The language used in newspaper articles affects the way readers internalize issues presented; thus, when negative language is used, readers' perceptions of issues may be influenced negatively. One issue for which language and word choice are particularly important is immigration, and historically, reporters have employed a variety of metaphors while writing about immigration in the United States. During the summer of 2014, there was a noticeable outpouring of newspaper coverage relating to thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors crossing undocumented to the United States. Although undocumented migration from Central American has been a common occurrence for decades, the number of children crossing during this time period was unusual. Through the conceptual frameworks of "othering" and moral geographies, this study uses content analysis to identify terminology and metaphors used in local newspapers close to the U.S.-Mexico border, state-wide coverage along the U.S.-Mexico border, and two national newspapers. Water-related metaphors were the most frequently used type of metaphor. There was no correlation between the perspective of the article toward the migrants and the use of metaphors. Thus, newspaper articles present metaphors as neutral terms, although the connotation of these metaphors may be very negative, implying danger or harm. This demonstrates an underlying contradiction between neutral newspaper coverage of an issue, such as immigration, and charged language, which can lead readers to visualize immigrants as dangers to communities and lifestyles, perpetuating the idea of immigrants as "others" who threaten societal norms, even while reading an article that is not overtly negative.

Central Americans now represent the third largest Latinx demographic in the United States and the number is growing (Noe-Bustamante, Flores & Shah, 2019). Central America and those of the Central American diaspora are frequently featured in policy discussions, the media, and even Hollywood, but Central Americans themselves are often absent from such discussions and representations. Further, little of this work highlights the history of American imperialism in the region and how such actions have contributed to the instability and corruption now experienced in many Central American countries (Chomsky, 2015; Frank, 2019). The effects of such intervention and exploitation contributes directly to the displacement and northern migration of many from the isthmus to the United States, who then are confronted with xenophobic rhetoric and policies (Garcia, 2006). Still, despite the close and often intertwined histories between the United States and Central America, as well as their position as one of the largest immigrant groups entering the United States, little social studies research has focused on the teaching of their histories and experiences (Alvarenga, 2019; Bermudez, 2020). Few have used the study of the relationship between Central America and the United States as an opportunity to reconceptualize immigration, especially those from historically exploited countries, as inherently linked to American empire and imperialism. This qualitative research project, grounded in Latina/Chicana epistemologies and LatCrit, fuses together elements of narrative inquiry, through pláticas and testimonios, with participatory 3 action research. It explores how Central American teachers engage with testimonios, both as a process as testimonistas and as listeners of testimonios by reading collectively a set of testimonios written by Central American migrant youth. Through a series of pláticas and curriculum dreaming and building encuentros, our aim was to explore how testimonio could serve a disruptive pedagogical and curricular practice for the teaching of immigration, empire and Central America. The results demonstrate that the impact of American empire and imperialism in Central America has long-lasting and far-reaching implications for Central Americans living both within and outside of the Isthmus, which manifests in silences in both our homes and in our schools and which drastically affect Central Americans’ sense of belonging in our schools. Despite these silences, the teachers in this study, all of Central American descent, reveal how they grew to claim and be proud of their Central American identity. Further, this study illuminates how these experiences with empire-induced migration and displacement then affects who they are as educators, as well as their pedagogical and curricular decision-making.

Refugees are on welfare and get into difficulty because the Federal Immigration policy does not give them work permits and Povincial Education policy does not provide English as a second language. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

“Undocumented Youth” is a socio-legal history of Latinx child migration to and within the United States between 1937 and 1986. By drawing on archival collections from across the country, the dissertation analyzes a crucial missing dimension of Mexican and Central American (im)migration history that adult-centric histories have overlooked or obscured. The dissertation uncovers a legal system of migrant exclusion that relied on various legal and quasi-legal forms of domestic restrictions and removal that combined with federal policies governing international migration. Under this broad legal apparatus, “border crossing” included migration from Mexico into the U.S. and domestic migration across state lines. Federal and state officials denied ethnic-Mexican border-crossing youth, with and without U.S. citizenship, legal rights and access to welfare state benefits, especially public education. This hybrid system of restriction and removal resulted in multiple injuries to children and families, including migrant minors’ exploitation on farms, educational deprivation, detention, and deportation beginning in the 1940s. The broad racialization of the criminal and invading “alien” of all ages at mid-century spurred ambivalent legal and political responses from officials in power that ranged from humanitarian to punitive. As grassroots activists and sympathetic policymakers found ways to intervene on behalf of unaccompanied and accompanied ethnic-Mexican migrant children, the state persistently and creatively enacted new draconian measures and refashioned well-meaning polices to reinforce the power and reach of the domestic removal apparatus. In response to the rights deprivations and welfare state exclusion imposed on the nation’s migrant Mexican youth, child welfare and migrants’ rights activists devised a series of local welfare programs in the 1940s and ‘50s to restore border-crossing minors’ “right to childhood” based on middle-class norms of innocence, play, and education. These local efforts led ultimately to federal reform, specifically the establishment of the Migrant Education Program (MEP) in 1965 during the War on Poverty. However, the MEP’s introduction of a unique data collection technology in schools jeopardized the privacy of undocumented youth and their parents, making them vulnerable to the criminal justice system and federal immigration enforcement. This data collection helped transform public schools into school-to-deportation pipelines. Concurrently, undocumented Mexican and Central American youth were forced to endure different forms of educational deprivation and rights violations in carceral and quasi-carceral sites, in immigrant detention and on commercial farms. The tensions and contestations over rights provoked by child migrants with and without U.S. citizenship after 1937 led to legal experiments, liberal pro-migrant federal policies like the MEP, and landmark court decisions, such as Plyler v. Doe (1982), that provided the rhetorical and policy foundations necessary to construct modern, child-centered mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. These legal experiments and court battles also increasingly defined national U.S. citizenship as the sole grounds for claiming rights, eclipsing social and local citizenship as modes of belonging. As a result, they hardened the distinctions between the citizen and the noncitizen migrant. In the 1970s, a legal regime with strict noncitizen restrictions emerged that no longer collapsed all border-crossing minors into a single discursive and legal category. By the late-twentieth century only minors and adults without federal U.S. citizenship were identified and marginalized as “migrants,” marking a sharp departure from the category’s previous legal and social meanings.

No description available.

This study examines the various ways that Central American migrants traversing Mexico’s southern border interpret, negotiate, and resist conditions of immobilization imposed by state refugee policy and other institutional impediments to northbound movement. My findings are informed by 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tapachula, Chiapas, followed by an additional six, non-consecutive weeks in various sites of transit across Mexico as a Human Rights Observer in the migrant caravans of 2017 and 2018. Since 2011, as a result of increasing rates of violence, flows of Central American women, youth, and families across Mexico’s southern border have risen substantially. In efforts to curb northbound movement, the US has exerted significant pressure for the Mexican government to assume a greater role in the retention, organization, and deterrence of prospective refugee populations, resulting in the temporary resettlement along the southern border of thousands of migrants seeking international protection. Many of these migrants find themselves in a liminal space of legal and social uncertainty in which they must contend with a range of limitations and distinct possibilities as they consider their ongoing trajectories. Through close attention to the social worlds that emerge around and within migrants’ transit communities, I explore central themes related to the existentiality of im/mobility, gendered experiences of transit migration, the paradoxes of institutional practices of refugee protection within predominant transit zones, and diverse forms of resilience and coping that are given breadth through collective travel. Ultimately, I argue that it is critical to explore the narratives and lived realities of those most affected by migration-centered policy and discourse, and to recognize the critical role that migrants play in challenging and reimagining the terms of their in/exclusion.

No description available.