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Finding home: the migration and incorporation of undocumented, unparented Latino youth in the US

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Finding home: the migration and incorporation of undocumented, unparented Latino youth in the US

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Content 202

FINDING HOME:
The migration and incorporation of undocumented, unparented Latino youth in the US

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN SOCIOLOGY

by

Stephanie L. Canizales

August 2018

2
Para mi Mama Pati

3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 4

Curriculum Vita 6

Abstract 15

List of Tables 16

Chapter 1 Unaccompanied Latino youth migration: history and destiny 17

Chapter 2 Leaving home without parents and papers 53

Chapter 3 Unparented youths’ social tie configurations in Los Angeles 78

Chapter 4 Orientation and adaptation 126

Chapter 5 Immigrant youth Cultures of Incorporation 164

Chapter 6 Immigrant incorporation as a process in everyday life 187

Appendix A Respondent demographics 202

References 205

Endnotes 222

4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not exist if not for the generations of immigrant youth who left their families
and communities to find home in the United States. Throughout this process I have struggled with
what it means to conduct award-winning research telling the heart wrenching stories that I do from
the privileged position I hold as an academic. I pray that these words accurately represent the
individuals that inform them and will motivate social change in policy and practice.

To Voces de Esperanza, Wilfredo and Jorge, and the youth who guided this study, I am indebted
to you for your kindness, your faith in me and this work, and for trusting me with your stories.
Abrieron puertas para mí que no supe que existían y les dedico este proyecto y cada obra que
complete en esta vida.

The seeds of this research were generously nurtured by the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research
and Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. I gratefully acknowledge the National Science
Foundation- Sociology Program and USC Graduate School for supporting the data collection. I
am also grateful for support from the American Sociological Association, Haynes Foundation, and
Ford Foundation who supported the completion of this project.

The members of my dissertation committee deserve special recognition. Pierrette Hondagneu-
Sotelo, your influence on my development as a scholar began before I stepped foot on USC’s
campus. I am so grateful to have had your mentorship and support for the past seven years. I am
the envy of every graduate student who hears that I have the privilege of working with you. I aspire
to be the thinker, writer, professor, and mentor that you are. Thank you for pushing me to think
deeper and broader.

Jody Agius Vallejo, with tears streaming down my face I say, ‘thank you.’ A million times thank
you. I would not have joined the department if not for you. I would not have returned my second
year if not for you. I would not have run this race so swiftly if not for you. You have impacted my
life in more ways than I could count. Thank you for being my mentor and my friend, and for
knowing when each was necessary. I will always be inspired by you, the work you do, and how
fiercely you fight for justice.

To Manuel Pastor and George Sanchez, my steady streams of support. Manuel, you invited me to
find community at CSII and PERE and helped me develop my confidence as a public sociologist.
Thank you for recommending me for various speaking opportunities where I was able to take my
research to administrators, funders, and project coordinators throughout the University and
beyond. George, you were the missing piece in my powerhouse committee and I am so grateful
for your support in getting this project off the ground and through the finish line.

While at USC I also benefited from the support of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant
Integration and the intellectual community there. Roberto Suro and the Tomas Rivera Policy
Institute were a source of consistent support. Thank you, Roberto, for believing in the power of
my research and my skills as a researcher.

5
I am eternally grateful for Nathaniel Burke and Michela Musto who let me laugh, cry, brainstorm
and brag throughout the years of conceptualizing, researching, and writing this dissertation. I could
not have asked for better friends. To have started and now be finishing this chapter (pun absolutely
intended) with you is a dream. Go, us!

To Stachelle Overland, Melissa Hernandez and Amber Thomas, you are my dream team. Thank
you for all you have done to keep my wheels spinning. Stachelle, for your warmth and brilliance;
Melissa, for always holding a space for me; Amber, for the endless laughs and reality checks—
thank you. I am also grateful for Glenda Flores, Emir Estrada, Jazmin Muro, Laura Enriquez,
HyeYoung Kwon, and Jessica Butler for being the powerful women they are. Thank you for your
wisdom.

I want to acknowledge the support and mentorship of those passionately engaging in research on
Central America, unaccompanied child migration, undocumented youth and refugees. I am
indebted to Cecilia Menjívar and Jacqueline Hagan. When asked to bring in sample writings for a
McNair seminar in 2010 as a UCLA undergrad, I brought in articles by each. I never would have
imagined I would get to share ideas and my own article manuscripts with them years later. I am
honored-- beyond honored-- to share a platform in this discipline with you. I am also grateful for
the mentorship and support of Susan Coutin, Marjorie Zatz, Zulema Valdez, Leisy Abrego, Tanya
Golash-Boza, and Roberto Gonzales.

To my friends Dayna Garwacki, Reyna Vasquez, Wendy Maya, Aresha Martinez, Vladimir
Medenica, Natalia Chavez, Abagail Leepin, Elise Leepin, Steph Gomez, Diana Rivera, Brandee
Thornton, Lisa Loperfido, Lauren Portillo Perez, and Jessica Tollette: Thank you for believing in
me, for encouraging me, and for speaking life into me throughout the years.

Finally, to my family. My parents, Edgar and Sandra Canizales, and my siblings, Jessica, Kendrick,
and Brianna: Thank you for your love and confidence. You have held my disappointments lightly
and celebrated my accomplishments. My sister Jessica brought my nephew Levi into the world in
2016 and my heart grew two-fold. His smile, laugh, baby steps and words have been a source of
joy in my life. Kendrick became a student at UCLA while I was collecting data for this project.
His excitement for higher education and learning reminded me of why I strive to be a professor
and mentor during the moments when I questioned whether this was the path for me. I am also
incredibly thankful for my sister Brianna who kept me laughing, introduced me to new music, and
indulged most of my junk food cravings while I wrote the first draft of this project. You are my
heart and soul, Bri.

I dedicate my education and this dissertation to my sweet mother, Mama Pati. From footsteps, to
braces, to driving, to UCLA, to letting me move home while I wrote this project— you are my best
friend. Even when you did not fully understand the trajectory I was on (and offered up other career
options), you have supported me, you have celebrated me, and you have given me rest. You hold
my dreams as your own and always find the time to tell me of your love for and pride in me. You
have been my utmost support-- the rock on which my feet stand. I could never, in a million
lifetimes, repay all that you have done for me. But I will start here: as Doctora Stephanie L.
Canizales. Te adoro, mamita mía, y te agradezco con todo mi ser.

6
STEPHANIE L. CANIZALES
University of Southern California
851 Downey Way, HSH 314 • Los Angeles, CA 90089
stephanie.canizales@usc.edu • 213.740.3533

EDUCATION
Ph.D. Sociology, University of Southern California 2018
Finding home: the migration and incorporation of undocumented, unparented Latino
youth in the US
Committee: Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Jody Agius Vallejo (Co-chairs), Manuel
Pastor, George J. Sanchez

M.A. Sociology, University of Southern California 2013
Becoming American: American Individualism and the social adaptation of unauthorized,
unaccompanied Mayan young adults in Los Angeles
Committee: Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Jody Agius Vallejo

B.A. Political Science, UC Los Angeles 2011
Minors: Global Studies and Latin American Studies
“’Aqui somos familia”: Associational Membership and Collective
Identity Among Los Angeles’ Undocumented Latino Youth

PUBLICATIONS
Peer-reviewed
Canizales, Stephanie L. 2018. “Support and setback: The Role of Religion in the Incorporation
of Unaccompanied Indigenous Youth in Los Angeles.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Online access.
• Cristina Maria Riegos Student Paper Award, ASA Latina/o Sociology Section, 2018

Agius Vallejo, Jody and Stephanie L. Canizales. 2016. “Ethnic Capitalists: How Race, Class,
and Gender Shape Entrepreneurial Incorporation among Professional Latino/as.” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 39(9): 1637-1656.

Canizales, Stephanie L. 2015. “American individualism and the social incorporation of
unaccompanied Guatemalan Maya young adults in Los Angeles.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
38(10): 1831-1847.
• Aristide Zolberg Student Scholar Award Honorable Mention, ASA International
Migration Section Graduate Student Paper Award, 2014
• Distinguished Contribution to Research Article Award, ASA Latina/o Sociology Section,
2017

Research/Policy Reports
7
Canizales, Stephanie L. 2014. “The Exploitation, Poverty, and Marginality of Unaccompanied
Working Migrant Youth.” UC Davis Center for Poverty Research.

Canizales, Stephanie L. 2015. “Unaccompanied Migrant Children: A Humanitarian Crisis at the
Border and Beyond.” UC Davis Center for Poverty Research.

Suro, Roberto, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, and Stephanie L. Canizales. 2015. “Removing
Insecurity: How American children will benefit from President Obama’s executive action on
immigration.” USC Tomas Rivera Policy Institute and UCLA Institute for Immigration,
Globalization, and Education.

Book Reviews
Agius Vallejo, Jody and Stephanie L. Canizales. 2016. “National Colors: Racial Classification
and the State in Latin America” by Mara Loveman. American Journal of Sociology 21(4): 1294-
1296.

Works Under Review
Agius Vallejo, Jody and Stephanie L. Canizales. Latino Banktivism among Latino Elites as a
form of Ethnoracial Financial Activism. Under Review, Social Forces.

Works in Progress
Canizales, Stephanie L. “Undocumented, unparented youths’ Social Tie Configurations in Los
Angeles.” In preparation, Social Problems.

Canizales, Stephanie L. “Crafting mobility: Unaccompanied migrant youth workers navigating
the US garment industry.” In preparation, Social Forces.

Stephanie L. Canizales, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Minerva Solis-Rubio. “Children and
Migration in Latin America-US and Asian Contexts: A Comparative Reflection.”

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
International migration; inequality, poverty, and mobility; race/ethnicity; children and youth;
Latina/o Sociology; qualitative methods

ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND AWARDS
Fellowships
Ford Foundation 2017-2018
Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

American Sociological Association 2016-2017
Minority Fellowship Program

8
John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation 2016-2017
Haynes Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

University of Southern California Graduate School 2015-2016
Oakley Endowed Fellowship

University of California, Davis Center for Poverty Research 2013
Center for Poverty Research Visiting Scholar

University of Southern California 2011-2015
Dornsife College Doctoral Fellowship

Grants
USC Department of Sociology 2016
Bessie McClenahan Research Collaboration Grant, $3000

USC Department of Sociology 2016
Emory Bogardus Research Enhancement Grant, $2000

USC Graduate School 2015-2016
Research Enhancement Grant, $1500

USC Tomas Rivera Policy Institute 2015-2016
Fieldwork Research Grant, $1500

National Science Foundation, Sociology Program 2015-2016
Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, $11,254

USC Latin American and Latino Studies 2015
Maria Elena Martinez Summer Fieldwork Research Grant, $2000

USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration 2014
College 2020 Summer Research Stipend, $2750

Stanford University, Center on Poverty and Inequality 2013
Hispanic Poverty, Inequality, and Mobility Research Award, $7000

Awards and Honors
University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program 2018
Finalist and Alternate

ASA Latina/o Sociology Section 2017
Distinguished Contribution to Research Article Award

Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship 2016
9
Honorable Mention

ASA International Migration Section 2014
Aristide Zolberg Student Scholar Award Honorable Mention

Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship 2014
Honorable Mention

Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship 2013
Alternate and Honorable Mention

University of California at Los Angeles 2010-2011
Ronald E. McNair Scholar

PRESENTATIONS
Conference Presentations
2018
“Crafting mobility: Unaccompanied migrant youth workers navigating the US garment
industry.” August. American Sociological Association. July. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

“Immigrant ‘Cultures of Incorporation’: undocumented, unaccompanied youth redefine success
and belonging in the US.” July. Latina/o Studies Association. June. Washington, DC.

