Amplifying Young Voices In Transit: The Lived Experiences of Violence, Care, and Vulnerability Across Borders Among Salvadoran Migrant Youth

Abstract

My dissertation, “Amplifying Young Voices in Transit: The Lived Experiences of Violence, Vulnerability, and Care across Borders among Salvadorean Migrant Youth,” focuses on how Salvadorean youth develop and enact practices of care and invent kinship during their transit to the United States. The research demonstrates the manifold ways in which migrant youth enact their agency to negotiate the impact of the legacy of violence experienced during the last century. Building upon the concepts of structural and political violence, I hypothesize that migrant youth enact their agency to challenge conditions of vulnerability imposed by the immigration policies and to negotiate the impact of the legacy of violence experienced in El Salvador during the last century. The novelty of this approach is that it explores youth migration not only in relation to violence, which has dominated these studies but also through understanding networks of care. Structural violence −both historical and contemporary− makes youth vulnerable and shapes conditions leading to migration. By focusing on youth’s agency, and not just the way they are made vulnerable, this project will show the networks of care that youth produce and reside within. I utilize a diversity of methodologies to study the experiences of youth migration as a historical product of the political violence experienced in El Salvador since the years of the Late Cold War (1985-1989), the internal armed conflict (1980-1992), and the violence of the postwar (1992-2018), in which the evolution of street gangs affected the safety of children and youth. By centering the voices and lives of migrant families, I amplify childhood experiences marked not only by trauma, community disruption, violence, but also equally care and love. The methodologies employed in this study include in-person and remote ethnographic research, the close reading of historical sources and newspapers, online consultation of international statistical databases, media analysis, and a community-engaged project involving the research interlocutors.