The United States and the border: Mexican children’s drawings of family separation

Abstract

In the current age of border talk, border enforcement, and of draconian policies that further separate and break up families, children who remain in the country of origin are rarely asked what they understand the border and the United States to be like. Media vehicles and academic papers have reported the brutal effects of family separation at the border for children and families. In order to further understand how young children make sense of their feelings of loss and separation psychologists and members of the American Academy of Pediatrics have collected drawings done by children to understand how trauma has manifested in the minds of children during detention and separation. However, another facet of children’s perceptions of the United States, migration and family separation also exist a little farther away from the physical border that divides the U.S. and Mexico. This paper, then, addresses the questions: How do Mexican children in Mexico make sense of their family separation through their drawings? How are children’s drawings and narratives describing how they see and understand the United States? In this paper, we analyze 50 drawings from children in Puebla, Mexico who have one or more parents living in the United States. Data for this paper stems from a 3 year, multi-sited ethnography that spanned New York City and several states in Mexico.