Navigating Precarities: Agency, Intergenerational Care, and Counter-Narratives among Indigenous Migrant Youth

Abstract

Navigating Precarities:Agency, Intergenerational Care, and Counter-Narratives among Indigenous Migrant Youth Diane Sabenacio Nititham (bio) Heidbrink, Lauren. Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation. Stanford UP, 2020. 240 pp. $25.00 pb. ISBN 9781503612075. In Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation, anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink shares the perspectives of unaccompanied youth migrants from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States. She urges scholars to rethink common perceptions of youth as "non-agents" in need of protection and to re-evaluate the idea that youth migration is disconnected from the underlying social and political institutions that engender migration. This multi-sited ethnography offers rich and thorough evidence that migration is not simply a linear journey and that youth are neither helpless nor passive. Through the counter-narratives of Indigenous youth, Heidbrink brings to life the impact of the nexus of institutional apparatuses, migration, and deportation on individuals and their communities. Heidbrink's background as an ethnographer and engaged public scholar is clear through her approach. The text offers readers rich descriptions and deep understandings of how Indigenous youth in Guatemala sit at the intersections of transnational processes, externalized borders, securitized development, genocide, and violence. Drawing on multiple methods of data collection conducted over several years, Heidbrink utilizes observations and in-depth interviews along with mixed-methods community-based research, including workshops, video and photo elicitation, walking ethnographies, and a community household survey. In partnership with Indigenous organizations, teachers, and older youth, this comprehensive and multilingual approach (English, Spanish, and K'iche' and Mam) is attuned to the ways in which migration is used as an intergenerational strategy to navigate marginalization and precarity. The text is both thought-provoking and gripping. In sharing the counter-narratives of diverse Indigenous youth, Heidbrink makes visible [End Page 183] how they understand and respond to their migration circumstances. They are active agents, navigating local economies, transnational social networks, and global processes as they migrate from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States. In each of the book's seven chapters, Heidbrink reminds the reader that the values, experiences, and decisions of youth do not exist in a vacuum. Violence, intergenerational trauma, and legacies of colonialism and conflict are always present for Indigenous communities, even if the ways in which they take form are not always explicit. Providing the social and political contexts of youth migration in each chapter imparts a pressing urgency. It is also helpful for educators who may choose to assign isolated chapters instead of the entire book, as each chapter can stand alone with informational framing for students who may be new to the topic. The first two chapters focus on how Indigenous youth conceptualize and understand their migration. In chapter 1, "Youth as Agents, Caregivers, and Migrants," Heidbrink problematizes and interrogates the framing of economic migrants as simply making individual choices to improve their quality of life. Whether engaging in seasonal, internal, and/or transnational migration, youth migration becomes delinked from the conditions that motivate it when it is viewed as an individual rather than a public issue. These predicating events can include historical genocide, armed conflict, and migration management decisions. Further, the application of an intersectional lens emphasizes how embodied trauma and racialized, politicized geographies shape the emotional and social lives of youth and their families, their meaning-making processes, and what is at stake when youth do decide to migrate. Because migration is deeply woven into the social fabric, even when youth do not migrate themselves, the consequences reach far beyond the individual and their families: they also have significant impacts on households and communities. Thus, reframing economic migration provides depth to the varying degrees of agency that Indigenous youth have within interconnected global systems. Chapter 2, "Widening the Frame," focuses on the disconnect between how youth and those in power make meaning of migration and deportation. Increasingly restrictive policies, media campaigns, and public service announcements try to keep migrants from moving. [End Page 184] While these messages are framed around protecting youth, they contain dehumanizing discourses around Indigenous youth, their parents, and their identities. Heidbrink uses a multimedia elicitation focus group to give youth a space to respond to these discourses and how they both...