“The undocumented and unaccompanied migration of Latino youth to the US.” Latin American
Studies Association. May. Barcelona, Spain.

2017
“Home bound: Undocumented, unaccompanied immigrant youths’ (non)familial context of
reception in the US” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August. Montreal,
Quebec, Canada.

“Without parents and papers: The migration of undocumented, unaccompanied youth to the US”
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August. Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

“Motivations for undocumented, unaccompanied migration among Central American and
Mexican youth in Los Angeles.” Law and Society Association Annual Meeting. June. Mexico
City, Mexico.
2016
“Experiences of illegality and incorporation among unauthorized, unparented Latino youth in
Los Angeles.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August. Seattle, WA.

“Legal status in the lives of unaccompanied Latino youth.” Invited panelist, Law and Society
Association Annual Meeting. June. New Orleans, LA.
10

2015
“Support, setback, and exploitation: Religion and the adaptation of unaccompanied Central
American youth in Los Angeles.” Migration Institute of the University of Granada: International
Migration Congress. September. Granada, Spain.

“How religious Social networks shape the adaptation of unaccompanied Latino youth in Los
Angeles.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August. Chicago, IL.

“Networks of exploitation: Church and unaccompanied youth settlement in Los Angeles.”
Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting. April. Long Beach, CA.

2014
“American individualism and the social adaptation of unauthorized Mayan youth in Los
Angeles.” American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. August. San Francisco,
California.

“Becoming American: Expressive individualism and the social adaptation of unauthorized,
unaccompanied Latino young adults.” International Latina/o Studies Conference. July. Chicago,
Illinois.

“Support group membership and American ideological socialization among working Mayan
youth in Los Angeles, California.” Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting. March.
Portland, Oregon.

2013
“From the transnational to the local: The social adaptation of unauthorized Mayan youth in Los
Angeles.” University of California, Davis Center for Poverty Research Graduate Research
Symposium. October. Davis, California.

2012
“’Aquí somos familia”: Associational membership and collective identity among Los Angeles’
undocumented youth.” The New York School for Social Research Annual Sociology Conference.
March. New York City, New York

Invited Presentations
2018
“DACA, TPS, and unaccompanied minors in the US: how US policy shapes immigrant
outcomes.” Labor Studies M166: Research on Immigration Rights, Labor, and Higher Education.
University of California, Los Angeles. Lecture.

“Fast fashion, slow integration: Undocumented and unaccompanied youth workers in Los
Angeles.” American Studies 101mgw: Race and Class in Los Angeles. University of Southern
California. Lecture.

11
2017
“How research can inform the work of Catholic institutions on immigrant advocacy, integration,
and empowerment.” Center for Migration Studies of New York. Loyola Marymount University.
Plenary.

“Causes and consequences of the Humanitarian Crisis of unaccompanied minor migration to the
US.” University of Southern California. Lecture.

“Unaccompanied Latino minor migration and youth’s school and work experiences in the US.”
Arizona State University. Lecture.

2016
“Support, setback and exploitation: the role of religion and religious organization in the
adaptation of unaccompanied youth.” University of San Diego. Panel.

“International migration and unaccompanied minors.” Labor Studies M166: Unaccompanied
Minors Oral History. University of California at Los Angeles. Lecture.

“Unaccompanied minor migrants: life and low-wage labor in global cities.” Gender and the
Public Sector. National Louis University. Lecture.

“Understanding the unaccompanied child migrant crisis in the US” GE Seminar 130g: Social
Analysis of Mexican Migration. University of Southern California. Lecture.

2015
“Conducting qualitative research with unaccompanied minor migrants,” Labor Studies M166:
Unaccompanied Minors Oral History. University of California at Los Angeles. Lecture.

“Unaccompanied Latino child migration,” Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics.
Discussant.

2014
“Unaccompanied child migrants at the border and beyond.” Sociology 155: Immigrant America.
University of Southern California. Lecture.

“The exploitation, poverty, and marginality of unaccompanied working migrant youth”.
Sociology 429: Immigration, Work, and Labor. University of Southern California. Lecture.

2013
“American individualism and the social adaptation of unauthorized Mayan Youth in Los
Angeles.” IFHA Gifford Migration Workgroup, UC Davis. Paper presentation.

“Immigration: The social justice agenda beyond reform.” Tomas Rivera Policy Institute:
Students Talk Back. University of Southern California. Panelist.

ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT
12
Teaching Associate, University of Southern California
Immigrant America (SOCI 155) Fall 2012, Spring 2013
Fall 2014, Spring 2015

Diversity and Racial Conflict (SOCI 142) Spring 2014

Graduate Research Assistant, University of Southern California
Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California, Research
Assistant, 2015.

Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, University of Southern California, Research
Assistant, 2014-2015.

Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, University of Southern California, Research Assistant to Roberto
Suro, 2013-2017.

Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, Research Assistant to Jody Agius
Vallejo, 2011-2016.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
To the Profession
Co-organizer and presider, “The Undocumented and Unaccompanied Migration of Latino Youth
to the US” May. Latin American Studies Association. Barcelona, Spain.

Graduate Student Representative, International Migration Section, American Sociological
Association, 2017-2018.

Graduate Student Representative, Latina/o Sociology Section, American Sociological
Association, 2015-2017.

Presider, “Experiences of Immigrant Mothers and Youth,” Annual Meeting of the Pacific
Sociological Association. March 2014. Portland, Oregon.

To the University
Invited panelist, “Unaccompanied Latino Child Migration and Integration in the US,” USC
Dornsife Councilors Annual Meeting. May 2017.

Invited speaker, “Beyond Enrique’s Journey: Solving Illegal Immigration (For Real).” USC
Visions and Voices. March 2017.

Invited speaker, “Child migration to the US and LA’s integration initiatives.” USC TrojanVision:
Platforum. November 2016.

13
Invited panelist, “Unaccompanied Latino Child Migration and Integration in the US,”
(Un)settled: Migration, Integration, and the American Future, USC Board of Trustees
Conference. April 2016.

Invited speaker, “Immigration and Labor: A Guest Worker Program.” Center for Active
Learning in International Studies, Arsalyn Program Policy Seminar. February 2015.

Invited panelist, “Search for Safe Haven: Central American Child Migration.” International
Relations Undergraduate Association. October 2014.

Invited participant, UC Berkeley Summer Institute on Migration and Global Health. June 2013.

University Representative. Annual Conference on Teaching and Mentoring Institute. Social,
Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Scholars Program. October 2011.

To the Community
Consultant, Immigration Task Force, United Methodist Church Los Angeles 2016
Consultant, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) Los Angeles 2016

Manuscript Referee
Ethnic and Racial Studies; Law and Society; Social Problems; Social Services Review; Oxford
University Press; Qualitative Sociology

PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY
Op-Eds/Commentaries
Contributor to, “3 key quotes from Trump's first State of the Union, explained.” The
Conversation. January 31, 2018.
Quoted in, “La cancelación del TPS salvadoreño es ilógica y contraria a los intereses
estadounidenses en América Latina.” La Opinión. January 8, 2017.
“Rescinding DACA: The children are watching.” The Globe Post, September 9, 2017.
“How unaccompanied minors become exploited workers in the US” The Conversation, March
13, 2017.
Quoted in, “When family ties fray, migrant kids can land on streets,” Al Jazeera America,
November 24, 2015.
Quoted in, “Young immigrants placed in sponsor homes are at risk of abuse, experts say,” Los
Angeles Times, August 18. 2015.
“Where Unaccompanied Minors Go When They Immigrate to LA.” KPCC 89.3: Take Two.
September 15, 2014.
Research profiled in, “Young, undocumented, and invisible.” Pacific Standard Magazine:
Politics & Law, August 28, 2014.
“Life for child migrants is even harder beyond the US border.” The Conversation, August 11,
2014.

Essays
14
“Support and setback: Catholic Churches and the Adaptation of Unaccompanied Guatemalan
Maya Youth in Los Angeles.” Center for Migration Studies, research report. November 2016.

“Fast fashion, slow integration: Guatemalan youth navigate life and labor in Los Angeles.”
Youth Circulations, featured blog contribution. September 2015.

Honors and Awards
Voted one of the “Top 30 Thinkers Under 30” for 2016, Pacific Standard Magazine.
Excellence in Teaching and Leadership. Central American Resource Center, LA. 2012.

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
American Sociological Association
International Sociological Association
Latin American Studies Association
Latina/o Studies Association
Society for the Study of Social Problems
Sociologists for Women in Society

REFERENCES
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Jody Agius Vallejo
Professor, USC Associate Professor, USC
851 Downey Way, HSH 314 851 Downey Way, HSH 314
Los Angeles, CA 90089 Los Angeles, CA 90089
(213) 740-3533/ sotelo@usc.edu (213) 740-3533/ vallejoj@usc.edu

Manuel Pastor George Sanchez
Professor, USC Professor, USC
Director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Vice Dean for Diversity and
Integration and the Program for Environmental Strategic Initiatives
And Regional Equity 3551 Trousdale Pkwy, ADM 304
950 W. Jefferson Blvd, JEF 102 Los Angeles, 90089
Los Angeles, CA 90089 (213) 740-2531/ georges@usc.edu
(213) 740-3643/ mpastor@usc.edu

Marjorie S. Zatz Jacqueline M. Hagan
Vice Provost and Graduate Dean, Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill
and Professor, UC Merced 206 Hamilton Hall
Student Services Building, Room 318 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-2200
Merced, CA 95340 (919) 962-2327/ jhagan@unc.edu
(209) 228-2408 / mzatz@ucmerced.edu

15
ABSTRACT

Existing research on undocumented youth concentrates on the education and employment of those
who migrate with their parents and on Dreamers, but a growing number of undocumented youth
journey to the US without their parents and are therefore ‘unparented’ as they come of age.
Sociological theories that rely on parents’ socioeconomic backgrounds to predict immigrant and
non-immigrant youths’ socioeconomic outcomes insufficiently explain unparented immigrant
youth incorporation, as these youths often do not have access to parents’ financial, human, and
social capital. Finding Home draws on multiple qualitative methodologies, including four years
(nearly 600 hours) of Spanish-language participant observation and 75 in-depth interviews with
unparented undocumented young adults aged 18-31 who arrived in the US from Central America
and Mexico as minors, some as young as 11-years-old. I also completed 15 interviews with
attorneys, social workers, activists and community organizers for a total of 90 interviews.

