape public debate about immigration. So thank you for moderating, Professor Song. And the floor is yours.

SARAH SONG: Thank you, Chuck, for that generous introduction. Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for coming to this Author Meets Critics panel. I just want to briefly tell you about the format of today’s panel and then introduce our panelists. So I’m going to introduce our panelists, and then Professor Canizales will give a short presentation (with PowerPoint) of her book.

Then professor Kristina Lovato and Professor Caitlin Patler will offer their comments. Professor Canizales will then take a few minutes to respond to some of their comments, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A. If we stick to time, we should have 20 minutes for Q&A. And when we get to that portion, catch my eye, and I’ll call on you, and Chuck will come out and circulate a mic. So please wait for the mic before you speak.

So I’m going to first introduce our commentators, and then I’ll introduce the author of our book for today. First, Kristina Lovato is Assistant Professor of Social Welfare here at Berkeley. She is the member of the Latinx and Democracy Cluster and serves as the director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare in the School of Social Welfare. Her scholarly work and teaching is directly informed by her dedication to community-engaged social justice.

She spent the past 20 years working at the intersection of child well-being and immigration issues as a bilingual social work practitioner, educator, and teacher. Her research utilizes intersectional, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches to examine the impact of immigration policy on Latinx and migrant child and family well-being.

Our second commentator is Caitlin Patler, who is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy here at Berkeley and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. She’s a sociologist whose research examines US immigration and criminal laws, legal statuses, and law enforcement institutions as drivers of socioeconomic and health disparities.

She also studies the spillover and intergenerational consequences of systemic inequality for children and household well-being. She’s received multiple grants and awards for her research on undocumented immigrant young adults, the impacts of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA program, and the US immigration prison system.

Last but not least, the author of the book that we’ll be discussing today is Professor Stephanie Canizales. She is a researcher, author, and Assistant Professor of Sociology here at Berkeley and also the faculty director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, also known as BIMI, and a resident scholar with the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Her research specializations include international migration and immigrant integration; children, youth, and families, inequality, poverty, and mobility, and race and ethnicity. She uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic research methods to understand the causes of Latin American origin migration to the US, and how immigrant children, youth, and families fare once here.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in Los Angeles inform her scholarship and motivate her commitment to public scholarship. So without further ado, let me introduce Professor Canizales.

[APPLAUSE]

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Thank you. Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. I’m Stephanie Canizales. This is my fourth book talk on campus this semester. So some of them are recorded. Some of them live in the ether. I’m hoping to give you both what I normally do with a little bit of a spin so I’m not repeating myself. But you can hear me, right? I don’t need that? OK, great.

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles is a book that I wrote that is based on six years of research in Los Angeles. It is my first book project, and I’m very excited to be sharing on it with you today. To ground us in the research, I want to start here with trends of unaccompanied child migration to the US.

We know that millions of youth migrate by themselves across the globe each year. And in the US, unaccompanied minor migrants are predominantly of Central American origin — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras particularly, and a smaller proportion of unaccompanied children also from Mexico. In 2014, the year that is known as the humanitarian crisis, the number of child apprehensions doubled from the year prior for the first time in recent history.

Apprehensions rose to about 69,000. Around 70,000 children were apprehended, and that is known as the year of the crisis. We’re now in 2024, a decade later. The average rate of apprehensions at the US-Mexico border of unaccompanied children since 2021 is about 146,000. So we’ve now doubled what was the year of the crisis.

I want to note a few important patterns, demographics related to this population that are relevant to the book that you all will hear about today: 81% of these children are between the ages of 13 and 17, so in adolescence and in their transition to adulthood. This is the average working age in Latin America.

61% of unaccompanied children apprehended at the US-Mexico border are young men. And teenagers and teenage males are more likely than younger aged children and teenage women to be the first in their families to migrate, to migrate alone, and to engage in transnational migration as their first migration experience, as opposed to internal or regional.

There is a sort of expected pathway– there you go– of entry into the US for unaccompanied children following their arrival in which they’re apprehended at the US-Mexico border by the Department of Homeland Security. Children who are from contiguous border countries, countries that we share a border with, are immediately returned to the country of origin, unless they can prove a well-founded fear of persecution at the moment of apprehension by a Customs and Border Protection agent.

If they are from a non-contiguous border country, children are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services custody, where then they are given over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, ORR. ORR then transfers children into the custody of an adult caregiver, of which 40% are typically parents. The US government then assumes that the sponsor, the adult caregiver, will care for and protect children as they come of age and through the time when their legal protection is granted or the child is ordered removed, deported.

That assumption was turned on its head very publicly when the New York Times published this report, Alone and Exploited, in February of 2023, which revealed that children were being released from ORR custody to their sponsors across 20 states, and were ending up as low-wage exploited workers in meatpacking, dairy farming, construction, and other dangerous industries.

A follow-up report later last year told us of teenagers who lost their limbs and their lives working dangerous jobs to pay off migration debt and then to make ends meet in their everyday needs. Since these stories were released, there’s been much confusion about how we got here. Like, this is America, we value children. Or this shouldn’t be happening.

But there is a history of US intervention in Central America and Mexico that has led us here, and children have always been embedded in the migration flows. I hate using that word. The migration trends from Latin America to the US. So I want to give us a little bit more context. My goal for the next 15 minutes is to unpack who unaccompanied and undocumented migrant youth in the US are, and how immigrant youth experience incorporation as they come of age without parents or papers.

To get at that first question, we have to understand that the population is much larger and more diverse than what’s written into policy reports or what we’re reading in the media. And this is because there’s more than one pathway of arrival into the US. While over 146,000 children on average are apprehended at the US-Mexico border, some also evade apprehension.

Some youth can be reunited with family members upon evading apprehension. Some youth might also remain unaccompanied. Research on the trends of unaccompanied migration at the height of the population’s growth in the ’90s and early 2000s suggested that for every one person that was apprehended, about three others were not.

So we might actually have a larger population of unaccompanied children who evaded apprehension and are growing up in different household contexts, including being the head of their own household in the US. With this in mind, my research really– the book is focused on answering the second question. How do immigrant youth experience incorporation as they come of age without parents nor papers?

I’ve argued that answering this question is important as a matter of empirics. We don’t know how many, but there could be at least 450,000 more children living in the US without parents or legal status. But it’s also one of theoretical significance, primarily in the social science areas of the sociology of migration and immigrant incorporation.

Until now, immigrant youths coming of age has been studied in an existing theoretical frame that treats incorporation as an individual or group-level experience. Scholars ask which immigrant individuals or groups are incorporated, which ones are not, and what mechanisms make these outcomes so.

In this way, incorporation is treated as a static outcome. We’ve measured– oh, no, my graphics are not going to work. Assume my presentation is really pretty. We’ve measured this outcome in socioeconomic terms, educational attainment and English language dominance, occupational and wage mobility, and wealth accumulation.

