Description
Book SynopsisRich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders
As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth.
Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple places—including some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompañamiento—spaces for solidarity and community-building among migrants—allow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.
Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young people’s identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Sepúlveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging.
Trade Review"Border Thinking offers critical insights into how Latinx youth speak back to racializing, colonial discourses that frame them as outsiders. It is theoretically sophisticated, engaging, and methodologically innovative, offering new insights into participatory methodologies—but its true contribution lies in how it reveals young people’s creative imaginings of transnational forms of citizenship and belonging that are too often silenced by integration initiatives focused on national assimilation."—Reva Jaffe-Walter, author of Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth
"A notable title in an age when border restrictions have become near-absolute."—The Know, Denver Post
"Dyrness and Sepúlveda engage in critical methodologies, such as participatory action research and the use of testimonio, to uncover an array of unique but often overlooked perspectives."—Anthropology & Education Quarterly
"Scholars interested in action research, transborder, migration, and citizenship studies will find these contributions very helpful."—Gender, Place & Culture
"On its face, the book appears to be an excellently written contribution to a specific literature focused on immigration and Latinx youth. But the book is also a contribution to the broader discussion of how societies and communities incorporate—or do not—people from places different than the home context and the crater-sized impacts these seemingly everyday minute choices can have."—Great Plains Research
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Rethinking Youth Citizenship in the Diaspora
1. Acompañamiento in the Borderlands: Toward a Communal, Relational, and Humanizing Pedagogy
Enrique Sepúlveda
2. In the Shadow of U.S. Empire: Diasporic Citizenship in El Salvador
3. Negotiating Race and the Politics of Integration: Latinx and Caribbean Youth in Madrid
4. Transnational Belongings: The Cultural Knowledge of Lives in Between
5. Feminists in Transition: Transnational Latina Activists in Madrid
Andrea Dyrness
Conclusion: Reflections on Acompañamiento in the Borderlands
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
