The following is an excerpt from Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales, available now from University of California Press.
Sin Padres, Ni Papeles (Without Parents, Nor Papers) tells the coming-of-age stories of Central American and Mexican immigrant youth who migrated to the United States and arrived in Los Angeles, California, clandestinely, without parents nor papers.
I began my research with unaccompanied and undocumented migrant youth in 2012, just as communities across the US were settling into the Obama administration’s passage of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order. Colloquially known as DACA, this executive order granted a stay on deportation and work authorization renewable in two-year increments to a select group of undocumented migrant young people who arrived as children and grew up as students.
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While DACA had a significant positive impact on eligible groups’ political, economic, and social mobility, some criticized its limited scope, including that it left out 62 percent of the undocumented youth and young adults who did not meet the policy’s educational requirements. Among those excluded were the youth I was meeting in Los Angeles, who, because of their unaccompanied status, were not growing up as students in schools but as low-wage workers.
Telling these youth’s stories would get more complicated come 2014 when the near doubling of Unaccompanied children and youth apprehensions at the US-Mexico border incited “an urgent humanitarian situation that would eventually launch a decade-long migration crisis. Suddenly, it was not just images of undocumented high school and college graduates donning caps and gowns that were spread across printed and digital media but those of Central American and Mexican children as young as three or four years old at the border, in detention centers, and in courtrooms.
How did we get here? And what would we do now?
In October 2016, I sat in a wood-paneled room of a Koreatown, Los Angeles, teahouse with sixteen undocumented young adults who had come of age as unaccompanied youth and low-wage workers across the city. Some were the first in their families to migrate from Central America; others had arrived in Los Angeles following siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles. Many remained tied to left-behind families, but a few described themselves as solitos (alone). I asked the group several questions: What comes to mind when you hear the news of unaccompanied child migration? Do you relate to these children, and how? What should we do to help kids arriving in Los Angeles today?
The room turned quiet, and the youth pensive. I waded through the awkward silence until Cristhian, a Guatemalan Maya man in his early twenties, responded. “I am going to talk from my experience,” he said. “I’ll tell you how I’ve lived and how I see things,” asserting that he did relate to the children arriving in the US at the time. I smiled and nodded as others turned their gazes toward him. “I think, well, the first thing is to understand how people lived in their home countries when they were little. Some of us live in a lot of poverty,” he began, “Over there, when you’re little, you grow up poor and without resources, and you can’t get ahead. And the same goes for our parents; they don’t have an education. It’s not their fault, but that is how we lived in Guatemala. There was no education, no way to get ahead.”
For Cristhian, the news of unaccompanied child migration prompted him to think of children’s original displacement(s). He understood migrant children’s lives in the United States as shaped by what they left behind: intergenerational structural violence, including poverty, that cut futures short. Cristhian described himself and other adolescent migrants as being aware of the unattainability of their imagined futures even when “they were little” because “no one asks you, ‘what do you want to do?’ And even if you know what you want to do, over there, when you’re little, you work. So, you think, ‘Oh, this is my life, and people live like this in other places too.” Supporting children, he proposed, necessitated the understanding that youth possess imagined futures and a curiosity about what they could entail.
Turning back to his experience, Cristhian reflected, “Like, I would have liked to study, but there was no one here to support me. There still isn’t. So, you get here, and you must work. You come here to work. If you don’t work, you end up on the street.” Regardless of what future youth imagined they would have at the point of departure, their arrival context—that there “was no one” and “still is no one”—shaped how they would grow up in Los Angeles.
Without support, Cristhian became a worker, not a student, as he desired. He had no other choice. If he did not work, he would go unhoused. Cristhian ended his reflection by saying, “If someone had helped me financially, if someone had funded my education and my housing, I would at least have a college degree by now. But it wasn’t like that. There aren’t resources there or here. So, you move very slowly, little by little, because you cannot do everything at once.”
“Everything is a process,” someone said from across the table.
“Yes, it’s a long process,” another young person affirmed.
Engaging in this process—of immigrant incorporation and youth coming-of-age— requires the support of caring relationships.
Unaccompanied Migrant Youth’s Coming-of-Age Process, and the Difference People Make
Critical to youth’s positive coming of age was their engagement in community organizations and groups and individual relationships with significant adult figures and peers who provided desahogo; that is, opportunities for young people to unburden themselves from the emotional distress of loneliness and angst looming over them as unaccompanied teens transitioning to adulthood. A vital component of the effectiveness of desahogo (unburdening) was that youth have meaningful connections with adult mentors or guides who could orient youth to their roles and responsibilities, norms and values, and the available structure of opportunities before them.
These ties were also meaningful to the unaccompanied teens as they provided the structure and discipline they longed for. Nonfamilial adult figures often did not provide material resources. Still, they offered emotional support by teaching youth how to name the isolation and hardship they endured, make sense of the disillusionment of the circumstances of their lives as unaccompanied and undocumented youth, and provide frames for thinking about and acting on them.
The influence of a guide on youth’s coming-of-age became clear through my interaction with a group of Indigenous Guatemalan teens and young adults of Maya descent whom I met through a group I refer to as Voces de Esperanza (Voices of Hope) between 2012 and 2018. During my six years with this group, it seemed that many unaccompanied Maya youth in Los Angeles, regardless of where I met them, had some connection to the group’s primary coordinator, Wilfredo.