Immigrants’ attainment of these markers informs claims of their deservingness of political protection and social inclusion. So thinking here of the DREAM Act, DACA, DAPA. If you achieve a certain level of success, therefore you are deserving of our consideration of rights and privileges. Scholars have focused on the possibility of attaining these markers within distinct contexts.

We typically study youth in schools and adults at work. We’ve largely understood that immigrant parents labor on behalf of their children so that they can occupy that role of students at school. This is the general premise of the foundational, segmented assimilation theory, which has been the leading immigrant youth incorporation theory over the last three decades.

Segmented assimilation theory offers us three potential pathways of incorporation. Upward mobility into the mainstream, reserved for children who are received favorably race, class, citizenship status, so forth. Selective mobility for those who are less welcome, but who benefit from remaining embedded in parent-led households and K through 12 schools and are incorporated into their local communities or co-ethnic communities.

And downward mobility for youth who are disconnected from traditional family, co-ethnic networks, and do not complete K through 12 school. The role of parents really cannot be overstated in segmented assimilation theory. The theory of immigrant youth incorporation. The mechanism that scholars attribute the successful, upward, or selective incorporation pathways to is the availability of financial, human, social, and emotional capital within households that are transferred from parents to children that can buffer them from potential hardships in the present but also in the future.

Parents also act as liaisons to extended family and community networks who do the same. So the idea is that the child is idealized in the household and protected in the household and the community, and everyone is invested in their coming of age. The assumption of who immigrant youth are in the context they’re growing up in ties us to one dominant empirical frame, one in which children are passive, accompanied migrants who grow up in parent-led households, where parents’ resources and discipline are supplemented by extended family, community, and schools until they transition into adulthood and work.

Research on undocumented youth shows us that, by and large, the household and school contexts render them indistinguishable from their US-born peers until they age out of K through 12 schools and age into illegality. But as we know, more undocumented Latin American origin youth are knowingly migrating to the US unaccompanied by a parent.

They’re remaining unaccompanied as they come of age. They’re growing up outside of the bounds of normative childhood and complex households and families and independently enter the co-ethnic community. They don’t have that liaison. So I attempt to widen the empirical frame to account for this marginalized group and offer a chance to reassess our assumptions about how immigrants experience incorporation and how distinct pathways of incorporation come to be.

I can also reveal something new about how immigrant and young people experience identity formation, survival, what it means to thrive from their perspective. So like I said, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles really sets out to answer that question, how do immigrant youth experience incorporation as their coming of age without parents nor papers?

I advance several incorporation theory arguments moving beyond an institutionally bound, static, socioeconomic endpoint to argue that incorporation is a dynamic, material, and emotional process that occurs within and across societies over time because young people are not just growing up here. But they’re also connected to families there.

Engaged in an incorporation process, Immigrants experience their well-being and success in ways that reflect their social roles and their social position and that young people are capable of navigating this process independently. In the absence of an adult, that doesn’t mean that the child inherently becomes deviant or is disconnected from society. But the connections might look a little bit different.

So I really try to lay that out in the book across six substantive chapters. I begin at the point of departure, where you set individual and collective migration goals that are rooted in advancing their own and their family’s futures. I really try to draw on youth’s understanding of migration metas. What are those goals that they’re setting that really motivate not just their migration, but their persistence in what are unimaginable conditions a lot of the time.

Many arrive in the US to find that long-settled relatives who are constrained by their own legal and socioeconomic status are unable to offer material and emotional support, rendering children unaccompanied upon their arrival. Young people might feel disoriented as they’re thrust into material and emotional independence and their role as low-wage workers in the US.

Over time, they experience orientation to life as an unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant youth worker. Some establish meaningful social ties with individuals and organizations that facilitate their emotional orientation. Some people talk about being unaccompanied but not alone. These young people move into a phase of “adaptación al sistema,” adaptation to life in the US.

They learn to navigate the structure of opportunities before them. But there is also young people who might learn to navigate the bus system, how to get a job, how to get an apartment. They still feel emotionally disoriented and experience what participants refer to as “perdicion,” a state of perdition, of loss, of an emotional despair, where they not only lose their sense of self, but lose the metas, the things that motivated them.

As youth move from disorientation to orientation to adaptation or perdition, they make meanings of success and well-being that really are a reflection of the conditions of their lives. It’s not diplomas or wealth that they point to as a marker of success, but their ability to take care of themselves independently, to take care of left-behind families, and to support others similarly situated peers that matters most to them.

I said a lot. I’m talking really fast, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of the research methods. And if you all want to know more, I’m happy to answer in the Q&A. I spent six years conducting ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with Central American and Mexican young adults all over the age of 18 when I interviewed them. I can explain my IRB restrictions on that, but all had arrived in the US as minors between the ages of 11 and 17 in the decade before the onset of the crisis.

I observed a support group for six years. I attended church mass prayer groups, weekly gatherings, community gardens, book clubs, adult English language classes– where I did some recruitment and observations– community festivals. And then just over time, the general hanging out at the donut shops and the McDonalds and all of that stuff, really getting a sense of how young people spent their time when they weren’t at work.

Of the 75 in-depth interviews that I conducted, 61 of the interviewees were Central American, 14 were Mexican. About half of the sample was Indigenous Maya, 36, Indigenous Maya language speakers. The sample included 53 men and 22 women. The median age of interviewees was 23. So really in young adulthood, anticipating the future, but also very much connected to the teenage years that they migrated in.

The median age of migration was 16. As I mentioned, the youngest interview participant was 11 at the time of arrival. The oldest was 17. Participants had spent– on average across the 75– about 8.6 years in Los Angeles. So they were really able to tell me what happened in their incorporation. About five of the 75 were received by long-settled relatives that set them on the path of school enrollment.

They told the story very similar to the Dreamer story, the DACA student story. So I focused really on young people who were not well received, that other 70 who became full-time workers. A quick glimpse of the types of work they did. Most of my participants focused in manufacturing, garment manufacturing, which is really densely populating the Downtown LA area.

Food manufacturing, some domestic home making, janitorial workers. One woman worked at a salon. One was a restaurant DJ. It’s kind of across the board, but predominantly in what we consider these racialized immigrant jobs where single men were exploited predominantly decades ago, and then women, families, and now children are the target recruiting worker population.

So sociologists have long studied immigrant youth in schools and adults at work. Because these are deemed the age-appropriate institutions, we don’t really question how they function in making the incorporation process. If we want to study immigrant youth, we go to a school, and we end up studying students. If we want to study adults, we end up talking about work.

