Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention ed. by Seth Michelson (review)

Several children’s books have chronicled migration, family separations, and deportations.¹ Most recently, Jorge Argueta’s We Are Like the Clouds/Somos como las nubes (2016), a bilingual collection of poems for children ages seven to twelve, tells migration from the perspectives of refugee children, including thoughts on what they left behind and their fears for the future. Some of the stories of migrant children and their undocumented families and friends have been widely anthologized. Such characters are forever remembered in classics of the US literary Latino canon such as Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), and Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (1997) and Breaking Through (2001). Most recently, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario brought attention to the experiences of a young migrant boy in search of his mother. These critically acclaimed books, through heart-wrenching accounts of migrant lives in the United States, draw attention to the way children experience migration.

Until Seth Michelson’s Dreaming America, though, no book had exclusively focused on the lives of the incarcerated children. Michelson, who conducted poetry workshops in two detention centers for undocumented, unaccompanied youth in the United States, starts the introduction of this anthology with a powerful statement: “[T]he following texts come to you directly from incarcerated teens living in isolation cells in one of two maximum-security detention centers for undocumented, unaccompanied youth in the United States. And from their solitude, they are reaching to you” (viii). A few lines later, he warns us that such poems will make us consider whether it is “ethically tenable to incarcerate an unaccompanied child,” and Michelson offers an answer: “any child in need, require[s] our tenderness, patience, attention, and compassion. They are children in our care, and we therefore have an intrinsic responsibility to nurture them” (ix, xi). Cristina Casado, the program manager from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, Division of Children’s Services in the facility that Michelson visited, provides more detailed information about these children: “Unaccompanied Children are placed under the Office for Refugee Resettlement (ORR)/Division of Children Services (DCS) after being apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for having no lawful immigration status in the United States, not having attained 18 years of age, and having no parent or legal guardian in the United States available to provide care and physical custody” (108). Michelson goes on to provide some common biographical facts for the authors of the anthology: they have escaped violence and poverty, survived a grueling transcontinental trek, know little of the USA aside of its detention system, and commonly experience self-harm and suicide. “Nevertheless, their hope springs eternal,” Michelson concludes (x).

The introduction addresses how poetry in Michelson’s workshops “prove[d] a powerful tool for both introspection and interpersonal connection” (xi). In the preface, poet Jimmy Santiago Baca bows in reverence to the spirits of incarcerated children who have seen “parents murdered by cartels and tyrants and dictators, houses burned to the ground by military mercenaries, sisters and brothers raped and beat to death and imprisoned” (xviii). Like Baca, Michelson encountered “bright, imaginative, and insightful children, and when given the chance, they can transform worlds. Already they are helping us to rethink our very understanding of democracy” (xiii).

Although Michelson does not mention origin, we can assume these are Latin American children since the original poems are in Spanish with English translations provided by undergraduate students enrolled in Michelson’s Spanish courses. The editor expresses the disappointment of not being able to identify the writers for legal reasons. He reflects, “I am obligated to anonymize their writing, thereby reinscribing their erasure from the body politic by the (unjust) law” (xvi). He invites readers who would like to express their support to write to him, and...