Wilfredo, a former catechist instructor and refugee of the Salvadoran civil war, was a figurehead in Pico-Union and MacArthur Park’s unaccompanied youth worker community. He is often accompanied by a young Mexican American man named Jorge, who is in his mid-twenties. Jorge was from the Pico-Union area. Together, they worked to encourage youth in seven distinct areas of development: physical, intellectual, moral, emotional, spiritual, social, and sexual. Although he was not the only mentor or significant other whom the youth came to know, he was an example of the influence that even a single guiding adult figure can have in the lives of unaccompanied youth.
Wilfredo was known for gathering with youth every so often in one-on-one or small group meetings with a few youth at a time at a Pico-Union Starbucks. After a few months of meeting as a group, usually four or five people at a time, Wilfredo began coordinating what became Voces de Esperanza. Meeting once per week for two hours at a Starbucks coffee shop, the core goal of Voces was to support youth’s desahogo. Wilfredo was particularly kept on Voces being a space of desahogo for unaccompanied Indigenous youth who were facing challenges other undocumented Latin American-origin youth faced, but which were compounded by their marginal status within the Central American or broader Latin American immigrant community.
During Voces de Esperanza meetings, Wilfredo reminded the young people that their societal incorporation was distinct from those growing up with parental guidance and support. Hence, their outcomes could not be measured against better-resourced youth with normative coming-of-age experiences. He related his journey of coming to this realization:
When I accepted that I was at a zero in everything, I started looking for things I could work on. Why am I going to compete with other people and feel bad? Imagine that. Imagine I am at a zero and want to compete with Stephanie. At that point, I am in the wrong. I am going to feel [that I am the] worst. How will I compete with her if she started on her path when she was little and has never stopped working toward that goal [referencing educational attainment]? So, I must accept that I come from a different place. I have a lot to go, but that doesn’t mean that I cannot get there. Of course, I can. It just means that is the area [in my life] that I must work on. What is most important is living the best [life] that we can. That is the key to life. We have talked about the value of life and that we are all the same. No one is bigger or smaller [than anyone else]; we are equally valuable.
Wilfredo contextualized the young people within their distinct social worlds. He referenced me, a US-born, English-speaking, and formally educated daughter of immigrants, as an example of an unreasonable comparison to make, even for himself. Thus, supportive adult figures like Wilfredo played a role in encouraging youth to develop positive self-concepts.
Wilfredo’s earlier role as a catechist instructor in Pico-Union sharpened his insights about the damage that guilt and shame could wreak on young people’s lives. Hence, he emphasized the importance of the seven focal areas identified by Voces de Esperanza. “Why these areas?” he asked rhetorically and answered, “Because these are the things they are dealing with the most.” Furthermore, Wilfredo grasped the complexity of adolescence and the transition to adulthood, involving physical and emotional changes. Voces participants and their close friends confided in Wilfredo about their sexuality, their addictions to pornography or masturbation, and their engagement in premarital sex—taboo to discuss with adults and peers in most spaces.
Wilfredo related a conversation with a Guatemalan Maya teenager, Vicente, who confessed, “Don Wilfredo, I am embarrassed to say this, but I am bisexual, and my family in Guatemala will kill me [if they find out].” Wilfredo detailed the ensuing conversation as follows:
I asked him, “What? Do you know what bisexual means?” He said, “No, the truth is that I think I am homosexual.” So, I told him to tell me why, and he said, “It’s because I have a girlfriend but only to be in front of my family. I don’t love her; I only use her. The truth is,” he told me, “The truth is that I have more [physical] contact with men than I do with her, but my family says that if someone in our family is homosexual, we will kill them. Don Wilfredo, what do I do?” And that made me think, “Wow, sexuality [really matters here].”
Wilfredo focused his efforts in community with unaccompanied youth on creating spaces where they could desahogar (unburden) from the burden of self-denial and shame.
The Roles We Play
The immense value of such messages notwithstanding, they did not solve the very real structural and material problems that participants confronted. But they did provide youth with a framework of self-compassion, acceptance, and worth. Wilfredo encouraged youth to view themselves as active agents in their lives and futures, capable of changing the direction of their lives. In short, Wilfredo encouraged them to value their own lives, skills, and experiences—a lesson more often imparted by parents as their children come of age—so that youth could become the community leaders and guiding figures in the future that Voces participants hoped for in the present.
Unaccompanied youth’s incorporation and coming-of-age in the US is contingent on their orientation to the structure of opportunities available to them, including relationships with organizations, groups, and individuals that offer material and emotional resources, well-being, and guide their use of their limited resources. The concept of desahogo, unburdening, illuminates what has largely been left unsaid in immigration and immigrant incorporation scholarship, which tends to ignore the socioemotional dynamics: the migration trauma and immigrants’ handling of trauma as they move through the settlement and coming-of-age processes determine patterns of participation in the public spheres of life that are necessary to achieve mobility, embeddedness, and belonging. Caring, compassionate, and empathetic adults like Wilfredo and us can create spaces of desahogo that nurture migrant youth, proving that though they may be unaccompanied, they are not alone.
Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Stephanie specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Over the last decade, Stephanie has focused her research on the migration and coming-of-age of unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico in the US. Stephanie’s first book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, brings together six years of research to tell the stories of unaccompanied migrant youth in Los Angeles, California.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in LA motivate her commitment to public scholarship. Stephanie’s research has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other public outlets. She aims to impact policy through her work as a Resident Scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a Research Consultant at UNICEF.