This research interrogates how undocumented, unparented youth experience incorporation and
belonging in US society. Three questions guide the analysis: 1) Why do undocumented, unparented
youth migrate to the US and how do they settle in the US? 2) What spheres of society do
undocumented and unparented youth participate in and what mechanisms prompt their patterns of
participation? 3) And, how does incorporation work for youth who lack both parents and legal
status in the host society? Drawing from social science research on immigrant youth incorporation,
citizenship, youth agency and life course, I examine why children migrate to global cities like Los
Angeles without their parents, the psychological trauma they experience in the years following
migration, how they navigate American institutions as minors without their parents, form social
networks and recreate families, and their aspirations for future. Theoretically, I investigate ideas
of incorporation, belonging and illegality through immigrant youths’ autonomous migration and
everyday participation or absence from the institutions of school, work and community life as they
come of age in the US. I introduce “Cultures of Incorporation” to explain how once-isolated youth
adopt narratives of overcoming past trauma and giving back to generate a sense of stability and
status that facilitates participation in institutions and communities and the remaking of meanings
of success. Researchers might predict these youth—who are undocumented, unparented, primarily
low-skilled and low-wage workers—to experience stagnated mobility. However, as youths’
institutional participation and social networks in the US expand, their Cultures of Incorporation
prompt increased feelings of belonging. Hence, incorporation may be understood as a
socioeconomic and socioemotional process, rather than a stagnant socioeconomic outcome.

16
LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Why youth migrate

Table 3.1 Social tie configurations

Table 3.2 Relatives receiving unparented migrant youth

Table 3.3 Community ties to mentors

Table 4.1 Occupation and education (at time of interview)

Appendix A Respondent demographics

17
CHAPTER 1

Unaccompanied Latino youth migration: history and destiny

California is home to more than 2.6 million of the nation’s 11 million undocumented
immigrants who make up more than 6 percent of the state’s population (Hayes and Hill 2017).
i

The Migration Policy Institute reports that about 25 percent of California’s undocumented
population was eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
1
under the 2012 rules and the
2014 expansions at the time of their proposal, which specifically target unauthorized youth for
temporary legal protections(Hayes and Hill 2017). This means one quarter of the undocumented
population in California meets date of arrival, length of stay, age, and educational attainment
requirements to receive some legal protections through a work permit and two-year deportation
protection. Yet 62 percent of the nationwide undocumented youth population do not qualify for
DACA or similar programs geared toward high achievers (Canizales 2014). Among those who are
excluded are long-settled, undocumented and unaccompanied youth who enter the US as workers,
rather than students, and as such are not guaranteed access to traditional assimilatory institutions
such as schools. Sparsely explored in migration and incorporation research, these young people
are at the center of this study.
Finding Home began taking form in late summer of 2012, when I met a group of eleven
young people in the heart Little Central America in Los Angeles, California who gathered every
Friday night to share stories about their week. Dressed in Hollister and Aeropostle t-shirts,
distressed and faded jeans, baseball caps, and with headphones hanging around their necks, the

1
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a form of temporary administrative relief provided to
undocumented youth who meet various eligibility requirements such as date of arrival, length of stay and
educational enrollment or attainment, among others. As was outlined by the Obama Administration in 2012, DACA
provides a 2-year protection from deportation and a work permit.
18
youth I met on the coffee shop patio were not too different from the undocumented youth making
headlines in media, organizing, and advocacy efforts at the time. As I introduced myself to the
group coordinators the group participants alternated between speaking Mayan K’iche, one of the
twenty-one indigenous Guatemalan languages, and Spanish. Very little interaction occurred
between myself and the group participants that night and the seven months that followed though I
attended the group meeting each week and curiously listening as they developed their narratives.
Youth spoke of their work in the garment industry, church and other community activities, and
their families abroad. This was not simply a gathering of undocumented Latino youth, but of
migrant workers who came to the US as minors, without their parents. I refer to these young
migrants and those that I met throughout this research as being undocumented and ‘unparented.’
2

The unparented youth in this study knowingly journey to the US as undocumented minors
and come of age without legal protection and without their parents. Upon arrival in the US,
undocumented and unparented youth anticipate financial independence and may enter into
exploitative, low-wage labor, like that in factories, restaurants, or warehouses. Like many
undocumented adult laborers, they initially have the hope of returning to their home countries. As
their time in the US increases, they find the structure of the labor market, low wages, their
undocumented status, along with the political and economic uncertainties in their home countries,
keeps them in the US longer than intended. Youth who initially describe the need to “orientar” or
“orient” themselves to life in the US to get by find that, over time, they come to “adaptar” or
“adapt” to American society. Finding Home interrogates the central research question: How do

2
While many youths retain their transnational ties to families abroad, including parents, or develop new kin-like
relationships in the US, the term ‘unparented’ refers to the absence of a biological parent in the US and works to
differentiate the youth in this study from the ‘unaccompanied youth’ that are the center of post-2014 policy, media,
and research discussions. Unparented youth are long-settled undocumented youth who migrate to the US and
subsequently grow up in the host society without their parents.
19
undocumented, unparented youth experience incorporation and belonging in US society? Three
questions guide my analysis: 1) Why do undocumented, unparented youth migrate to the US and
how do they settle in the US? 2) What spheres of society do undocumented and unparented youth
participate in and what mechanisms prompt their patterns of participation? 3) And, how does
incorporation work for youth who lack both parents and legal status in the host society?
In what follows, I will summarize how undocumented, unparented youth are situated in US
policy and scholarship and contemporary trends of unaccompanied youth migration. This research
lies at the intersection of several bodies of literature, including immigrant incorporation,
frameworks of citizenship and belonging, and youth agency and life course. I draw on these
literatures to construct a framework that centralizes youth in immigrant incorporation trajectories.
I show that unaccompanied immigrant youth are active in migration decisions and their
incorporation. Furthermore, that incorporation functions as a process of institutional
embeddedness in local and transnational contexts and is not solely measurable by a static
socioeconomic outcome as suggested by existing scholarship. I then provide a detailed description
of the research methods and data on which the research is based. I end by outlining the substantive
chapters of the dissertation.

UNDOCUMENTED YOUTH IN US POLICY AND SCHOLARSHIP

In the US today, 2 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants, or 23 percent, are
youth and young adults under the age of 31 (Passel and Cohn 2010). The World Bank estimates
that young people, defined as those between twelve and twenty-four years of age, make up one-
third of all international migrants (Donato and Perez 2017). Two segments of this population
dominate the ongoing scholarly, policy, and public discourse in the US: long-settled
20
undocumented youth and recently-arrived unaccompanied minor migrants. The undocumented and
unaccompanied youth of this study do not neatly fit into these frames.
Most of the research on immigrant youth incorporation assumes children are brought to the
US by their parents, that they grow up with immigrant parents, and have access to traditional
assimilatory educational institutions—like high schools and universities— that guide their
transitions into adulthood. This understanding of undocumented youth incorporation is largely
shaped by research on those considered Dreamers and examines youth brought to the US at a very
young age who grow up fully immersed in American society and indistinguishable from their peers
(Gonzales 2015). Accordingly, they learn to be “illegal” as they age out of inclusive schools to
find their undocumented status blocks them from full membership in US society (Gonzales 2011).
Their perceived Americanness, high levels of educational attainment, and aspirations for the future
deem them deserving of citizenship by many who argue they are brought to the US by parents at
very young ages and therefore ‘illegal’ by no fault of their own (Chauvin and Garces-Mascarenas
2014; Perez 2009).
ii
The Dreamer movement brought this group to public attention and centralized
the experiences of immigrant youth in federal immigration policy reform debate in recent years
(Nicholls 2010).
The second well-known segment of the undocumented youth population are
unaccompanied child migrants from Central America and Mexico arriving at the US southern
border became national news during the so-called ‘humanitarian crisis’ of 2014.
iii
Between 2008
and 2013, the US saw a five-fold increase in the number of unaccompanied minor migrant
apprehensions from 8,041 to nearly 40,000 (US Customs and Border Protection 2018), which
escalated to almost 70,000 in 2014. The increase in unaccompanied minors brought about two
notable demographic shifts. First, of the children migrating at this time, 84 percent were between
21
the ages of 13- and 17-years-old (Pew Research Center 2014). And, in 2012, the rate of
unaccompanied minor migration from Central America, namely Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador, outpaced that from Mexico for the first time (Center for American Progress 2014).
Migration and policy experts and researchers suggest that children migrate fleeing the
reigning violence and poverty throughout Central America and Mexico and in hopes of family
reunification (Chavez and Menjívar 2010). The study of unaccompanied child migration is
typically couched within the understanding that they will be, or expect to be, reunited with parents.
Others leave their families behind to find work in global cities such as Los Angeles (Canizales
2015; 2018) and New York (Martinez 2017). Yet most of our understanding of this population in
the US is based on data collected in federal institutions and focus on causes of migration (Donato
and Sisk 2015, Donato and Perez 2017; Kennedy 2014), detention and human rights (Bhabha 2014;
Heidbrink 2014), and asylum procedures and proceedings (Galli 2017), creating a conceptual gap
in immigration and immigrant youth incorporation literature. In public discourse, and contrary to
the narrative of Dreamers (Nicholls 2013), unaccompanied minors have been portrayed as
criminals, deviant, and undeserving.
Though dominating much of today’s immigration debate, the two segments described
above do not capture the full story of the undocumented immigrant youth population in the US
today. There is a third segment of this population whose experiences do not fit into the binary
frames of long-settled and deserving youth or newly-arrived and deviant minor. These are
immigrant youth, who knowingly journey to the US as undocumented minors and who come of
age not only without legal protection but without their parents. Upon arrival in the US, most
undocumented and unparented youth anticipate financial independence and enter into exploitative,
low-wage labor in factories, restaurants, or warehouses. Others might find their independence
22
assuaged by the support of relatives, mentors, or peers. In the chapters that follow, I elucidate why
undocumented and unparented youth migrate to the US and how they participate in four spheres
of interaction between immigrants and the host society— family, work, schools (both traditional
high schools and adult English language schools), and local community. I will demonstrate how
motivations for migration and access to material and emotional support can guide youth into
specific institutional settings that shape their ability to orientar (orient) and adaptar (adapt) to US
society. Youth experience incorporation within the institutions in which they become embedded
and develop personalized meanings of success and belonging. Finding Home addresses what is
acknowledged as an “urgent need for research that deals with [unaccompanied young persons’]
life experiences in the host society” (Wernesjo 2011: 505).

