In July 2020, a group of scholars convened as the Infancias y Migración Working Group. The cross-disciplinary group, consisting of 10 historians and social scientists based in five countries, aims to explore the politics of child migration in the hemisphere from a historical and contemporary perspective. This series of articles for NACLA is the group’s first publication project.
Exiliados, Refugiados, Desplazados: Children and Migration Across the Americas
October 30, 2020
Nara Milanich, Isabella Cosse, and Valentina Glockner
Understanding the history of child migration and the discourses attached to the phenomenon is critical to countering unjust immigration policies across the hemisphere. Read more.
The Origins of an Early School-to-Deportation Pipeline
November 6, 2020
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez
Appeals to childhood innocence helped enshrine undocumented kids’ access to education. But this fraught politics of childhood has also inadvertently reinforced criminalization. Read more.
Guatemalan Child Refugees, Then and Now
November 13, 2020
Rachel Nolan
Tens of thousands of Guatemalan children sought refuge in Mexico during the country’s civil war, a history often overlooked in today’s discussion of child migration. Read more.
Children who Come from Afar
November 20, 2020
Karen Alfaro
Decades after being forcibly separated from their mothers, children put up for transnational adoption under Chile’s military dictatorship are searching for their origins. Read more.
Euphemisms of Violence: Child Migrants and the Mexican State
December 4, 2020
Valentina Glockner and Elisa Sardão Colares
The Mexican state legitimizes deportations and family separation by veiling these violent interventions as “protection practices." Read more.
Orphanhoods in the Ecuadorian Andes
December 11, 2020
Soledad Álvarez Velasco
Many children of Ecuadorian migrants are de facto orphans, growing up with their parents physically absent, while others lost their parents on the journey to the United States. Read more.