So I’m trying to really understand when you dislocate the age and the institution, what does that tell us about how institutions work in shaping the incorporation process and the role of age in navigating space? So those two things concurrently. Beyond the narrative arc that I described across the six substantive chapters earlier, I hope readers also engage with these important takeaways.

First, that migration and coming of age are co-occurring processes. These are adolescents transitioning into adulthood. They’re also newcomers transitioning into a long-settled migrant status and that there are also material and emotional dimensions to those two things. There’s a lot happening. I talked earlier about how we’ve come to understand the material endpoint of incorporation, and we’re keen on uncovering the material lives that immigrants live, how they live, where they live, how they work, how they make community.

So I really urge us across the six chapters to think about the emotional dimensions of immigrants’ lives. What does it feel like to depart? What does it feel like to arrive? How does this orientation of being a new migrant also then intermingle with being an adolescent that just every day feels uncomfortable in their body, is learning how to make friends, maybe has their first heartbreak, is learning how to drive. All of those things, or maybe not learning how to drive, but learning how to drive in Los Angeles, which is its own beast, and then getting your first, second, and third job.

All of these firsts, not just as an immigrant, but an adolescent in a new society. I also urge readers to consider how the emotional dimensions of youth lives are being navigated without an adult supervisor or a guide, someone that they can, at the end of the day, either say nothing happened at school or unload the thing that– those everyday interactions that we might have with our siblings, our parents, our caregivers.

I draw on youth perspectives and their own words and outline the material and emotional dimensions of how they’re living through these ongoing processes of disorientation, orientation, adaptation, and perdition. And I want to also highlight that all of those chapter titles come from when you read the book. You’ll see that they are drawn out of the words that young people use.

They said “disorientado.” They said “adaptacion,” “perdicion,” all of these words. I don’t introduce a framework. I give you the language that young people use to give texture and color to their own lives. So that is the youth-centered approach. I also play with these concepts that I’ve been developing over the past few years and previously written work that I bring together and the narrative of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.

The concepts that I’ve played with are work primacy and trying to understand the subjective meanings that young people draw around their well-being and also success. What does it mean to feel well, to live well, but also what does it mean to succeed when they’re outside of all of those markers and institutions that we’ve defined as normative.

The first concept, work primacy, I introduced in the book to illustrate how unaccompanied immigrant youth experience incorporation when the primary institutional context that they’re growing up in is the workplace and the primary social role that they take on is one of low-wage worker. With this concept, I analyze how institutional primacy undergirds the immigrant incorporation process within and across spheres and societies.

So really drawing attention to the fact that we don’t call it school primacy, but we’ve really assumed that young people are growing up in schools and that certain resources and socialization processes are happening in their lives. What I draw out of this concept is that immigrants relationships to institutions make the incorporation process by shaping a immigrants’ live chances, who they are in the present, and who they can become in the future.

And I think that’s something that studying young people’s transitions into adulthood lets me think a lot about where they’ve been and also what they imagine the future would look like for them. Again, I do this across multiple spheres of society to show how immigrant incorporation plays out in a way that is shaped by institutional primacy.

I focus on four vital spheres through which immigrants encounter the structure of opportunities, starting with youth at work, how work lives shape educational access and opportunities, the way they engage in community, how they relate to their families that are still in the origin country. I talk in the book about how long hours at work and physical ailments caused at work makes it impossible for young people to enroll in K through 12 schools.

You can’t both be at work and school at the same time but then near impossible to enroll in adult English language schools that might meet at 7:00 or 8:00 PM. And young people really try to learn the English language. So turning, again, on its head, this idea that if an immigrant is not– if an immigrant young person is not in school, they don’t value the culture.

Young people revere the English language as something that is essential for their work lives. So they’re really trying to learn the language. I highlight the cases like that of Tomas, who arrived in Los Angeles at 14. I met him when he was 19. He said he saw how attending school was nearly impossible because he said no one helped me.

I had to pay rent. I had to pay for food. So either I go to school and I don’t have money for rent or food, or I don’t go to school and I have money for rent and to eat. There’s these negotiations that a 14-year-old is making that they wouldn’t normatively make in the US. In interview after interview, I heard comments like this.

People would say, I wish I could go to school, but no one’s going to support me. It’s just me. “Estoy solito,” I’m by myself. A garment worker said, when I got here, no one wanted to help me, but I needed to find a job to survive, to pay rent, to pay food, to take care of myself. There’s so much talk a lot in the book about how young people felt being solito, being alone, and therefore relegated to work and limited mobility opportunities.

I don’t know how much time I have. I’m doing great. In particular, without English language proficiency, young people have a lesser chance of getting jobs outside of the exploitative garment industry, restaurant, kitchens, and construction work. Low wages make it hard to send consistent remittances to left-behind families, breeding feelings of guilt and shame.

Youth cope, then, by withdrawing from families only calling when work is going really well and then not calling on all of those weeks that work is not going well. Youth also participate in communities in ways that time and resource constraints posed by work enable them to. So maybe they only see friends on a Sunday afternoon because they’re working Monday through Saturday.

They go to church on Sunday morning, and they only have a few hours to themselves or engaging in physical activities. I talk in the book about a few young men who got together and started a running club. They wanted to get faster, but not just faster runners, but faster at work. They wanted to earn. I think the phrase was– something about if you work more, you earn more.

So it’s very much getting faster. That’s work primacy, getting faster for the sake of doing better at work. So that’s the relationship between institutional primacy and the lives that young people live that I try to draw out across the chapters. The everyday material conditions shape how youth feel about themselves and about whether or not they were attaining the metas they set out to and whether or not they were growing up in a way that they could feel proud of and they could communicate to their left behind families that the parents would be proud of.

Unaccompanied youth noticed that they were surrounded by adults at work and that children were either accompanied throughout the neighborhood or that kids were not at work because they were at school learning for the first time. The education is compulsory. And even if you grew up as a child worker in Guatemala, and you think this is what everyone does, arriving in the US and realizing that that’s not what everyone does, hurts their feelings in a way that I wasn’t anticipating finding.

I call this the emergent frame of reference. They’re learning in real time how kids live and how that’s different from how they’re living themselves, but also how other kids that they’ve left behind are living, including their younger siblings. One participant described that they grow up as unaccompanied young people feeling discriminated against.

He said, I feel like I’m less than them, kids with parents. I would look at other kids, say, wow, why not me? I would ask myself, why am I not a kid who was born here? Why aren’t my parents here? Why is my life different? I say, look, the ones who were born here, they go to school, they have parents, they have everything. I wish I could speak the language too. I feel like there’s no way out. I like being here, but I feel stuck. I feel less than others.

So again, the material and emotional coming together and making young people feel a sense of deprivation they probably weren’t anticipating upon migration or departure. Tomas, who we met earlier, said that when youth migrate to the US without their parents and don’t get familial support upon arrival, they have to grow up as workers (NON-ENGLISH). They only come here to suffer.