UNACCOMPANIED YOUTH MIGRATION TO THE US
History reveals that children—young people under the age of 18— have long been active
participants in global movements and have migrated to the US alone voluntarily to pursue
employment, opportunity and adventure, as well as fleeing war, famine, natural disasters and
separation from family members (Hernández-León 1999; Ressler, Boothby, and Steinbock 1988).
Between 1880 and 1925, unaccompanied European children settled in British North America lived
and worked alongside adults (Klapper 2007: 5). Other groups such as African slaves and kidnapped
children were forced into indentured servitude in the US during the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries, while
Native American children who were taken from their homes were viewed no differently from slave
and displaced adults (Heidbrink 2014).
iv
As I will detail below, the definitions of childhood – and
approaches to child migration— have shifted in the last 150 years.
Unaccompanied child migrants have also been resettled in the US from refugee camps
through ad-hoc programs after World War II (Steinbock 1989). Such US programs included
23
evacuating 1,300 British children in 1940. Another 14,000 Cuban children were evacuated by
Operation Peter Pan between 1961-1962. In 1975, 2,547 Vietnamese children were resettled
through Operation Babylift (Bhabha and Schmidt 2008). Hungarian children were resettled in the
US between 1956-1957 and Indochinese children in both 1975 and 1979 and onward (Bhabha and
Crock 2007). More recently, Haitian children were resettled in the US after a 7.0 magnitude
earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010. Elian Gonzalez became the face of the unaccompanied Latino
child migrant in 1999 when Elian’s mother and stepfather died in capsized vessels while traveling
from Cuba to the United States, leaving Elian unaccompanied at the age of five. Elian was found
clinging to a life raft just south of Florida. In 2014, tens of thousands of Central American and
Mexican youth arrived at the US-Mexico border. Child migration is a global phenomenon—as
conflict has risen throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, children from Syria,
Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Somalia have doubled their rate of migration into countries like Germany
and Sweden (Rietig 2016).
v

Unaccompanied minor migrants to the US is part of what human rights scholar Jacqueline
Bhabha (2014) refers to as the “third wave” of contemporary migration that follows mid-twentieth-
century migration led by single men and the later pattern of migration driven by female migrant
workers and families (269).
vi
Children who have been apprehended at the US Mexico border report
reasons of migration such as political or civil unrest, poverty (and lack of education and work
opportunities), forced recruitment as child soldiers or gang members, natural disaster
displacement, or child labor or sex slavery (Chavez and Menjívar 2010; Kennedy 2014), and
family reunification (Donato and Perez 2017). Much of existing migration research portrays
children as passive “luggage” in the adult’s migration process (Orellana et al. 2001). Once in the
host country, children are generally described as supplemental to their parents’ incorporation
24
decisions (Estrada 2012; Kwon 2014). Anthropologists who have studied unaccompanied minor
migrants argue that unaccompanied youth are active in navigating migration to the US and the
legal institutions while in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (Heidbrink 2014;
Terrio 2015). The unaccompanied migrant youth in this study demonstrate such agency as they
come to the US alone, typically with prior work experience, and, because of conditions of violence
and poverty in the home country arrive in the US without the financial support of parents abroad.
Ultimately, we know little about children who migrate to the US without an adult and who come
of age in the host society without their parents and outside of formal legal institutions. In what
follows, I briefly outline the political and economic historical context of US-Latin America
relations that have caused unaccompanied minor migration for several decades.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF UNACCOMPANIED CHILD MIGRATION

Unaccompanied migrant youths have been arriving to the US from Latin America due to
over a century of US exploitation of Mexico and Central America that has often gone ignored in
analyzing contemporary child migration. Mexican youth migration dates back to the first decades
of the twentieth century leading up to the Mexican Revolution, when the Mexican elite and US
corporations and businessmen, including JD Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst and David
Guggenheim, that placed almost a quarter of Mexico’s land and many shares of Mexico’s main
industries such as railroads, mining and oil, into the hands of foreign capitalists, including the US,
Britain, and France (Gonzalez 2016). Many campesinos, or farmers, were displaced from their
lands and were actively recruited for jobs in the construction of railroads and other industrial
developments (Durand, Massey and Zenteno 2001). By 1910, the Mexican Revolution saw conflict
between landowning revolutionaries and federal soldiers who fought each other and themselves
for control over privatizing land and developing markets. War tactics of forced recruitment,
25
kidnapping, robbery and rape targeted young people who would soon flee from their home country
to the US (Brenner and Leighton 1984).
Mexican migration to the US continued after the Mexican Revolution as agricultural,
financial, and oil markets remained under US pressure for development. Repatriations of Mexican
nationals grew in the 1930s, just as birth rates, life expectancies, and literacy levels also increased.
The growing and aging Mexican population encountered two problems as a result of these
demographic trends: first, agricultural markets were unable to meet the demands of the population;
and second, the working-age population was growing without a simultaneous expansion of the
labor market and wages (Fussell 2004). In this period, the Bracero Program was introduced to fill
the labor needs of the US whose labor-age men were fighting in World War II (Durand, Massey,
and Zenteno 2001; Reichert and Massey 1980).
vii
The Bracero Program provided reprieve for those
who were under-and unemployed in Mexico to find work in the US. As eligible men began
enlisting in the program, others migrated for work without the authorization of the labor program.
Unaccompanied teenage migrant males joined the men migrating to the US in search of work and
alleviation of family poverty— ignoring immigration laws that prohibited their migration and
enrollment in the program as minors (Martinez 2016). Many would lie about their ages and remain
enlisted as minors, others would return to Mexico to formally enroll in the program upon meeting
the age requirements (Reichter and Massey 1980). Though the program ended in 1964, labor
migration patterns were sustained by migrant networks (Massey, Goldring and Durand 1994;
Massey, Durand, Malone 2002).
Fifty years after the signing of the Bracero Program, the US and Mexico entered into a
bilateral agreement—the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994—that would
initiate another out-migration of Mexican adults and teen minor workers to the US (Massey,
26
Durand, and Malone 2003). NAFTA introduced a bundle of economic reforms directed by the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund that was proposed to lift Mexicans out of poverty
and into prosperity. However, NAFTA heightened economic instability and increased the
displacement of workers through the deregulation of the agricultural labor market and the
elimination of tariffs and subsidies. Subsistence farmers lost their income-earning potential and
their means of survival (Fernandez-Kelly and Massey 2004) as the skills of those in the working-
class were devalued by industrialization (Hernandez-Leon 2008). As opportunities for survival and
social mobility dwindled in Mexico, unaccompanied adolescent migrants journeyed to the US.
viii

The recent outpacing of unaccompanied minor migration from Mexico by that of Central
America is tied to the expansion of US political, economic and military agendas in Central America
during the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries and the root causes of today’s ‘surging’ trends of child migration
(Lowenthal 2014). US intervention has shaped the region’s conflicts and made the US complicit
in driving the migration of thousands of unaccompanied minors today. The Northern Triangle
countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have been the focus of US intervention and
militarization in Central America because of their geopolitical positioning and the economic
benefits they provide in the name of anti-communism (Alvarado, Estrada, Hernandez 2017). Thirty
years following El Salvador’s large-scale massacre of approximately 30,000 indigenous peasants
and farmworkers through what was known as La Matanza, or “the massacre,” the US backed the
same individuals in the name of market interests (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). Central
American governments received economic and military support in confiscating land from peasants
for foreign economic expansion in the early 1960s (Lopez, Popkin, Telles 1996). The resulting
civil wars led to the mass migratory flows of Central Americans to the US in the 1970s through
1990s.
27
In El Salvador, the privatization of once publicly held land quadrupled landlessness
between 1961 and 1975 (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). Between 1978 and 1984, nearly 30% of
the population was displaced due to counterinsurgency and repression. As campesinos fought back
against land reforms they were characterized as communists and guerrillas and became the target
of increasing military-led Government repression. Between the 1960s and 1990s, US-backed
Central American military and parliamentary groups controlled the population through death
squads, murder, torture, and ‘disappearing’ peasants, farmers, dissidents and sympathizers who
opposed land reform (Lopez, Popkin, Telles ibid.; Menjívar 1993). United States involvement
included military training, provision of arms and military technology, and funding. The US funded
the Salvadoran government with 1.5 million dollars per day at the height of this war during which
entire villages were murdered and/or disappeared, with survivors fleeing or forced to resettle in
military controlled villages where they searched for work and home.
The height of violence in Guatemala began when the United States CIA intervened to
protect market interests—and US profits from the United Fruit Company—as President Arbenz
Guzman’s administration sought to move toward deprivatization of land, rural community
leadership and labor organizing. Since the indigenous population made up much of subsistence
farmers and the agrarian workers, this war was also marked by genocide (Loucky and Moors 2000;
Menjívar 2011). Indigenous communities became targets of violence through what is known as
the scorched-earth policy, wherein entire communities were decimated by being lit on fire from
the outside in (Burgos-Debray and Menchu 1983; Manz 1988).
ix
The civil wars left a legacy of
fragile institutions, weak or corrupt law enforcement, and mistrust between government and
citizens (Manz 2008). During the 36-year-long war in Guatemala between the Guatemalan military
and the indigenous, rural poor, and the agrarian communities, over 200,000 people were killed and
28
45,000 disappeared (Manz ibid.; Morrison and May 1994). By 1990, between 10,000 and 20,000
unaccompanied Central American minors, who were predominately male teenagers, would flee to
the US to avoid dislocation, poverty, targeted recruitment of military and guerillas, and of being
witnesses and victims of violence.
x

