Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation by Lauren Heidbrink (review)

Migranthood is an insightful ethnographic examination of young Indigenous people’s long-term migrant trajectories—frequently across multiple starts and stops, arrivals and returns—across Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. Lauren Heidbrink argues that casting migrant youth as victims, objects of policy, or criminal threats not only ignores their complex selfhood as migrants and people but rationalizes securitized approaches to migration management that fail to mitigate the violence, wealth inequality, and family separation that motivate migration. Attending to young people’s experiences and insights, instead, illuminates the workings and meanings of migration, membership, and youth in contradistinction to humanitarian, media, political, and popular discourses.

One of the biggest strengths of this study is its far-reaching and varied qualitative research design. Beginning in 2013, Heidbrink conducted participant observation with dozens of children and families in Guatemalan repatriation facilities and with 50 young Indigenous people in local communities; encountered an additional 83 Indigenous adolescents deported to Guatemala in community workshops and an oral history project she co-organized; performed visual elicitation using anti-migration public service announcements; held focus groups; undertook walking ethnography, a method for engaging the places of social life; documented testimonios, or first-person accounts of historical events; and carried out 148 household surveys. Moreover, interviews with 253 stakeholders— diplomats, migration officials, migrant shelter workers, community leaders, legal practitioners, and researchers—provide an equally rich dataset from which to analyze discourses and policymaking.

Indigeneity is central to the book’s exploration of how articulated social identities—of ethnicity, race, gender, and nationality—mediate marginalization within entwined social, macro-economic, and political contexts. Migranthood outlines the impact on Indigenous communities of colonial histories of wealth accumulation within burgeoning extractive economies, the consolidation of colonial and post-independence political power, the violently repressive political oligopolies, and the globalized pressures of labor and capital flows. Heidbrink argues that Mam, K’iche’, and other Indigenous people respond by “revalorizing Indigenous identity” (178), strategizing transnational remittances, and recrafting familial relationships. Moreover, rich histories of internal and transnational mobilities reflect innovative tactics for navigating the squeeze of social subordination; territorial displacement; political, structural, and interpersonal violence; and wealth inequality, which influence patterns of movement. Moreover, the book illuminates how micro-finance, public relations, and so-called development programs are deployed, putatively to mitigate wealth disparities and the hardships of migration. She argues that these efforts, however, pathologize poverty and migration by reaffirming stereotypes of Indigenous people’s irresponsibility and lack of industriousness—for not maximizing presumed entrepreneurial potential—and thus serve to justify militarized, criminalizing restrictionist immigration policies in the United States and Mexico.

A virtuous result of this book’s combination of experience-near ethno-graphic research with migrants as well as among government and NGO workers is its nuanced view of the disconnect between on one hand the logics of border securitization, economic delocalization, and the southward externalization of international borders, and on the other, the outcomes they produce in people’s lives. By leading us into sterile offices and disorganized waiting areas, introducing us to indifferent bureaucrats and status-oriented political appointees, and tracing the stated objectives and budgetary appropriations of an alphabet soup of initiative and program acronyms, readers apprehend the behemoth, clunking engine of globalized migration management. This exemplary instance of studying up contrasts with perceptions of youth themselves, who see through the alternatively punitive and infantilizing approaches to dissuading, containing, and demonizing their movement.

Migranthood presents a lens onto governmental discourses and policy responses by exploring—fittingly in the introduction—the 2014 “unaccompanied child migrant crisis” and 2018 “kids in cages” episodes. These well-known moments reflect the irony of U.S. government conceptualizations of “child migrants” as “unaccompanied” and yet simultaneously dismissing them “as economic actors rather than refugees, ignoring histories of inequality, violence, and discrimination that do not easily fit into the few forms of legal relief that immigration law has designated available to them” (9). Heidbrink also addresses misinformation regarding the material circumstances of these...