- Home
- Migranthood

Migranthood
Youth in a NewEra of Deportation
by Lauren Heidbrink
Published by: Stanford University Press
240 pages, 152.00 x 229.00 mm, 1 map, 5 tables
Migranthood chronicles deportation from the perspectives of Indigenous youth who migrate unaccompanied from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States. In communities of origin in Guatemala, zones of transit in Mexico, detention centers for children in the U.S., government facilities receiving returned children in Guatemala, and communities of return, young people share how they negotiate everyday violence and discrimination, how they and their families prioritize limited resources and make difficult decisions, and how they develop and sustain relationships over time and space.
Anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink shows that Indigenous youth cast as objects of policy, not participants, are not passive recipients of securitization policies and development interventions. Instead, Indigenous youth draw from a rich social, cultural, and political repertoire of assets and tactics to navigate precarity and marginality in Guatemala, including transnational kin, social networks, and financial institutions. By attending to young people's perspectives, we learn the critical roles they play as contributors to household economies, local social practices, and global processes. The insights and experiences of young people uncover the transnational effects of securitized responses to migration management and development on individuals and families, across space, citizenship status, and generation. They likewise provide evidence to inform child protection and human rights locally and internationally.
This chapter introduces the book's three main arguments. First, the narratives of migrant and deported youth challenge the ways that the law and public policy homogenize the complex, multifaceted, and varied experiences of young migrants. Second, securitized approaches to migration management, often under the guise of "development," is a mode of governance that moves across and beyond geopolitical space, increasingly ensnaring children and youth in this global immigration dragnet. Third, in Central America, Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the adverse consequences of the securitization of migration management revealing the enduring and transnational reach of public policy across geopolitical space and generation. By interrogating how violence is produced and practiced across borders and how Indigenous youth navigate this violence following deportation, Heidbrink rethinks how and why youth are on the move. The chapter describes the mixed-methods enlisted in this 5-year, multi-sited study and outlines the forthcoming chapters.
Seemingly new patterns of migration among Central American children suggest that young people are engaged in intergenerational survival strategies that are increasingly transnational and youth-led. Enlisting multi-sited ethnography with young people and their families across the U.S., Mexico and Guatemala, this chapter examines how young people enlist social agency through their care work, paid labor, and mobility. As seasonal, regional and transnational migrants, young people enlist migration as a collective and historically-rooted survival strategy that responds to their past experiences of violence and marginalization and to their present and future needs. In tracing the ways young people enact care and belonging through social and physical mobility, this chapter argues that the contemporary transnational migration of Indigenous youth is a cultural elaboration of care, one rooted in historical displacements of Indigenous communities.
Chapter two utilizes the method of multi-media elicitation with young people to dissect discourses that emerged from official media campaigns intended to deter child migration. Youth identifies the ways these official messages infantilize young people, criminalize their parents, and pathologize migration. Analyzing discourses about youth alongside narratives by youth reveals the consequential disconnect between the imagined and lived experiences of young people and their families. In critiquing the campaign and its many pitfalls, young people widen the frame of reference by alternatively interpreting the reasons for and consequences of migration and deportation. In so doing, they evaluate the efficacy of policy responses to child migration in Central America.
In spite of media headlines which claim that child migration is the crisis du jour, chapter three argues that the influx of young migrants in 2014 and 2018 are policy-made crises. Chapter three situates the testimonio of Liseth, a Mam woman who was a refugee in Mexico as a child, alongside key historical and contemporary policy initiatives to illustrate how colonialism, armed conflict, the proliferation of plantations, and extractive industries have displaced Indigenous communities across generations. The chapter argues that these displacements are emblematic of the growing securitization of migration management and of development aid in "post-conflict" Guatemala. Key policies analyzed include the Southern Border Program, the Central American Minors program, and the Plan for the Alliance for Prosperity. Ultimately, the chapter contends that the securitization of aid spurs rather than deters migration.
Chapter four analyzes how discourses about child migration seep into government interventions and institutional practice and how young people experience them. The chapter begins by recounting the narrative of 16-year-old Delia as she is deported from a U.S. facility for unaccompanied children to a government processing center in Guatemala City. The chapter continues with the examination of development initiatives that explicitly claim to support returned youth like Delia, to reintegrate them into communities, and to create alternatives to (re)migration. These development initiatives not only fail to effectively support young people but also reinforce long-standing social hierarchies between the ladino (mixed-race) elite and Indigenous communities in Guatemala.
Chapter five examines how young people variously experience removal following deportation—as children of deported parents or madres y padres deportados; as U.S. citizen children who arrive in Guatemala as they accompany their parents following removal or as llegadas; and as unaccompanied children who are deported as retornados. The in-depth narratives of young people focus on the social, emotional, and financial impacts of removal on intimate, familial relationships over time. Conceptually, these diverse and multiple experiences of removal allow us to recognize the depth and breadth of deportation's impacts on young people and their families. The chapter argues that deportation is a process, one with rippling effects on individuals and families over time and geopolitical space.