Although the civil conflicts officially ended in 1992 and 1996 in El Salvador and
Guatemala, respectively, migration continued due to the worsening economic and political
conditions caused by contemporary market integration policies. Ten years after the signing of
NAFTA, the US signed CAFTA- DR with five Central American countries (Costa Rica, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and the Dominican Republic. The US
government aimed this agreement to “promote transparency” and “further regional integration” by
eliminating tariffs, opening markets, and reducing barriers to services. The outcomes of NAFTA
in Mexico were replicated in Central America with the agricultural staples of sugar, coffee, and
bananas (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2003). Impoverished families and communities are unable
to secure the futures of their children, leaving many to fend for themselves or with little chance at
mobility through education and employment (Flores-Macias 2008). In their home countries, the
lack of educational and employment opportunities for these children prompts their migration.
The violence in Central America and Mexico that is spurring contemporary unaccompanied
child migration is tied to a more recent war throughout Latin America— the US war on drugs. In
2006, Mexican government declared a war on drugs, supported by the US financed Merida
Initiative. Starting in 2008, the US government began funneling billions of dollars into Central
America through the Merida Initiative and CARSI (Central American Regional Security Initiative)
(Alvarado, Estrada, Hernandez 2017). Unlike its three adjoining neighbors, Honduras did not
experience civil war during the 20
th
century.
xi
However, its geographic positioning and shared
29
borders with Guatemala, El, Salvador, and Nicaragua made it a strategic military site throughout
the 1800s and 1900s. Honduras became a hub for the war on drugs in the Central America. In
2011, it became the first country to accept CARSI funding to implement drug war militarization—
funding totaling $176 million dollars. As US dollars pour into Central America for military training
and development of militarization strategies, drug traffickers are pushed to find more clandestine
and violent methods of staying in business— often sacrificing citizen lives as they are recruited as
drug mules or killed if they resist participation in the drug trade. Children and youth are
increasingly targeted to serve as players in the drug trade.
Additionally, the US began its war on gangs in the early 1990s and began deporting gang
members from cities like Los Angeles to their home countries in Central America. In the first
twelve years of the war on gangs, over 50,000 gang members were deported to Central America,
primarily El Salvador. Once in their home countries., deportees are ostracized, stigmatized and
excluded from their home societies, deemed criminals and immoral, which increases their desire
to return to the US (Coutin 2012; 2016). In October 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that
deportations have helped create an "unending chain" of gang members moving between the US
and Central America and described this as a "merry-go-round" (Lopez, Connell, and Kraul 2005).
Researchers detail how children are targeted as “fresh blood” for gang membership at early ages,
causing them to flee their countries. The overall increase in Central American immigrant
deportation points to the shifting trends of Latino migration and the rising presence of Central
Americans in migration and deportation regimes (Blanchard, Hamilton, Rodriguez, Yoshioka
2012; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013).
Central American nations have experienced various natural disasters alongside these
economic and human catastrophes (Alvarado, Estrada, Hernandez ibid.). For example, Hurricane
30
Mitch struck Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in 1998. Honduras was the most affected, as
7000 people were killed, and 20% of the population (1.5 million people) were displaced. In total,
35,000 and 50,000 homes were destroyed and damaged, respectively. In early 2001, El Salvador
suffered two earthquakes that worsened already fragile social, political, and economic situations.
Finally, in late 2005, Guatemala endured Hurricane Stan. These natural disasters displaced
thousands of Central Americans to the US and worsened economic and infrastructural poverty and
the prospect for today’s Central American youth to incorporate in their home societies as they
come of age, contributing to the rates of migration that have endured and risen in recent years.
Limited economic opportunity along with human and natural disasters drive individuals in
families of all ages to opt for migration despite the climbing financial, physical, and emotional
risks of leaving home (Rosenblum and Brick 2011). The conditions of Mexican migration are
economically rooted. Thus, the growth of the Mexican economy, increased funding of public
education, investment in infrastructure, and declining birthrates in Mexico have produced a decline
in Mexican migration to the US (Gonzalez-Barrera 2015). Increased enforcement at the US
southern border and the decline of the US economy during the Great Recession of 2007 also
contribute to declining migration. Central American migrants, and unaccompanied youth
specifically, outpace Mexican migrants as the mechanisms of migration, including poverty and
social instability, persist (Garni 2010).
The chronology of Central American and Mexican youth migration trends demonstrate that
migration is a response to macro-social processes. Children are also subject to the consequence of
uneven economic development, the dislocation of workers in response to capitalist penetration in
less developed economies and the need for foreign labor in the more developed nations that
undergo economic restructuring through globalized production. As workers are displaced and
31
labor surplus swells, migration to cities and nearby countries make way for migration to the core
countries that enacted economic intervention (Arango 2002). In the case of Mexico and Central
America, market, cultural, transportation, and communication links were established through US
interventions. Migration networks have sustained the flow of Latino migrants into the US (Garip
and Asad 2016; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2003). Increasing inequality in Latin American
nations has prompted children and youth to participate in global migration flows. Hence,
unaccompanied child migration is part and parcel of the history of Latino migration to the US.
This history, paired with the growing reach of capitalism into Central and South America, wrote
the 2014 surge of unaccompanied child migration into our destiny. The US has taken similar
stances toward Mexican labor and Central American refugee migration to the US by systematically
denying the causes of migration and opportunities for legal entry and residence through legal or
refugee status (Garcia 2006). Given that the root causes of migration remain unrecognized, we can
expect the continuous migration of unaccompanied child migrants to the US southern border.
The recent “surge” of unaccompanied minors apprehended at the US border has drawn
attention to the unaccompanied migration experience, and an exploration of the factors that
motivate youth to migrate and legal processes in asylum proceedings. Few sociological studies
move beyond the border and legal processes for detained children to examine these children’s
unaccompanied settlement and integration in the US (see Canizales 2015; 2018). Unaccompanied
child migrants are entering the US during a time of heightened anti-immigrant and anti-Latino
sentiment. Today’s unaccompanied child migrants are viewed as a threat to US society (Heidbrink
2014), and migration rates are climbing during a political moment in which Latino migrants, and
youth in particular, are described as “criminals,” “animals,” and as “infesting” the country by the
US President and other elected officials at the time of this writing. Elzbieta Gozdziak (2015) writes
32
that “American society was favorably disposed to previous waves of youth migration” (4). Finding
Home offers a portrait of how youth who grow up in the US without their parents and legal status
fare and experience incorporation in an unwelcoming society. Below I review diverse theoretical
approaches to immigrant incorporation, citizenship and belonging, and children and youth agency
to offer a framework from which to build this research.

IMMIGRANT YOUTH INCORPORATION IN THE US

Contemporary immigrant assimilation theory

Researchers consider the family to be the single most important socializing institution as it
provides a sense of personal identity and belonging to immigrant youth coming of age (Suarez-
Orzoco and Suarez-Orozco 2008; Zhou 1997). Guided by segmented assimilation theory, much of
what we know about immigrant youth incorporation in the US emphasizes parents’ role in
providing ‘moral and material resources’ of aid and mobility to their children to attain social,
economic, and political incorporation and avoid downward mobility (Neckerman, Carter, and Lee
1999; Portes and Fernandez-Kelly 2008; Portes and Zhou 1993). This is central to the achievement
of a delayed or selective assimilation pathway, in which the structural factors that make up a hostile
or welcoming context of reception, such as policies of the host society, values and prejudices of
the receiving society, and characteristics of the local community, are navigated (Portes and
Rumbaut 2001).
xii

Parents’ socioeconomic status, vis-a-vis parental educational and occupational background and
immigrant entry and legal status (Bean, Brown, Bachmeier 2016; Agius Vallejo 2012), is a critical
determinant of a child’s incorporation pathway and mobility trajectory (Feliciano 2005; Hardie
and Seltzer 2016; Kohn 1963; Lareau 2011) as they shape the starting points for immigrant
incorporation. Class background and legal status determines how involved parents can be in a
33
child’s life in cases of separation. Whereas the poor migrant worker leaves their child behind and
struggles to remit money to them, often unable to secure food or education (Abrego 2014;
Schmalzbauer 2008), wealthy families can afford to send their children away to pursue greater
opportunity, as is the case with Korean Parachute Kids living in the US (Zhou 1998).
xiii
Wealthy
parents, even when absent, provide social ties and means for material and emotional support in the
host society. Youth in families can also draw on their social position between their immigrant
parents’ social class, practices, and capital and their own social position as US-born and educated
to maintain a ‘second-generation advantage’ in navigating US institutions (Kasinitz, Waters,
Mollenkopf, and Holdaway 2008). Hence, parents provide a source of social and human capital.
Parental socioeconomic status not only shapes starting points for adaptation, but also youth’s
access to group-based resources. Scholars find that parent act as liaisons between immigrant youth
and their local community institutions. Accordingly, immigrant youth’s social networks are
inherited from parents (Portes and Rumbaut 2001) and built upon in schools (Suarez-Orozco,
Suarez-Orozco, and Todorova 2010) to promote their educational attainment, entry into the labor
market, and life course mobility. The interconnectedness of various forms of capital can generate
economic, cultural, and human capital via social capital (Bourdieu 1986). In addition to strong
familial and co-ethnic ties, a ‘really significant other’ or a non-parental figure who takes ‘a keen
interest in a child’ is decisive in immigrant children’s socio-economic assimilation trajectory
(Portes and Fernandez-Kelly 2008, 26; Vallejo 2012). Hence, high-achieving and college-going
youth, or Dreamers, are better positioned to obtain social capital to get ahead because of their
access to a diverse set of social ties (Enriquez 2011).
Scholars emphasize how parents, the co-ethnic community, and significant others buffer
children from societal sentiments and mechanisms of exclusion as they discipline and guide them
34
towards success despite potential structural disadvantages. This work portrays youth as dependent
on adult figures and passive recipients of capital and resources that promote socioeconomic
mobility. When detailing youths’ agency in incorporation, research focuses on highly-achieved,
politically-active youth (Seif 2011; Terriquez 2014, 2015), and those with resources like
citizenship and access to technology that enable incorporation and mobility (Estrada 2013).
Existing studies of immigrant incorporation measure positive or successful incorporation via
socioeconomic outcomes of educational and economic attainment. Given these measures, we
might predict that undocumented youth growing up without parents in the US and oftentimes
outside of schools might experience a downward incorporation trajectory, as the traditional
endpoints of educational attainment and occupational mobility as well as the buffers of parents
and schools are unavailable to them. However, this assumption renders invisible immigrant
youths’ everyday participation in US institutions and community embeddedness as a measure of
incorporation.

Citizenship Theory

US immigration policy has created a structure in which there are legal, “illegal,” and
intermediary statuses (such as Legal Permanent Residency, Temporary Protected Status, etc.) that
shape belonging. Studies of undocumented immigrants’ incorporation and belonging culminate in
questions of citizenship, institutional membership, and practices of inclusion. Contemporary
citizenship theory posits that citizenship, or formal membership status in a geographic or political
community, is comprised of four strands: legal status, rights, participation within society, and a
sense of belonging (Bloemraad 2006; Bloemraad et al. 2008). These theories center on rights and
responsibilities of members to a nation-state (Castles and Davidson 2000). Menjívar (2006)
introduces the concept of “legal liminality” to describe how migrants in these intermediary legal
35
spaces are “betwixt and between” and “both inside and outside the United States and their countries
of origin” (1007). This is because, while denied legal recognition, immigrants are physically
present and socially active in transnational, state, local, and cultural level institutions (Chavez
1994; Flores 2003; Ong 1996; Rocco 2014). Studies also show the effects of ‘illegality’ can lead
to socioeconomic immobility at best (Rumbaut and Komai 2010) and violence at worst (Menjívar
and Abrego 2012). The consequences of ‘illegality’ range from exploitation at work (Gleeson
2010), emotional and mental health stresses and strains (Gonzales, Suarez-Orozco, Dedios-
Sanguineti 2013), the burden of deportation (Dreby 2010)—all of which can be passed on to citizen
children via ‘multigenerational punishment’ (Enriquez 2015). Among youth, undocumented status
creates conditions for dimmed aspirations and expectations for the future (Abrego 2006, Gonzales
2011, Suarez-Orozco et al. 2010).
The vast number of undocumented peoples in the US today, coupled with the ongoing
deportation regime and restrictionism of US immigration policy (De Genova and Peutz 2010), has
not only incited questions of the costs and consequences of formal exclusion but also bring to light
the myriad ways productivity exists within clandestinity (Coutin 1999). Sebastien Chauvin and
Blanca Gerces-Mascarenas (2014) write that “the incorporation of undocumented migrants
involves not so much invisibility as camouflage—presenting the paradox that camouflage
improves integration” (422). Studies of undocumented immigrants offer a counter to the prediction
of exclusion and downward incorporation by positing that, despite the denial of legal status and
rights, undocumented immigrants can achieve “informal citizenship” through active civic
participation in their local communities, especially in schools, churches, ethnic community groups
and political organizations (Flores 2003; Chavez 1991; Coutin 2000; Menjívar 2006; Ong 1996;
Rosaldo 1994; Sassen 2002; Terriquez and Patler 2012). Through participation, immigrants engage
36
in processes by which groups define themselves, form a community, and claim space and social
rights—the process of cultural citizenship (Flores 2003, 89). As social and cultural participation
increase, undocumented immigrants access rights, claim and perform citizenship (Abrego 2011,
Coutin 2013, Bosniak 2006; Motomura 2010) and are therefore deserving of membership (Keyes
n.d.).
The deservingness framework draws on assimilationist arguments of productivity through
active political participation, economic incorporation and responsibility, and civic duty (Keyes
2013). Theorists have acknowledged that social membership can be attained in family, community,
civil society, and state; yet research continues to focus on immigrants’ socioeconomic mobility
outcomes. This frame perpetuates narrow conceptions of citizenship that classify those who
participate in mainstream institutions as ideal and citizenship-worthy subjects and non-participants
as deviant, unworthy subjects. Accounting for civil society participation and the potential for
productivity in clandestinity, cultural citizenship theory grounds an understanding of how
participation and feelings of belonging may exist in informal institutions.
For undocumented immigrant youth, research shows that claims to belonging are constructed
in familial and educational settings (Abrego 2011; Gonzales 2015; Nicholls 2013; Perez 2009),
nodding to American values of higher education and economic contributions. While immigration
scholars acknowledge how citizenship is enacted despite formal exclusion, few have considered
why it matters to feel a sense of belonging in the host society. Furthermore, we do not know how
these processes work for undocumented youth without parents in the US who are not enrolled in
school and who do not consider themselves to be Dreamers. Rather than providing a snapshot of
institutional participation and belonging, I examine how unparented youth experience institutional
orientation in a variety of contexts and how the institutions in which they participate shape their
37
adaptation. Ultimately, I theorize a new meaning of incorporation that more fully accounts for
immigrant youths’ experiences outside of traditional assimilatory institutions and their own
definitions of success and belonging in the host society through ‘Cultures of Incorporation.’ I argue
that belonging is tied to emotional and mental health stability in daily life and this is important
because positive self-identity and stability enable continued participation in family, work, school,
and community. Further, that the mechanisms that contribute to feelings of belonging are fluid,
taking on new forms as young people’s tenure and institutional participation in the US increases.

