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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation by Lauren Heidbrink Amelia Frank-Vitale Lauren Heidbrink. Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. 213 pp. Thinking about my own sense of identity, I realise that it has always depended on the fact of being a migrant, on the difference from the rest of you. So one of the fascinating things about this discussion is to find myself centered at last. Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centered. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is “coming home” with a vengeance! Most of it I much enjoy—welcome to migranthood. — Stuart Hall (1987:44) It is fitting that most scholars cite Stuart Hall as the coiner of the term, “migranthood.” In this essay, he discusses his own experience, as a migrant himself, of dispersal and fragmentation. His term, his description, come from expertise based on his own experience. This is one of the arguments at the heart of Lauren Heidbrink’s Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. We must take seriously, she tells us, the expertise of young people who migrate and are deported to understand the nature of this condition of being a migrant, of migranthood. Migrant children, she holds, are too often discussed as either passive victims made vulnerable by the poor decisions of adults around them or as an inherently criminal, dangerous, invasive force that cannot be trusted and must be expelled. Heidbrink strives to trouble a public discourse that rests on these two polar but connected tropes by grounding an analysis of Indigenous Guatemalan youth migration in the narratives and reflections of, precisely, Indigenous Guatemalan youth migrants. [End Page 345] One of the core arguments of this book is that migranthood, or “how migration is socially constructed, practiced, and experienced” (5), is not an individual experience. Rather, the decision to migrate as well as the attendant risks and potential rewards are all familial, communal, collective. She makes this argument through detailing how the migration and deportation of children has ripple effects on parents, siblings, grandparents, friends and, conversely, how the migration and deportation of parents has ripple effects on children, families, communities. She reinforces this argument through a similar analysis of how the Indigenous communities in Guatemala where she works have come to experience migration; it is grounded in the historical experience of forced labor, internal labor migration, discrimination, state violence, and neoliberal extractivism. As a work of public scholarship, Migranthood does a remarkable job of weaving together statistical data, survey results, ethnographic storytelling, and history to offer a clear and compelling assessment of how the so-called crisis of unaccompanied minor migrants in 2014 (and the series of migration-related crises since then) is, as Heidbrink calls it, a crisis of policymaking. Importantly, Migranthood, points us toward what I think will be a new and necessary approach to deportation. While many of the stories Heidbrink includes involve the deportations of individuals who have lived for years in the United States, she also brings in the voices of youth (and in some cases their parents) who have been deported without ever having had the chance to arrive. While narratives of displacement and dis-orientation for those deported after making a life elsewhere (see Zilberg 2011, Coutin 2016, among others) have done the crucial work of showing how deportation is not a matter of returning out-of-place people back to their “natural” place (Khosravi 2018), the experiences of those deported without ever having “made it” are also rife with trauma and multiple, layered consequences. Migranthood shows us families and communities grappling with the full range of post-deportation experience, and like the story of Sebastián—who at 20, after three deportations from Mexico, falls into depression and dies of alcohol poisoning (163–164)—suggests that those who never arrive may be the least able to survive deportation. As the United States and other countries in the global North further harden their borders, restrict access to asylum and other forms of protection, and externalize migration enforcement, we will...