Dissertation Research: Impossible Subjects: Unaccompanied Guatemalan Youth

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Doctoral Dissertation Research: Impossible Subjects: Unaccompanied Guatemalan Youth This project explores the complex network of actors and institutions that emerge when unaccompanied children migrate clandestinely from Guatemala to the United States. The juridical category of "unaccompanied alien child," an individual under the age of 18 who has no lawful immigration status and no legal guardian to provide care and custody, complicates the construct of personhood in U.S. immigration law. Recent legal shifts have begun to guarantee some relief for minors but require youth to legally sever kinship ties and become dependents of the state. Based in Chicago at a federal shelter for unaccompanied children and within the Guatemalan community, the research investigates how this juridical category may recast relationships between the state, youth, and their families. The investigators trace the coherence of this category through the complex and often unsubstantiated decisions of immigration officials, practices of shelter social workers, and narratives of migrant youth. While the anthropology of youth argues for acknowledging the cultural construction of childhood and children as social actors, migration literature consistently neglects the child migrant as either a subject of study or as an active agent of transnational migration. Few researchers have sought the experiences of undocumented migrants through ethnographic or qualitative methods, and fewer explore migrant children outside a school-based analysis. By considering how the migrant child embodies surveillance of families and national borders, this ethnographic project centers on the diverse framings of unaccompanied youth as an intersection of the legal production of migrant illegality (Calavita 1998; Sassen 1999; deGenova 2002; Panter-Brick 2002; Menjivar 2006) and the liminality of youth as cultural stage shaped by both adults and youth (Van Gennep 1960; Jakobson 1971; Turner 1974; Silverstein 1976; Merten 1999; Hall and Montgomery 2001). With varied emphasis on the commonality or diversity of childhood across cultures, three principal models for the study of youth frame children as social actors (Mayall 1996; Qvortrup 1996; James, Jenks and Prout 1998); childhood as a social space (Willard 1998; Tanner 2007); and childhood as socially constructed (Talbot 1995; Okamoto 1995). Because an analysis of the juridical category of unaccompanied child does not easily fit into these existing models, the investigators suggest a legal model. The law defines rights and responsibilities between citizens while incorporating social practices from everyday life; as such, the law simultaneously reflects change and continuity in the structural space of childhood while shaping the daily lives of children (Parsons 1962, 1968; Habermas 1996; James and James 2001). As they navigate a complex network of actors and state institutions, the narratives of migrant Guatemalan youth will provide an anthropological analysis that engages critical questions not yet articulated in current literatures of the anthropology of youth, the sociology of childhood and transnational migration.