Children and youth agency

Incorporation and citizenship theory frame children as dependent on households and traditional
schools for resources that promote incorporation. Children are portrayed as ‘luggage’ in adults’
migration decisions and as transitioning into ‘illegality’ as they come of age. Studies of child
migration are situated within a normative western ideology of childhood, yet research underscores
that childhood is socially constructed and shaped by social and economic contexts (James et al.
1998; Lareau 2011); Pugh 2014). Historian Philippe Aries (1960) argues that childhood was
“discovered” in the seventeenth century. Prior to this, an individual was deemed an infant or elder
based on their physical appearance and habits. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1985) explains that in
pre-industrial, agrarian peasant societies children assumed adult-like work responsibilities. But a
shift occurred in the post-industrial period, when efforts to protect adults’ position in the labor
market and end child mortality increased the sentimentalization of childhood (Aries 1962; Zelizer
1985). During this period in the US, various policies were implemented that reflected the new
attention to children’s protection, extensive education and development.
xiv
Internationally, the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as any human being under
the age of eighteen, and has assigned civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights to
38
these individuals. International laws have “universalized” the child and assume a homogenous
childhood experience (Lopez Castro, 2007: 257); therefore, ignoring how sociopolitical contexts
and race, class, gender and legal status identities that shape childhood experiences (Kwon 2015).
Whether immigrant or native born, youth’s primary source of support as they incorporate
into US society and transition to adulthood is the family (Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1994).
The presence of a biological parent or an intact family unit is taken for granted in immigration
research. Yet many of today’s migrating youth, especially from Latin America, are encountering
diverse family configurations also enter uncertain and unstable living conditions. Little is known
about the alternate family configurations and environments that migrant youth enter in the absence
of biological parents. Landale, Thomas and Van Hook (2011) explore the living arrangements of
children of Mexican, Southeast Asian, and black Caribbean descent in the US and find that relative
to Southeast Asian Children (Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian) and black Caribbean origin
children, Mexican-origin children were more likely to live with “no parent” because, as sojourner
labor migrants, foreign-born adolescents are more likely to travel to the US alone. Instead they
live with siblings, cousin, aunts and uncles, or in households that do not include family members,
that is, they are informally fostered by non-parent guardians. My previous research shows that
Central American youth fleeing conditions of extreme violence and poverty also enter uncertain
and unstable family and household configurations upon arrival in the US (Canizales 2015, 2018).
Scholars have begun to examine youth agency, investigating how long-settled 1.5
undocumented or American-born youth use their American resources (like English-language
skills) to help their parents and families adapt by either serving as translators or economic
contributors to mediate parental disadvantage (Estrada 2013; Kwon 2014; Orellana 2001, 2009).
Ultimately, we do not know where unparented youth fit within these theories. Incorporation
39
theorists might expect that undocumented, unparented youth would experience downward
assimilation or stagnated mobility, but citizenship theory proposes that alternative pathways
toward incorporation through everyday social and cultural participation exist. Heeding
researchers’ advocacy of children and youths’ agentic navigation of their social worlds, we can
move these theories beyond the assumption that children are dependent on parents and traditional
schools and begin to navigate social incorporation as they leave these assimilatory institutions.
The study of financially independent, unparented youth who come of age in adult, work and
community spaces and aware of their ‘illegality’ can advance incorporation and citizenship
theories by demonstrating how immigrant youth are oriented toward US institutions, and how their
interactions within these institutions shape their ideas and practices of incorporation. This research
works to expand our understanding of how immigrant youth who knowingly come to the US
without legal status and parental protections are incorporating into their local community and US
society and to advance these theories.
My research shows why children migrate to global cities like Los Angeles without their
parents, the psychological trauma they experience in the years following migration, how they
navigate American institutions as minors without their parents, form social networks and recreate
families, and their aspirations for future. Rather than tracing the transmission of resources from
parent to child or child to parent—which has been the focus of a good deal of second generation
research—my work shows how unaccompanied immigrant youth generate resources toward their
own incorporation. I theorize notions of incorporation, belonging and illegality through immigrant
youths’ autonomous migration and everyday participation or absence from the institutions of
school, work, family and community life as they come of age in the US. I introduce the theoretical
framework of “Cultures of Incorporation” to explain how once-isolated youth adopt narratives of
40
overcoming past trauma and giving back to generate a sense of stability and status that facilitates
participation in institutions and communities and the remaking of meanings of success.
Incorporation theorists might expect that undocumented, unparented youth would experience
downward assimilation or stagnated mobility, but citizenship theory proposes that alternative
pathways toward incorporation through everyday social and cultural participation exist. I argue
that as youths’ institutional participation and social networks in the US expand, their cultures of
incorporation prompt an increased sense of belonging. Hence, incorporation may be understood as
a socioeconomic and socioemotional process, rather than a stagnant socioeconomic outcome.

RESEARCH DATA AND METHODS

Researching Unauthorized Immigrants in Los Angeles

California, and Los Angeles County specifically, have long been destinations for Latino
migrants in the US. The largest number of undocumented residents in the state of California live
in Los Angeles County (nearly 815,000) (Public Policy Institute of California 2017). Adding to
the size of disenfranchised and vulnerable migrant communities is the increasing number of
unaccompanied child migrants arriving at the US southern border and settling in California. During
the fiscal years 2014 and 2016, Los Angeles County received the second largest number of
unauthorized, unaccompanied children and youth released by the Office of Refugee Resettlement
following Harris County, Texas (US Department of Health and Human Services 2016). Public and
policy discourse has come to assume that unaccompanied youth migrants are reunited with parents
in the US. Yet many young people are released to relatives, family friends, or paisanos, which can
alter how a young person is received (Cengel 2015; Hennesy-Fiscke 2015). Less visible still are
children who enter undetected, without a biological parent or sponsor in the US to receive them,
and therefore they remain entirely unparented at settlement. Data on the size and destinations of
41
the undetected youth population is scant. However, my research shows that they follow similar
migration and settlement patterns as the unauthorized adults before them who settled in global
cities such as Los Angeles in hopes of finding low-wage labor so that they might provide food and
finance for their families left behind. And, much like their ORR detained and released peers,
undetected youth encounter various obstacles to settlement, learning a new sistema (system),
fitting in, and longing to return-- though perhaps more vulnerably as they must also find home.
Undocumented, Unparented Youth in Los Angeles

This study draws on multiple qualitative methodologies. The first stream of data includes
four years (nearly 600 hours) of Spanish-language participant observation at multiple sites—
including support groups, churches, workplaces, and recreational groups. I was introduced to
unaccompanied youth workers in Los Angeles through the above-mentioned support group, which
was mainly comprised of Guatemalan Maya youth garment workers (Canizales 2015). I then
continued my study of Guatemalan Mayan youth incorporation in the Los Angeles by observing
two Catholic churches, including weekly masses; small group and youth group meetings between
2013 and 2015 (Canizales 2018). I went on to attend community cultural events such as the annual
Dia del Salvadoreño, or Salvadoran day, book club meetings, community garden clean-ups and
gatherings, family events such as birthdays, Christmas dinners, and two funerals of youth who
committed suicide. I also observed case hearings for garment working youth at the Los Angeles
Labor Commissioner’s office where I gained insight into the conditions of garment labor and
employer and employee relations. To better learn about full-time workers educational aspirations
and patterns of school enrollment and participation, I attended adult English-language classes.
Ethnographic observations provided a window into the institutional landscape that undocumented
and unparented Latino young adults navigate in Los Angeles, which guided by interview protocol.
42
Observations across multiple years allowed me to observe the seasonal shifts of labor, changing
family ties and the on-going tensions between pursuit of educational and occupational mobility for
financially-independent youth.
A second data stream includes 75 in-depth interviews with unparented undocumented
young adults aged 18-31 who arrived in the US from Central America and Mexico as minors in
the 1990s and 2000s, some as young as 11-years-old and as old as 17 years old.
3
At the start of
this study, I employed a convenience sample based on my preliminary fieldwork through which I
completed 26 interviews. As my time in the field and rapport with participants of support group
and the church increased, I employed a snowball sampling technique with youth in my existing
networks to expand the study and collect 49 interviews. In-depth interviews provide insight into
how youth make sense of the conditions that uprooted them from their home countries and those
they face in the host society. Through my interviews, I developed the tripartite typology of
unparented youths’ social tie configurations (detailed in Chapter 3) and observed how youth
develop narratives of overcoming and giving back practices that constitute Cultures of
Incorporation (detailed in Chapter 5). Interviews also illuminated the micro-level factors that
prompted youths’ migration and their reactions to increases in unaccompanied child migration and
the media and policy discourse around the 2014 surge.
In 2015, I began targeted sampling as I expanded my recruitment efforts at various
organizations throughout the Downtown, Pico Union and Westlake/MacArthur Park, and San
Fernando Valley areas of Los Angeles that began reporting a history of work with unaccompanied
youth in their communities. Initially, I began recruiting respondents at adult English language
schools. I created IRB approved flyers and posters that were posted at community organizations

3
Table of respondent demographics included in Appendix A
43
and left with organizers who would then distribute the study information. I made announcements
at meetings and in classrooms as gatekeepers permitted. Flyers described the study as a project on
unaccompanied youth migration and displayed my phone number and email address so that
potential respondents might contact me as they preferred, via cell phone calls, or text and email
messages. I also included the link to my Facebook profile in an effort to give more personal insight
into myself and assuage hesitations in contacting me for those who were inclined to search. The
flyers listed cash compensation of twenty dollars for the time of interviews.
4

My identity as a Central American woman in my mid-twenties at the time of this research,
and as someone who grew up in the same neighborhoods and lived in Westlake/MacArthur Park
at the time of this study, facilitated rapport building. Being a Latina woman in the same age
category of my respondents allowed me to move in and out of youth groups and cultural events
with relative ease. My identity simultaneously proved to be a challenge in the field. Four male
respondents expressed interest in an interview, but later expressed developing romantic interests.
They became disheartened when I did not reciprocate this interest, causing us to end
communication. In two instances, male professionals working with unaccompanied youth—a
therapist and a housing counselor— demanded an exchange of ‘favors’ when I requested
interviewee referrals, including invitations to dinner. I moved residences after one of these male
professionals repeatedly showed up at my doorstep with flowers, notes, and photos of me from an
unaccompanied minors’ summer camp we both volunteered for. These types of interactions made
it difficult to snowball sample within my networks as I often lost touch with respondents and
potential respondents. My identity might have also affected the direction of interviews as
respondents may have worked to save face in conversations with a US-born woman.