I saw sufrimiento, how young people tried to cope with sufrimiento, through reports of drug and alcohol addiction. Several instances of self harm. I talk in the book about how these structurally produced voids that young people feel prompt young people to take up behaviors to fill the void. So when we see what is called deviant behavior, it isn’t something that is inherent to a young person.

But it is an emotional response and really trying to draw attention to the structure that produces the void. I talk about in that final chapter on perdicion. But I also find that youth make positive meanings and fulfillment of their work and kept promises. Use definitions of success reflect the primacy of work and their ability to claim social responsibility.

Youth claim belonging and citizenship within an emergent frame of reference. A guy who left school in Guatemala in sixth grade after his father passed away migrated to Los Angeles at 16 after years of trying to fill the role, the financial gap, his father left behind. He thought he’d be able to attend school while working.

This didn’t happen for him. While growing up in LA, he became preoccupied with ensuring that his younger siblings didn’t end up migrating as unaccompanied youth after him. He made it his goal to ensure that his five siblings completed education and were able to get jobs in Guatemala. He said he’s spending a lot of money and working hard for them to succeed in Guatemala.

A lot of people say, I don’t have a house. I don’t have an education. Those traditional markers. He says, I’ve been here for five years, and I’ve accomplished nothing. So he’s basically saying in sociology speak, a lot of people would say that I have that third downward incorporation pathway. He says, you know what? I always think that what I’m doing for my family.

He says his mom is happy. His siblings are safe. They all finish school. Everyone is there, and they admire how much I’ve overcome. That relational success is what he’s pointing to. Esmeralda provides another example. She migrated at 16 when her two older siblings stopped remitting money. They both got married and started families in Los Angeles.

So Esmeralda was the next one in line. She was 26 when we met. She said she felt proud that she hadn’t achieved that life stage marker. The normative marker of getting married and starting a family. She said they’re happy because I haven’t gotten married. So I went, yeah, I’m the good daughter. Because a lot of women come here and a few years later, they get married, have children, forget about their families.

The not forgetting about her family became the marker of success. So again, pointing to these idealized– the high school diploma, the college diploma, the home ownership, and young people from their institutional position as workers say, my marker just happens to be different, and I’m doing well along that line. So I started off with these two questions, who are unaccompanied and undocumented migrant youth, and how do they experience incorporation? Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.

The book advocates for scholars to widen the empirical frame of who immigrant youth, but also who undocumented youth and unaccompanied youth are. I’ve relied on the case of unaccompanied undocumented youth workers who enter the US not having been apprehended at the border to show how young people are active agents in their own lives.

They can navigate complex households, transnational families. They can learn communities and workplaces and survive. They transition into adulthood as workers, and I’ve argued that this doesn’t mean that youth experience downward incorporation into deviance and institutional disconnection. Instead, they experience incorporation as a process that is conditioned by their starting point. Their institutional primacy, which is work.

I define the incorporation process as one that occurs within and across institutions and societies over time. Once pathway along the material and emotional incorporation process is informed again by their context and the role they take within that context. I introduced work primacy as a concept that shows how relationships to the place that we occupy in society is what makes the process– gives structure to that process for us.

Youth can be relegated to work, but they’re also not flatly just workers. They’re living these multi-dimensional lives, and they engage in society in ways that reflect their access to opportunities, time, resources, and also their goals. Last thing I will say is that we can see youth agency in how they draw subjective meanings of success and well-being from within their distinct social contexts in relationship with other people and that they navigate these processes, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.

Actually, last thing I’ll say is that within my– I mentioned that 36 of the youth that I interviewed for this project are Indigenous young people. And throughout the book I really tried to explain how gender and ethno-race can shape or make these processes just a little bit different in different contexts, but it wasn’t enough. So there’s another book coming next summer that is just on those 36 young people and explains the role of ethno-race and language. So be on the lookout for part two of Sin Padres if you enjoyed it, which I hope you did.

SARAH SONG: Thank you, Stephanie.

[APPLAUSE]

Kristina.

KRISTINA LOVATO: Well, thank you, first and foremost, for such an amazing presentation. My name is Kristina Lovato, and I’m an assistant professor here. And I’m going to just start off with recognitions of the amazing contributions that Stephanie’s book has offered all of us. First, I’m so appreciative and honored to be here today to engage with you all in such a beautifully written, engaging, accessible, and deeply analytical book.

As a social welfare scholar, my work focuses in similar ways, particularly focusing on immigration-related family separations. And when I knew that this book was coming out, as I followed Stephanie’s work for many years, I quickly assigned it to my research lab, and we have consumed it week after week this semester. So it’s really an honor to be here with all of you.

So again, starting off with some contributions, I’d like to say that this book shifts the way we think about who migrates and how individuals incorporate into the US and shape their resettlement. It provides nuanced and innovative insights into the framing and reconceptualization of migration.

In terms of the broad literature, as Stephanie pointed out, we’ve really understood migration from the vantage point of the push-pull factors that have centrally focused on US-Mexico relations. These push-pull factors that really have driven male migration. Fathers who come to the US. We have later learned about the experiences of women.

Mothers who experienced transnational family separation. More recently, we have learned about the experiences of youth who migrate to the US with their parents and have the opportunity to, at some point, perhaps apply for and potentially receive DACA status. This book really shifts that and places us into understanding the experience of unaccompanied migrants, again, who come here without parents, without papers.

It focuses on a demographic and a region that we have really not had the luxury of understanding, despite the humanitarian crisis that has been at the helm of the US border for the last decade. And so essentially, this population has been rendered invisible despite the intensified human rights crisis. And with that being said, particularly during a time of heightened restrictive immigration policies that is only becoming more restrictive in the next administration to come.

So with all that being said, this book is a huge contribution to the literature. This book also underscores the reality that these migrations are motivated by individual and collective urgencies and care. And this is such an important point to really think about, the fact that care is deeply involved in the decision and need to migrate.

There is a poignant quote by Caleb, one of the participants in this book. This quote stands out as he remembers how his mother confessed her concern for his future in Guatemala. At the young age of 14, in this act of care, Caleb’s mother encourages him to leave home for his own economic and emotional future.

He recalled her saying, there is no way for you to get ahead, to become a better person, and build your home. Caleb, like all of the participants, left home to obtain their metas, their goals, of becoming better individuals, earning money, caring for their families, and for many, returning home and participating in their local communities at some point.

So essentially, there was a hope to return back home and to participate and engage back in the communities that they were from. This book shows that migration is not an individual or selfish act, but rather a form of transnational family care motivated by individual and collective socioeconomic forces and urgencies that really are at the helm of their present and their metas for the future, their goals.