Moving beyond the individual and familial impacts of migration and deportation, Chapter six details the community-level impacts of securitization and development in the highland town of Almolonga. Known as the "breadbasket" of Central America, Almolonga enjoys a thriving agricultural economy including abundant employment opportunities given the multiple seasons of crops, selling in local markets, and commerce to and from Mexico and El Salvador. Yet, the migration of young people continues unabated. Enlisting a household survey, this chapter examines local critiques of development and explores how community members alternatively navigate precarity through the growing use of credit and debt, often with detrimental effects across generations.
Chapter seven reflects on the policy lessons learned from Indigenous youth, arguing that there is an urgent need for rigorous, publicly-accessible, and engaged research. The book concludes with the ways young people envision "the right to not migrate" as a transformative process that aspires to 'el buen vivir (the good life)', an Indigenous political project rooted in the valorization of Indigenous ways of knowing and the advancement of a collective well-being, broadly conceived. Young people link internal and community-based decolonizing projects as critical to broader social and, indeed, global transformation.
Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist and teaches in the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach.
"Heidbrink brings nuance, clarity, and depth to the lived experiences of Indigenous youth fleeing violence, hunger, and lack of opportunity in Guatemala. Migranthood unpacks contemporary post-conflict political, economic, and criminal violence as markers of youth migration. A must-read for anyone who cares about migrant youth, and a wake-up call for policymakers recycling failed immigration and development policies." ~Victoria Sanford, City University of New York
"This gripping account of contemporary migration sheds much needed light on the experiences of unaccompanied Indigenous minors as they navigate border controls and violence. With keen insights and eloquent prose, Migranthood reveals the real-life consequences of securitization policies on the most vulnerable. An essential read." ~Roberto G. Gonzales, author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America
"[Heidbrink] offers rich portraits of young people eager to help their families through 'irregular migration' and ashamed of their failed attempts. Their stories are made more meaningful by Heidbrink's deft analysis of the historical abuse of indigenous groups by Guatemalan political and economic elites....This nuanced assessment suggests the narrowness of increasingly securitizing policy making and denying families' cultural and economic realities. Recommended." ~M. Morrissey, CHOICE
"[A] poignant juxtaposition of the contrasting perspectives of migrant youth and the multiple governmental and non-governmental authorities, both in Guatemala and the United States, responsible for migration management. By weaving the detailed chronicles of migration and deportation provided by youth with the discourses circulating in legal, medical, and humanitarian interventions, Heidbrink effectively debunks reductionist images of monolithic depictions of migranthood.'" ~Virginia Diez and Jayanthi Mistry, Teachers College Record
"[This book] makes key contributions to methodology and scholarly debates and is a must-read for scholars and students of international migration, development, and childhood studies....Migranthood is an ambitious book that lays the groundwork for future research to continue investigating the contradictory effects of the link between development and migration, and the perspectives and roles of youths as independent migratory actors embedded in larger communities." ~Chiara Galli, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"Migranthood validates youth agency, clearly making connections between systemic failures in immigration policy, securitization, and development. It is a much-needed contribution that gives depth not only to the consequences of migration and deportation beyond youth and their families but also to how the effects reverberate across communities, temporally and spatially." ~Diane Sabenacio Nititham, Jeunesse
"[A] robust understanding of youth migration....[Anchored] in an honest and systematic effort to listen to, understand, and learn from the migration experiences of Indigenous youth, Heidbrink's skillfully crafted arguments challenge many dominant frameworks." ~María V. Barbero, Children's Geographies
"[Heidbrink] contributes important insights regarding how policy affects migrant youths' experiences pre- and post deportation. This text has the potential to engage interdisciplinary audiences in education, sociology, and anthropology as well as scholars wanting to challenge misconceptions of migration and its impact on youth, families, and communities." ~Sophia Rodriguez, Anthropology and Education Quarterly
"[A] methodologically sophisticated study.It captures the tragic social cost of displacement and deportation from the view of Indigenous youth, as well as their efforts to understand and resist the old and new forms of dispossession and exploitation they experience." ~Alison Elizabeth Lee, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
"As I was reading Migranthood, record numbers of child migrants were arriving at the southern border of the United States, the vast majority from Central America. I was immediately struck by how clearly Heidbrink's analysis of migranthood – the complex political and social construction of migration – critically responded to the simplistic narratives presented in the media. Heidbrink's theoretical framework has given me a much more nuanced lens to bring to the so-called "border crisis" and the media and political representations of it.... Beautifully and clearly written, this is a book of urgent theoretical and political importance." ~Leah Schmalzbauer, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books