4
Flyers are included in Appendix C
44
A final data stream includes interviews with professionals and advocates serving
unaccompanied immigrant youth in Los Angeles County. At the height of the surge in 2014 and
2015 I joined various organizations in their advocacy and organizing efforts, drawing on my
research with long-settled unaccompanied youth to inform the work around recently arrived
unaccompanied minors. During this time, I built relationships with officials, advocates, and
organizers and began informal and formal conversations. Starting in 2015, I conducted 15
interviews with attorneys, social workers, activists and community organizers for a total of 90
semi-structured, in-depth interviews. I will detail interviews with undocumented and unparented
youth in more depth below.

Gathering Unparented Youths’ Stories

Respondents originate from the Northern Triangle region of Central American, including
El Salvador (n=10), Guatemala (n=50) and Honduras (n=3), as well as Mexico (n=12). As the
section on the Historical Contexts of Unaccompanied Minor Migration described, the youth from
Central America have very different political and economic contexts of exit than those from
Mexico. Guatemalans make up the largest proportion of the interview respondents in this study
because of the nature of my entry into the field and previous field sites. Though not generalizable,
the representation of Guatemalan youth here reflects national origin trends during the time at which
youth migrated—between 1997 and 2003. Guatemala also sends more unaccompanied Central
American youth to the US than any other Central American country since 2011, and in 2014
surpassed Mexico as the sending country with the greatest number of minor migrants apprehended
at the US southern border (US Customs and Border Protection 2015). Since 2014, Salvadorans
and Hondurans have outpaced Guatemalans as the Northern Triangle countries sending the largest
number of migrants as gang violence and poverty are on the rise.
45
At the start of this study, I intended to interview an equal number of men and women, but
men remain overrepresented in my sample. Reflecting contemporary gendered trends of
unaccompanied minor migration, I interviewed more men (n=53) than women (n=22). In his study
of “Migration aspirations of European youth in times of crisis,” migration scholar Christof Van
Mol (2016) writes, “Gender shows to play a specific role in migration movement. Whereas in some
migration flows, women are overrepresented, other flows appear to be male-dominated” (1306),
including, he elaborates, youths’ labor migration flows.
xv
Ethnic and gender studies researcher,
Lilia Soto (2011) writes in “Preludes to Migration” that young girls lack the social networks to
migrate without the support of their parents. I will explore these ideas in the next chapter.
Respondents’ median age at migration was 16. The median age at the time of our interviews
was 24. All but two respondents were employed at the time of our interview, ranging from
occupations in auto repair and restaurant service to garment and domestic work. Five respondents
simultaneously worked and attended English-language school. All but two respondents who had
DACA are undocumented.
xvi
Pseudonyms are used throughout the data collection, analysis, and
writing to protect anonymity. I use ‘youth’ and ‘young adult’ interchangeably throughout this
research since conversations and formal interviews include recollections of migration during
which time respondents were minors. Interviews began with a convenient sample originating from
the support group I introduced at the opening of this chapter. The respondents in this study (and
the subsequent tables provided below) are not representative of the body of unaccompanied youth
in the US but represent the sample I accessed through convenient and snowball sampling.
Data collection includes typing detailed fieldnotes of observations and interviews
immediately after leaving the field. During field observations, I attempted to follow the norms of
the setting. When appropriate to have a pen and paper, jottings were taken in a small notebook.
46
Important quotes are written in their original language (English or Spanish) to maintain indigenous
meanings (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw 2011). I also audio recorded fieldnotes after leaving the field
to contextualize jottings. In cases where it was common for study participants to use their cellular
phones during site visits but less common to have a notebook, I jotted observations down in the
“Notes” application on my iPhone. If inappropriate in any given space to take notes, such as
funerals or at meals, I audio-recorded my notes upon leaving the field. In total, I have 266 sets of
typed fieldnotes, and a collection of 16 notebooks with jottings and quotes from the field.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted at a time and place that was most convenient
for the respondent. This often-meant late nights at a coffee shop or Sunday afternoons when young
people did not have work, school, or religious commitments. Interviews focused on the following
themes: Background demographic information, growing up and family dynamics, migration and
initial settlement experiences, employment, education and school, community involvement.
experiences of discrimination and violence, feelings of belonging, citizenship and rights, and goals
and aspirations for the future.
5
Institutional Review Board regulations for this study prohibit the
collection of respondents’ contact information. Hence, I relied on individuals who volunteered for
interviews and followed through with our agreed upon meeting day and time. All interviews with
youth respondents lasted between 40 and 90 minutes and were conducted in Spanish. Interviews
with community leaders were conducted in English and Spanish, depending on preference of the
respondent. Pseudonyms are used throughout the study to protect the organizations’ and
respondents’ identities.

5
In each of the sections on school, work, community life, and discrimination and belonging I asked respondents to
elaborate on how their experiences might be different if: a) they had legal status, and b) their parents had migrated
with them.

47
Each interview for this study was audio recorded with the consent of the participant and
transcribed verbatim in its original language by a secure online transcription service, Datagain. For
Spanish language transcripts, only portions of the interviews reported in the chapters here were
translated into English. Transcripts are analyzed using Atlas.ti. The extended case method
(Burawoy 1998) guided my initial data collection and analysis in light of existing theories of
immigrant youth migration and incorporation, while the grounded theory method (Strauss and
Corbin 1994) directed coding and data analysis, the development of the social tie configuration
typology I will introduce in chapter 3 and the Cultures of Incorporation I introduce in chapter 5.
Each participant received a cash incentive pre-approved by the University of Southern California
Institutional Review Board and funded by the National Science Foundation Sociology Program.
Four respondents declined the incentive. Two felt as though that would imply they were “selling”
their stories, while another two explained they wanted to help with the project and hoped to later
see their names and stories mentioned in the book.
During fieldwork, participants often described the pain and suffering their endured in their
home countries, migration, and in their settlement in the US. While the everyday realities of these
conditions were vivid in community participation, they were evermore palpable during interviews.
Interviews were often tear-filled, especially with those who were more recently arrived in the US
and among women. Youths’ disillusionment with life in the US, frustrations with work, family,
and finances, and fear of the future were woven into their narratives. Simultaneous expressions of
hope, courage, and resilience unraveled during our conversations-- often in the name of loved ones
whom youth felt obligated to and responsible for. During the two years of intensive data-gathering
(2014-2016), I experienced severe migraines, sleeplessness, anxiety and worry. After various
interviews, and after attending funerals for two young people who committed suicide because of
48
the unbearable nature of their lives in the US, I pulled over to the side of the road to vomit after
leaving the field. As a researcher, I am thoroughly privileged to be able to enter a community and
return to my home with food, internet, and relative certainty that my financial stability is secure as
a graduate student. My physical responses to exposure to undocumented and unparented youths’
lives provided only a glimpse into actual experiences youth bear. Many youths thanked me for
taking an interest in them and their stories, often stating that no one had ever asked why they
migrated or their life in the US. Dozens of youth included in this study and those I met throughout
the years mentioned that they did not tell their parents or siblings about poverty, violence,
exploitation, and physical and mental health instability as they did not want to worry them. It is an
honor and a privilege to collect, possess, and retell these experiences here.
Finding Home seeks to strategically distinguish between institutional membership as
practice and belonging as emotion in order to highlight the interplay of incorporation patterns and
propose incorporation as an everyday process rather than an outcome. That is, one’s formal
institutional membership may not guarantee a sense of belonging (Rumbaut 2005), and a sense of
belonging does not necessitate formal institutional membership. As the first sociological study to
interrogate the assumed family structure of unauthorized and unaccompanied Latino immigrant
youth in the United States, this research employs a subject-centered approach to conceptualize the
ways young people define, experience, and perceive incorporation and belonging, thus advancing
assimilation and citizenship theories (Zhou et al. 2008). This approach helps to expand notions of
citizenship and the relationship between immigrants and the state as well as young persons and the
state.
The stories of undocumented and unparented youth in Los Angeles contribute to the
substantive field of undocumented youths’ transitions to adulthood by examining patterns of
49
incorporation among those who are left out of supportive institutions of higher education that
promote positive identity formation and community leadership. In all, this research addresses “the
urgent need for research that deals with [unaccompanied youth’s] life experiences in the host
society and which takes its point of departure from the unaccompanied children’s and young
persons’ own perspective… [and] how they themselves conceive of opportunities and obstacles”
(Wernesjo 2011).
OUTLINE OF DISSERTATION

