Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence by Susan Bibler Coutin (review)

Susan Bibler Coutin concludes Exiled Home with a memory. It is 1982, and she is an undergraduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. Eating cereal and milk and about to run off to class, she catches a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle about death squads in El Salvador. She writes, "I then headed off to class, not yet able to see my future self… [and] I did not yet know the degree to which I would be shaped by events that this conflict set into motion" (224–225). Nearly 35 years later, I have the pleasure to review this thoughtful and thought-provoking book that sensitively and sophisticatedly brings more than three decades of insight and activism to bear on the lives of Salvadoran transnational youth in the aftermath of violence. Exiled Home is a testament to many things—the importance of fieldwork, the significance of critical thought, the power of political participation—but the book also evidences the gift of longstanding ethnographic engagements. In defense of her use of the term youth, which can rightly come under fire, the author explains: "I suppose I also use youth to signal the fact, generally speaking, that I am from the same generation as their parents" (12). In this book, you see a scholar aging alongside her informants. The gift of Exiled Home is its trenchant critique of Central American deportation policy, which makes this title so incredibly timely. But the other gift is how the book provides a window into the life of an ethnographer who has spent the vast majority of her life struggling to understand what it means to bear witness. This is the book's more timeless insight. Exiled Home, to its credit, is part ethnography and part biography.

First, the ethnography. Exiled Home is based on interviews with 106 individuals. This consisted of 40 1.5-generation and second generation youths in Southern California (Coutin defines 1.5-generation youths as individuals who arrived in the US as children and adolescents), 41 youths who had been deported back to El Salvador, and 25 NGO workers and human rights activists. Coutin concedes that most of those interviewed are college educated, and so they do not represent the complete spectrum of experience that might fully fit under the rubric of youth. This again calls into question her use of the term youth instead of a more sociologically accurate term. But this cohort nonetheless allows the book to successfully argue against any facile division between home country and host country, as mainstream immigration and diasporic studies might assume. Rather, with a US-backed civil war in Central America (1980–1992) pushing a generation of Salvadorans to the US and with shifts in US deportation regimes beginning in 1992, there exists a cohort of Salvadorans caught between a supposed home country and a supposed host country. To consider the social relationships and affective fallout generated by such histories, Coutin considers two terms: dismembering and re/membering.

Dismemberment here means two things. The first is "not remembering or erasing" (3). The second is "the breaking apart of bodies, politics, and nations" (4). The civil war dismembered Salvadoran youths—literally with the breaking apart of so many bodies; but also figuratively with the dispersal of a generation as refugees. This dismemberment is then compounded by the systemic racism that these youths experience when in the US at the hands of white America as well as their Spanish-speaking classmates. One of the most convincing moments of the entire book comes in the second chapter, when Coutin details the microaggressions against Salvadoran youths by Mexican classmates for the Spanish that they speak (77). Coutin then advocates for a politics of re/membering, which she argues makes at least four contributions: that re/membering a) accesses subjective experience, b) reconnects subjects to nationalities, c) allows the past to haunt the present, and d) spatializes memory and membership (5–7...