Migration, vulnerability and resilience. Story and life history as narrative tools in social work

Abstract

This paper aims to intertwine the history of life as a technique within social work, to talk about family migration that goes from a Totonac town to the north of the Mexican Republic. The phenomenon of migration is generally associated with heartbreaking and sad stories. n this case, memory and life history go hand in hand to talk about the youthful subjective experience of effort, commitment, achievements, but also problems, illness, and the forced path towards resilience. With the use of qualitative methodology and specifically from narrative techniques, it presents us with another way of expressing the problem of youth migration. The narrative becomes, then, an example of how social research techniques come together to expose a daily experience of mobility, making it a reason for interdisciplinary study of social work with anthropology, under the auspices of hermeneutics.