Stephanie also does an amazing job of highlighting youth voices as she presented here. Stephanie demonstrates how youth construct hybrid identities that bridge their own local incorporation process, settling into this major Metropolitan city of Los Angeles, as well as tending to family ties abroad, all the while experiencing work primacy, as she mentioned, and providing this type of transnational family care, emotional, and financial support, staying deeply invested and engaged with their families back home.

Stephanie illuminates the variety of resettlement experiences as she shows that many of these experiences– that not all of these youth fared the same. That males, in some cases, fare differently because of the opportunities or non opportunities that were available to them, as well as female participants.

There were a lot of gender constraints on the ways that they were received, and so they experienced incorporation differently, as did Indigenous Mayan Guatemalan youth, who experienced a disproportionate amount of anti-Indigenous reception and sentiment in Los Angeles. So little has really been written on the importance of the context of reception in which one is received.

Oftentimes, sometimes it can be welcoming, but most of the time it’s hostile. And so through the narratives that are told throughout this book, Stephanie points to the household as a very important context of reception for providing the material and emotional support that shapes youth transition. She pointed out in her presentation that for some youth, they actually do have long-settled relatives who are here, who are resourced, who have the capacity to hear about their day.

And for a lot of them, they actually didn’t have their long-settled relatives who they moved in with. Uncles, aunts, just simply didn’t have the capacity, the resources to hear about their day, to receive them because of constraints on their own financial realities, their own status as undocumented individuals in the US.

And so this book provides examples of how long-settled receiving family members faced constrained conditions on their own due to macro-level structures, which really shaped not only their own mobility processes, but of course, the youth who tried to settle with them. And so an individual– I’ll give an example of Patrick, for example– who discussed how long-settled relatives weren’t able to support him.

He says, sometimes you don’t find the necessary support here. I know I can become someone here but only if someone supports me. I don’t know where to go on my own. And so essentially, many of the youth, like Patrick, felt emotionally and materially and physically disoriented. And while it might be easy to cast some kind of judgment, blame, on relatives who can’t receive these youth, their family members, Stephanie points to the larger macro-level structures and influences that absolutely make it impossible sometimes to receive their relatives.

Another contribution that I’d like to point out is the way that Stephanie attends to the emotional and social lives of these youth. She provides deeply intimate and a personal lens and window into the emotional lives of these youth who are navigating dual transitions. According to these youth, America, the US, is not the dream that they expected.

It’s a rude awakening when they get here that the US is really not what they imagined, and the emotional narratives that are portrayed really weave in youth’s voices. Essentially, they theorize their own experience, challenging dominant paradigms and dominant theories around what incorporation should look like. Through their own words, as Stephanie mentioned, they name their incorporation process through three dynamic processes, this orientacion, adaptacion, and perdicion.

And so just returning back to this idea of disorientation, many of the youth experience this lack of emotional and material support. In some ways, the ups and downs of finding work, being exploited at work, having to deal with not being able to go to school, navigating transportation, all of this was disorienting.

At the same time, many of them were also able to adapt over time. They found support through youth groups or rather, I should say, through groups like Voces de Esperanza, which Stephanie spent six years observing and engaging in. And I’d like to point out this quote that was so powerful to me. It was the organizer of the group, Wilfredo, and he really talks about youth agency in creating mutual aid and a collective space to share emotions, which this group offered.

And so Wilfredo says to the youth themselves, “Right now, you are OK. You have your feet. You have your hands. You can work. You can smile. You have what you need. But if you latch on to one thing that is happening, then you will not be fine. Instead of living in the present, your mind will be focused on something else that is difficult. So you must have courage, which is why we have this space. These are the things that you bring here to share, that you can share with a friend. That is the only way to heal.”

And so this quote, when I read it, it just hit me so powerfully. As someone who is a social welfare scholar and someone who has engaged in the importance of groups, this speaks to the power, really, of healing through the connection that exists through these narratives with others.

So adaptation is something that Stephanie highlights through community and family. These youth– I should say the long-settled relatives that sometimes the youth have access to. These youth are able to adapt. They learn how to go to– they learn how to form study groups, to learn English, to be, again, more productive at work. They learn how to pay rent, how to navigate a huge city like Los Angeles.

They learn how to advance their careers through job jumping. And at the same time, some of them experience this process of perdition, of loss because it is so overwhelming, this process. And so Stephanie speaks throughout this book about the way in which goal setting, setting one’s metas, is challenging. And they go through processes of some of them engaging in substance use and harmful relationships and even suicidality, unfortunately, constrained by these macro-level structural forces that are at play.

I’d like to jump through to– because I think I only have one minute left– to some of the questions that I’d like to pose. So really wanting to share the utmost respect and really the power that came through this book and through these narratives. As a social welfare scholar, I encourage social work students, professionals, those who work in mental health, community-based settings, legal professionals, human-service professionals, and policy makers to engage in this book.

This is a book about the real life stories of youth who are engaging and trying to make lives for themselves here on their own. This book provides critical contributions and recommendations for policy makers, really showing that we must engage and create policies and programs that mitigate harms so that our unaccompanied youth can really fulfill their futures and dreams.

And so I’ll pose three questions that I have for Stephanie, which really just came as thoughts and as curiosities as I was reading this book. So the first one really centers the geographic context of this book and the transferability. And so, Stephanie, while you show that household arrivals and context matters significantly in the process of incorporation in that when receiving families are stably situated and children are received well, you also demonstrate that local institutions, whether it’s faith-based agencies, churches, local institutions, and co-ethnic communities can act as mediators in potentially hostile situations and bridge aspects to mobility.

So this makes me wonder, how might incorporation processes differ in states and communities with less immigrant friendly policies than California, particularly in context shaped by the current heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive governance at play? How applicable are these findings in geographies other than California, which also may have high unaccompanied immigrant populations?

The second question focuses on methodological reflections. So the methods of this book. While reading the introduction and the appendix, we learned that Stephanie spent six years embedded doing ethnographic research in immigrant enclaves in Los Angeles, in which you take the role of providing a lot of care to these young participants.

You serve, at times, as a bilingual tutor, giving participants rides, waiting until the right time to conduct the focus group. So you really act with care in this ethnographic research, and this made me wonder what guidance might you offer? Are the emerging scholars who attempt to build the same depth of community engagement in their work?

Is sustained immersive engagement essential to gain such insights, or are there alternative methodological approaches for similar studies, especially as researchers? We’re often told that we don’t have a lot of time to engage in research. So that is another question for you. Lastly, I’ll focus on policy and practice implications.

Those of us who study social inequities and access to services, our work is really ensuring equitable access to social service systems and the social service safety net. And you provide some important suggestions around how governments, schools, how institutions may invest in alternative and flexible education programs, giving, again, the shifting political landscape and restrictive immigration climate that we’re entering.

How can institutions and service systems translate these important findings into tangible and attainable guidance? How might institutions and governments support the educational and psychosocial needs of this population while we see that the social service landscape is evolving and becoming increasingly punitive? Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

CAITLIN PATLER: Hi, everyone. Thank you for being here. And thank you to Dr. Steph for providing this opportunity to engage with this beautifully written, incredibly well theorized, meticulously researched, deeply respectful at times, really quite painful. Had to put the book down a few times while reading it. But this portrayal of the experiences of undocumented and unaccompanied children.

So I’m going to do something similar to what Christina did, which is organize my thoughts around three things of many that I really thought were just incredible contributions to the book, and then pose three points for discussion. I wanted to share a little bit about how I came to this read, just the lenses through which I read.

I was introduced a little bit in terms of my academic work. So I was introduced as having spent a lot of time writing about young, undocumented immigrants who come to the United States as children, this sort of so-called dreamer group, who are all presumed to come to the US with the goal of either staying with or reunifying with their parents.

So as you say, the parents are such an important part of the story of the dreamer. I’ve also written a lot about the US immigration detention and deportation systems and how these laws define and structure normative and public perceptions of immigrant goodness and criminality, which I’ll come back to in a second.

And then finally, how many folks in here are from LA. I see the Dodgers hat in the back. OK. Anybody have lived or been through the Pico Union, Westlake, MacArthur Park area? OK. Yes. All right. So also in my previous life, before I was an academic, worked for many years in an immigrants rights organization right down there in Pico Union Westlake, and then later helped run a youth boxing program in Pico Union right on Venice and Pico. And many of the youth that would go to that boxing gym had very similar stories to the types that you mentioned in the book. And so I felt that deep and personal connection to the book, too, so thank you.

Which brings me to the kind of three main contributions. And actually, I think you did such a good job talking about the main theoretical contribution, which is to really help us rethink, refocus, really reconsider what are considered to be the paradigms of the immigrant integration literature. So maybe I’m actually going to skip over that so that our LA friends and everyone else have time to ask some questions.

But I will say, Dr. Steph really turns a lot of that on its head. And thank god. Like, we were all a little bit tired of hearing about downward assimilation. Other people have rightly criticized some of the many problematic elements of that, but you do so as well in a way that’s really, really important, focusing on the structural inequalities that compel youth toward disorientacion and can lead to perdition, and I’ll say more about that in a moment.

I want to underscore something you said, too, which is really about making forefront the emotional realities of immigrants lives, their emotional well-being, their physical health, and how those two things are related, and also come about and are influenced by the role of work primacy of basically living all day long in these very difficult work environments that contribute to both social and emotional poor health, really.

And that has– that really hasn’t been present or at least not at the forefront of a lot of the work on immigrant incorporation, and I’m so grateful to you for bringing it in. You centered the well-being of these young people so beautifully. You delved into their fear, their pain. You talked about how they described [SPANISH], [SPANISH], loneliness, agony.

I mean, this reminds me of some of the really beautiful work that sociologist Lacey Abrego has done and talking about transnational family lives and the pain of living in separation and just bringing that to the forefront, because that is so profoundly important for people’s lives when you live away from your family, when you don’t have that love to draw on every day. So I just appreciated that a lot.

Your book also speaks the unspoken. Your respondents talk to you about incest, about rape, about the sexualization of immigrant women and girls. Those parts were very hard for me to read. You talked about drug and alcohol abuse, suicidal ideation, and actual suicide, successful suicide. Very painful accounts of anti-indigenous racism, the complexities of families that some parents abandoned their children.

Those are things that I feel like the stereotype of the good immigrant just chokes people and doesn’t let them talk about the multifaceted– like, that life is complex. What was the word you used? Multi-dimensional. Yeah. Like, our families aren’t perfect. And people aren’t allowed to not have perfect families and perfect stories if they want to get ahead in this country. And that in and of itself is oppressive. So I wanted to applaud the book for doing that. And you do it beautifully and you do it subtly.

1. Another thing I really think is cool and that I think more scholars need to do over and over and over again, and not just scholars, but anybody who’s talking about immigration, is to say it clearly over and over and over again, the structural relationship between US policies and what happens in countries of origin, and then what happens when migrants settle. And how those are all interrelated.

So I’m just going to use some of your words. So this is Dr. Steph writing. “The history of US intervention has destabilized political and economic systems and repressed collective action in countries of origin, imported violent gangs that prey on vulnerable children and their families, heightened environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources, and contributed to the rise of extreme poverty and debt, with few opportunities in these home countries for safety, mobility and well-being.” That’s US intervention.

And these very same home country conditions then, quote, “Force children to become knowing political and economic actors within their families and communities early in life. They are caught at the intersection of compulsion and choice as they make decisions to migrate.” But if that weren’t bad enough already– and a lot of us know this history of US intervention in Central America.

But we have to say it over and over and over again, because other people don’t know. And if that weren’t bad enough, then the US policies then structure what immigrant youth even can achieve once they get to the United States. Again, Stephanie writes, “US authorities not only create conditions for migration, they then criminalize immigrants once they are in the United States while barring them from accessing public assistance.”

You rightly call out this violence, quote, “To legally and socially construct barriers for immigrant families to secure young people’s mobility and well-being as they come of age and then weaponize families immobility as the justification for their legal and social exclusion is not only nonsensical, it is cruel.”

So this careful framing is just so utterly and beautifully sociological, and I just want to emphasize that a lot of us, again, in this room, we come to this work. We know that reality. We know that history, but a lot of other people don’t. And I just really appreciate how clearly you stated it and how important it is, especially right now when we’re just seeing this onslaught against immigrant communities from every direction to remind people that the US caused a lot of these problems, continues to cause problems that drive people out of their home countries, and then hurts those very same people who are forced to leave once they come here. And that those things are intimately related.

And it doesn’t mean that immigrants don’t have agency, that they don’t push back and resist a lot of that and do their very best within those contexts. It just means we have to name it. OK. And then my last thing I loved, and then I’ll get to my questions– I loved many things. But one of the things I thought was really, really great was your deep attention to methods and methodological precision, and that came up also in what Christina said.

I really appreciated the informant as expert. That methodology in which youth are the experts in their own lives. And you were not. You came in and you said, I have a relationship to this reality, but I’m not living in your shoes. I want your voice to structure the way I write about this, and you’ve done that.

I also want to say, if anyone in the room is thinking about doing an ethnographic project, I have not engaged in one like this myself. But I thought– I wrote down– I scribbled in the margins over and over. She has this beautiful methodological appendix that was also painful and hard to read. But it was like a real guidebook for students who want to do this work.

And you talk about your own socioemotional and physical health and how it’s hard to witness the kind of pain that you witnessed, the challenges you faced as a– you described yourself as a young female researcher doing this work in areas that are often male dominated. Those were REAL Insights about research that we don’t often get, the raw truths that some of us run into when we do this work that others do not. So for anyone teaching students, I really highly recommend that methodological appendix.

All right. So a few topics for discussion. Great. OK. So I was thinking a lot about work primacy. We’ve talked a lot about– we’ve talked a little bit about this in some of the work that I do. I’m working with people who have been released from immigration detention, and they’re trying to re-enter the world and work– shapes their lives too, because they also have to make ends meet. And they end up working in secondary labor markets as well.

And those labor markets are exploitative, and the jobs are very difficult. But they’re actually able to work precisely because it’s in these secondary labor markets where undocumented immigration status is the norm. It’s considered, quote, the cost of doing business. Employers have this don’t ask, don’t tell policy around that, and they seem to be doing something very similar by hiring children, which is also not lawful. Or that there are also barriers to those children’s participation in more formal labor markets. So I just thought I’d love to hear more about the kind of distinct role of secondary labor markets in work primacy.

And then, let’s see, I would love– I know you previewed your baby sister to this book, but I really was– I thought you very importantly drew attention to how anti-indigenous sentiment shapes settlement experiences. And I would welcome you to say more about how scholars should theorize and think about indigeneity in the context of US racial structures and hierarchies, and how can we do better about addressing that in our work.

And then my last comment is really about where we are right now today facing a Trump 2.0. And I know– one of the things that struck me was that not a lot of what you wrote about was fear of apprehension by ICE or by immigration or even by the police. And I thought that was so interesting because so much of this work is about people, quote, unquote, “living in the shadows” and living in the shadow of fear, really.

And the idea that their whole lives are determined by this fear of being discovered. And you don’t really– that didn’t seem to come up. I mean, in terms of youth being experts, they were not talking about that. And so I’d like to hear, do you think– what do you think might have chan– has anything changed since you left the field in 2018?

Do you think– what would they say if you asked them today how they feel. And then how would that change the policy and programmatic recommendations you made at the end of the book? What can we all think about collectively doing to promote the well-being of this very important and very vulnerable group of immigrants and also immigrants in general? I’ll leave it there. Thanks.

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Yeah. Can I just– We don’t have too much time, but I’ll just make a few comment. Oh, thank you. An Author meets critics. Like, the critics really killed me when I got the invite for this because I was like, no, only friends can read my book.

[LAUGHTER]

So I really appreciate the– you know, it’s almost an out-of-body experience to hear how people receive the thing that you’ve– I’ve spent 14 years working on this project. I’m going to cry saying this, but I really appreciate your time and attention. I appreciate that you– like, I wrote this book in solitude. We were in a lockdown. No one read it until it was done.

And to have the things that were heavy– I think, embodied heavy on me, that I needed people to know that I wrote draft after draft alone in my room, I just appreciate so much hearing the resonance, and it makes it feel like, sure, tenure, sure, all of these things. But it’s also just, I feel like I know things that I need other people– now I need you all to know, and help.

Let’s do it together because you just carry it. You’re the only person that knows for so long. So I appreciate the kindness with which you showed up, and also just the attention you gave it. So yay. Thanks. Yeah. Do we want to take other questions and maybe I’ll just mesh them all together?

SARAH SONG: Questions from the audience. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Ooh, that’s a lot.

[LAUGHTER]

SARAH SONG: There’s a mic. There’s a mic.

AUDIENCE: First of all, it doesn’t matter. Ooh, my heart is racing right now. So let me take a minute. How to speak in this space, especially talking about this particular group of undocumented students. I mean, documented persons. I look forward to reading your book. I am myself an undocumented graduate student without DACA who has– I mean, as I hear the stories, yeah, I grew up in that type of environment.

I don’t know. I guess my questions, I have two questions. One of them is, I never understood or never considered my experience as an unaccompanied minor. And so I was wondering what exactly is– I think, if I understood correctly, you’re unaccompanied minor as you’re traveling. But once you’re here, you might potentially be meeting your family, which I think was my case. But I never thought of myself as an unaccompanied minor, which is interesting to process that information.

And then the second one was more just language stuff. I’m in the English department here, but the usage of incorporation and assimilation. So moving between those two. It seemed like you were just using them, like–

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Interchangeably, yeah.

SARAH SONG: –interchangeably Yes. Sorry, I’m a bit nervous. Shaky. Yeah. So I guess the main question that I had was that, yeah, how do we– like you were describing. And I guess once I read the book, I’ll get a better sense of it. But what how do– what is considered unaccompanied in this particular situation? Thank you.

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Yeah. So unaccompanied minor federal law, it is a term used to describe someone who migrates before the age of 18, no legal status at the point of apprehension, and no guardian or caregiver with them at the point of apprehension. That means you have to be apprehended, and you have to be classified as those things to have the title of unaccompanied minor.

And then that gives you the rights and responsibilities bestowed to that particular group. Like immediately put in removal proceedings, the right to different social services, so on and so forth. The way I talk about unaccompanied, because I’m bringing the material and emotional dimensions of the experience together, I refer to an unaccompanied child as someone who migrates unaccompanied regardless of apprehension and who lives unaccompanied.

So by my definition, then a young person who meets a long settled relative, like, the federal government still gives an unaccompanied– a child an unaccompanied minor title if they’re reunified with a parent in the US, which I don’t know that you’re– so in some ways, your experience might overlap with that. But is that child then unaccompanied in their coming of age? So I talk about it as, you don’t have an adult in the room that is you’re experiencing socialization through or that is a liaison between you and institutions.

So I just made that up, and you get to do that when you write a book. And I love that for me. So I think that then allows me to say, there are experiences of unaccompaniment that then– things like I talk in the book about the importance of the [SPANISH]. I talk in the book about unburdening, the venting.

We can then– if there’s no parent or sibling or someone in the household caring for you and you are truly materially and emotionally unaccompanied, there’s null space of this [SPANISH] at the end of the day where you say, this happened to me, I did this. I met this person. Good thing or bad. I talk about the importance of witnessing having a witness, someone who validates that you are– so many of the young people were eager to be interviewed by me, and they would say, thank you so much for asking me these questions.

And I’m like, thank you for letting me write something about you. But the fact that no one had witnessed them because they were unaccompanied. So being able to use the word in a way that I think encapsulates the lived experience regardless of federal designation. And that people can be, again, unaccompanied but not alone.

There can be a point of accompaniment where young people are living alongside one another. Or Wilfredo and other people that I met in the field who intentionally sought to create spaces where youth that were living in this particular circumstance could make friends with one another or provide each other advice, [SPANISH] guidance, that sort of thing. Witnessing, I think, is really important. Which– oh, go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation and for the comments and so on. I’m from the architectural background, so I’m an architect. I’m doing research in migration and also refugee and so on. So I’m interested in your research, also from the point of view of the space. I don’t know if doing the research in Los Angeles is the same– I mean, the context of the city of Los Angeles.

I mean, how does this context affect the life of the people in terms of– I can imagine that creating community maybe in Los Angeles is not the same as creating community in Berkeley or wherever. So I think, how did you incorporate this kind of parameter, the space in your methodology? Yeah. If there is better spaces or better cities or better, yeah, institutions that work with the space, like, public space where people can build this community. That’s my issue.

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Yeah. I really– I can’t tell if this is on. OK. I really appreciate that comment. And I think it goes to the context of reception. And also, how applicable is this to another geography question. I’m doing it. So I’ll say this. There are some empirical components of the work that are simply not applicable to somewhere in Arkansas or Kansas or somewhere where there isn’t a long history of migration. There isn’t a density of– the Pico Union is little Central America in Los Angeles. And actually in the US, it is the highest density place of central Americans.

Long history of immigrant rights organizing some mediocre public transportation. The idea that you can both be deeply embedded in a secondary labor market. There is a concentration of that deeply exploitative work there. And that young people can hide in plain sight. They don’t talk about federal– even Obama’s language trickled down into conversations, but it was language, the rhetoric, the shithole country, the bad hombres talk, not so much, the policy shift affects my life because they’re so insulated in Pico Union, which is neighboring to downtown LA and walking– they’re just walking around.

I talk a little bit in the book about how disorientacion, adaptacion– disorientacion. Disorientation to orientation occurs spatially. My neighborhood, my block, my neighborhood. This workplace, that workplace. Now I’ll cross the street to this other– and then they learn the beach cities, and then maybe they want to go to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge.

And that is still disorientation to orientation to adaptation cyclically. I talk to people– it’s like a helix. You become oriented to this, so then you do the next one, and then your social world grows in that way. In which case, that is the component of the work that I think is applicable across geography, across context. That you can be plopped into Arkansas, middle of nowhere. I don’t know why Arkansas, but that’s what I decided.

And that you would be disoriented, and then you become oriented, and then you adapt to that place. And then you arrive to Los Angeles, and then you’re disoriented again. And you just keep undergoing these processes in which I say in the conclusion, aren’t we all then always doing that? Aren’t we all constantly being disoriented?

You get a new job. I just got here in August. I’m a little disoriented. And then the process keeps happening. So I think that is the sort of– regardless of where you are, even outside of the US context, I imagine it is experienced in that helix way. And then this idea of the work primacy. In Los Angeles, it might be work primacy to the garment industry or to the hotels in downtown LA.

But again, you might be in a rural place of the US where it’s meatpacking and roofing, and that’s the primacy of the work. And it might be even more severe there because there isn’t the organizations and the organizing and the churches. So I think that– it might be even more intensified in a place where there isn’t the built environment around you that lets you diversify your Sunday afternoon, even if your Monday through Saturday is all work. [LAUGHS]

SARAH SONG: Do we–

STEPHANIE CANIZALES: Yeah. I think what I would love to do is answer that. Like, the way forward, you each had like policy practice implications. One as it relates to the research. I think this research is both more important than ever and also will be harder to get funded than ever.

So I’m not sure that– I got NSF funding to do this fieldwork for a year and a half. I got different foundations that were very focused on– again, I was in grad school 2011 through 20– I don’t even want to say it out loud, to 2018, and there were foundations that were getting federal funding to do this work. And I benefited from that. I don’t know that those resources will be as robustly available, so I don’t know that it’s– honestly, I’m going to be very honest. I don’t know that you could do a six year long ethnography.

But I do think that more and more– because of the anti-immigrant sentiment, just the spillover– the chilling effect of– like, all of these punitive immigration laws, the embeddedness is actually more important now than ever to get people to talk to you about things like incest, the suicidal ideation, to uncover those really sensitive topics that I didn’t get in interviews. I only got in observations.

Like, I wouldn’t have known that. And I didn’t interview someone that was experiencing actively a place of perdition, that was being domestically abused or that was using drugs and alcohol to cope with– to fill the void. That was something I saw. So I think there needs to be, I think, a little bit of scrappiness with the way we move forward in order to do embedded, meaningful work that illuminates people’s lives in this way.

And then in terms of the policy implications, I think you were asking, like, what can we all do? And then, Caitlin, you were asking, how would my policy recommendations change? I think there’s one thing that I tell people and that I mentioned, this idea of [SPANISH], the unburdening and the witnessing.

Simple, simple things that aren’t actually like– you can’t do the organizing. Some people ask me, what is the process of taking in an unaccompanied child? And I’m like, OK, that is the extreme. Like, let me save a child vibe that I don’t recommend anyone walk away with that takeaway. But I think the [SPANISH] and the witnessing are simple things we can do every day that can make a difference between a child experiencing adaptacion or perdicion.

I make it clear, all of these young people– I try to make it clear in the book that all of these young people were constrained by the same structural forces. And the thing that fork in the road made it one way or the other was a meaningful social tie. Which is then all of our burden to walk around knowing that human-social relationship, it isn’t just the information that’s shared across social networks and the capital that’s built. It’s also the witnessing that is important for all of us, but especially for adolescents transitioning into young adulthood. The feeling of being lost. No one knows I’m here. No one knows I’m going through this. It could be really detrimental to young people.

And then thankfully, I would say that my conclusion would not change. My policy recommendations are the same. I’ve learned through my work with the federal government, that they don’t like– they do not like reading anything that’s prescribes, these are the steps of the things you have to do. Because if step 2 is not feasible by the law or by funding, they’ll throw out anything. And they’re not going to sit there and be creative about how to apply.

So I rewrote my whole conclusion after I learned that fact in a conversation in DC. And I said, OK, on the level of ideology, on the level of this managing emotion and material wor– emotional material world simultaneously, my recommendations will stand. Recognize the refugee status of children. Recognize the importance of legal status.

If you don’t want to legalize children, offer legal protection to children, what about the people that have been here for 15 or 20 years that you’re expecting to receive them? Can you support the system you believe is supposed to be functioning in a certain way? Can you believe in children’s ability to define for themselves?

I think the book opens with the conversation, like, what would you want the government to do for you locally, regionally, or at the federal level? And they said, listen to us. Like, children have insight. Young people have insight into what matters to them. And that, I think, is something I still think needs to happen.

And we need to empower a youth movement and unaccompanied youth movement in the same way that dreamers and DACA youth really thrust themselves to the fore of the immigrant rights debate. We can do that again. And it will be harder, but it is, again, still– one of the most important things you can do is tell the stories and illuminate the complexity of children’s lives.

SARAH SONG: Thank you so much, Stephanie, Kristina, and Caitlin. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.

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