Finding Home shows why children migrate to global cities like Los Angeles without their
parents, the psychological trauma they experience in the years following migration, how they
navigate American institutions as minors without their parents, form social networks and recreate
families, and their aspirations for future. Theoretically, I investigate ideas of incorporation,
belonging and illegality through immigrant youths’ autonomous migration and everyday
participation or absence from the institutions of school, work, family and community life as they
come of age in the US. I introduce the theoretical framework of “cultures of incorporation” to
explain how once-isolated youth adopt narratives of overcoming past trauma and giving back to
generate a sense of stability and status that facilitates participation in institutions and communities
and the remaking of meanings of success. Researchers might predict these youth—who are
undocumented, unparented, primarily low-skilled and low-wage workers—to experience
stagnated mobility. However, as youths’ institutional participation and social networks in the US
expand, their cultures of incorporation prompt increased feelings of belonging.
Throughout this dissertation I will show how incorporation may be understood as a
socioeconomic and socioemotional process, rather than a fixed socioeconomic outcome. I do this
through five substantive chapters. Chapter 2, “Leaving home without parents and papers,” opens
50
with an examination of Central American and Mexican youth’s agency in the migration process as
I explore how youth understand the conditions that prompt their migration. This chapter
investigates how undocumented immigrant youth in the US understand their decisions to migrate
without parents and papers and the role of adult caretakers in the decision to leave home. Moving
away from frames of dependency and victimization (Heidbrink 2014), I consider how youth
understand the structural conditions that guide their social, economic, and political lives and shape
their life chances.
Chapter 3, “Unparented youths’ social tie configurations in Los Angeles” continues with
an introduction of a typology for youths’ familial and community receiving context. This typology
includes unparented youth with supportive relatives, unparented youth without relatives but with
mentors, and unparented youth without relatives and without mentors. I consider the familial and
community ties that undocumented, unparented youth develop in the US as the unexamined
foundation on which they begin to participate in critical spheres of interaction: school, work,
family, and local community. Chapter 4, “Orientation and adaptation,” examines unparented
migrant youths’ patterns of participation in school, work, and community life. I draw on the
typology above to compare the opportunities respondents have to incorporate into core social
structures such as the labor market, school, and family. Much of their initial settlement experience
revolves around work and their transnational relationships and economic obligations. How youth
come to orient themselves and begin their participation in US institutions is guided by what I call
“social tie configurations” – that youth can have pre-migration or those that are established over
time. Youths’ transnational orientation changes overtime for those who become embedded in US
institutions and are oriented toward their local community.
51
Finally, Chapter 5, “Immigrant youth ‘Cultures of Incorporation’,” proposes a new
framework for understanding immigrant youth incorporation, focusing on incorporation as a
process enacted via discourse and practice. I introduce immigrant youth ‘cultures of
incorporation,’ as a more holistic understanding of how unaccompanied youth migrants experience
incorporation into US society. In contrast to Dreamers, undocumented, unparented Latino
immigrant youth enter the US as workers, rather than students, without the guarantee of familial
or community support. Facing disproportionate disadvantages, such as migration trauma and debt,
financial independence and labor exploitation, and a society that is unwelcoming of
undocumented, low-skilled and dark-skinned Latino migrants, these youths cannot reach
opportunities for traditional markers of social mobility. Hence, unparented migrant youth in the
US claim successful incorporation by crafting personal narratives of overcoming hardship that are
enacted in the various institutions they participate in. Moving beyond educational and occupational
mobility facilitated by resources obtained from parents as measures of incorporation, I emphasize
youth’s achievement of health, financial, and educational stability. I include concluding thoughts
on theoretical and policy implications of this work in Chapter 6, “Immigrant incorporation as a
process in everyday life.”
Taken together, this research makes two significant contributions. First, I advance theories
of migration which assume that children are passive in migration decisions and incorporation. I
contribute to theories of incorporation by showing how, rather than a static outcome, incorporation
functions as a process of institutional embeddedness in local and transnational contexts.
Empirically, I provide a critical complement to existing scholarship on undocumented youth, most
of which concentrates on the education and employment of youth who migrate with their parents
and on high-achieving Dreamers. Unlike Dreamers, undocumented, unparented Latino immigrant
52
youth begin their stay in the US as workers, rather than students, and without the guarantee of
familial or community support.

53
CHAPTER 2

Leaving home without parents and papers

In the long history of unaccompanied child migrants, both domestic and international,
young people are typically presented as subjects of decisions imposed on them by adult caretakers
or circumstance. Sociologist Barrie Thorne and colleagues (2003) write, children occupy a
“peripheral and luggage-like conceptual space, mostly framed as a source of contingency in
decisions to migrate, stay, or return” (3). The study of children in the migration process tends to
begin at the post-migration stage.
xvii
A vast body of literature examines how left-behind children
affected by changing family dynamics caused by parents’ migration (Dreby 2006; Hondagneu-
Sotelo and Avila 1997; Menjívar and Abrego 2009; Parreñas 2005) and family survival strategies
across borders (Abrego 2014; Dreby 2016; Schmalzbauer 2008, 2010). Another prominent body
of research considers the assimilation of immigrant children in the society of destination (Portes
and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993; Mollenkopf, et al. 2008). Studies of undocumented
youth consider their access to education and work and transition into adulthood without legal status
(Abrego 2006; Gonzales 2015; Seif 2004; Suarez-Orozco, Yoshokawa, Teranishi, Suarez-Orozco
2011), assuming children were unknowingly brought to the US by parents. This chapter points to
youths’ autonomy in migration by outlining how despite the deep histories and social networks in
which youth are enmeshed, they assume narratives of autonomy in migration decision-making.
When migrating alone, Central American and Mexican young people are not educational
migrants in search of better schooling options (Donato and Perez 2017). Rather, the determinants
of their migration include: escaping the conflict and post-conflict violence and poverty of their
home countries, seeking to reunite with their parents or parent who migrated before them, and
fulfilling a rite of passage (Donato and Sisk 2015, Ruehs 2016).
xviii
These findings point to
54
structural factors that induce ‘surges’ in migration, emphasizing children’s dependence and
victimization, leaving youths’ role in and understanding of migration decisions unaccounted for.
Yet research has inadequately examined how youth perceive and their decisions to leave home
without parents and papers.
Recent work on unaccompanied child migrants challenges the widely accepted ideas of
dependent and protected childhood and suggest youths’ agency in migration.
xix
For example, a
study of the protection-seeking processes of unaccompanied child migrants in the US and UK
concludes that children reconfigure agency and volition as they engage in the legal system, where
they must argue that they had no control over their migration to be able to receive legal protection
(Heidbrink 2014; Kohli 2006). Michele L. Statz (2016) argues that “paper lives” are formed when
migrant children are constructed as “inherently dependent, vulnerable” subjects who are victims
of abuse and neglect by adults, typically parents (1643).
xx
This agentic narration of self-identity
corroborates research on long-settled undocumented Dreamer youth in the US who make claims
to Americanness by emphasizing their unawareness of migration, role as students and following
idealized transitions into adulthood (Nicholls 2013). Children and youth prove to be flexible in
making claims that suit their interest, including taking up the role of unprotected child when
needed.
Examining youths’ autonomy in migration elucidates how they develop aspirations for the
future while in their home country and make decisions that shape their lives, including migration
(Chavez and Menjívar 2010). In this vein, Lopez Castro’s (2007) study in Zamora, Michoacán
notes that when there is a thick infrastructure and history of local out-migration, children who are
in elementary and middle school begin developing logics about migration at a very early age.
Hamilton and Bylander (n.d.) analyze the determinants of children’s migration from Mexico to the
55
US across the life course using the Mexican Family Life Survey and find that the migration of
primary school-aged children is guided by adult caregivers concerns for children’s exposure to
violence and barriers to education. Conversely, secondary school-aged children, like adults,
migrate without parents in response to economic factors and show greater sensitivity toward youth
migration prevalence relative to general migration prevalence. The authors conclude that, “youth-
specific norms of migration frame their decision-making.”
Gender also shapes when and how youth migrate. Sociologist Emily Ruehs’ (2016) shows
that the quest for gender identity is part of their migration process for unaccompanied Mexican
adolescent men. Adolescent male migrants take economic responsibility for their families and can
provide them the opportunity to escape violent masculinities.
xxi
Throughout Latin America,
cohorts of rural young women migrated to the city for domestic work jobs, yet daughters are less
likely to seek or be permitted to pursue lone international migration. Following gender norms,
fathers are more likely to resist the migration of daughters as compared to their sons (Davis and
Winters 2001). If a desire to migrate persists among daughters, the onus of convincing their fathers
falls on them (Pedraza 1991). Usually, daughters must “negotiate” migration with their fathers and
migrate against their father’s wishes (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). This study, in which male
adolescent migrants outnumber female migrants among respondents, will show how the
intersection of age and gender results in fathers also desiring to keep their youngest sons at home
as well as their daughters.
Research on contemporary undocumented and unaccompanied child migration to the US
has inadequately explored how youth understand the structural conditions that predicate their
migration. Youth enact varying social ages based on their sociocultural context and as active social
agents construct ideas of what social life entails. Youth growing up in heightened conditions of
56
structural violence and poverty experience social aging, or the “social situation where the
possibilities that life has opened up before us become fewer and fewer,” at young ages (Bourdieu
1993).
This chapter investigates how undocumented immigrant youth in the US understand their
decisions to migrate without parents and papers and the role of adult caretakers in the decision to
leave home. Specifically, this chapter asks two central questions: 1) To what do Central American
and Mexican youth attribute their decision to migrate without parents and papers? And 2) To what
extent are adult caretakers (parents and guardians) involved in their migration decision and
process? Moving away from frames of dependency and victimization (Heidbrink 2014), I consider
how youth understand the structural conditions that guide their social, economic, and political lives
and shape their life chances. Corroborating existing research on contemporary trends of
unaccompanied minor migration to the US (Canizales 2015; Donato and Sisk 2015; UN High
Commissioner for Refugees 2014), I find that the conditions of violence, poverty, and
displacement force Central American and Mexican youth to migrate as undocumented and
unaccompanied minors. Within these constraints to incorporation and mobility in their home
societies, youth attribute their migration to an autonomous decision to overcome disadvantages
and achieve their personal aspirations for future. As I will show, the lack of economic opportunity,
rampant violence, and social exclusion breed feelings of non-belonging in the host society that
then prompts immigrant youth to make the migration journey to the US without parents and papers.
Adult caretakers are involved in youths’ migration decision and processes to the extent that they
are able to offer alternatives to leaving home. This research is important in offering insight on
youths’ lone migration experiences that move beyond the explanation that children are helpless to
the structural constraints of their home countries and dependent on decisions of their migrant and
57
non-migrant parents and toward an understanding of how youth perceive their decision to leave
home without parents and papers.
EXPLAINING WHY UNACCOMPANIED LATINO YOUTH MIGRATE

The unaccompanied minor migrants in this study report three primary push factors that
prompt their emigration from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico, including: 1) lack
of economic opportunity (54%), 2) physical and emotional violence (28%), and 3) pursuit of
adventure (2%) (see table 1). Sixteen percent of respondents indicated migrating because of a
combination of these factors. Within these structural constraints, youths’ decision to migrate is
prompted by or their personal feelings of hopelessness and, ultimately, non-belonging in their
home society. When present in youths’ lives, parents take varying degrees of involvement in the
child’s migration journey, ranging from active to resistant against the young person’s departure.
Parents’ involvement in youths’ migration varies according to their ability to provide alternatives
to structural and social non-belonging. As such, youth and their adult caregivers understand
migration as a youths’ personal decision toward reaching an economic or social goal.

Table 1. Why youth migrate (n=75)
6

Reason for migration Total number (n) Percentage (%)
Lack of economic
opportunity 40 54
Violence 21 28
Adventure 2 2
Combination 12 16
Total 75 100

Lack of economic opportunity

6
Analyze distribution by national origin, gender, and age
58
The lack of economic opportunity is characterized in this study by the absence of work and
educational opportunities in the home country. Researchers find that in regions such as Latin
America where “young people struggle to complete their desired education pathway” and higher
levels of education fail to provide employment opportunities, many young people migrate for work
rather than an education (Punch 2015; see also Cerrutti and Massey 2001, Chavez 1992).
Displacement of Mexico’s workforce and recruitment of Mexican labor has long driven Mexican
migration to the US.
xxii
Today, the Northern Triangle countries represent among the highest
poverty rates in Latin America (Lorenzen 2017: 747). In their research with Salvadoran migrants
in the US, Landolt and Da write (2005), “An overarching context of economic uncertainty and
insecurity in El Salvador is giving way to a continual circulation of family member across
locations” (644). This, I posit, is true of Latin America more broadly and now encompassing more
individuals. Migrants include youth who become aware of their limited socioeconomic mobility
options at young ages and begin strategizing ways to access mobility ladders, including embarking
on an unaccompanied migration journey in pursuit of new economic opportunities.
Contrary to the image of migrant children as dependents or students in the host society,
many of these young people have a history of working in their home communities. In fact, 68
percent of the respondents who migrated because of the lack of economic and educational
opportunities said they had worked either alongside a parent and/or relative, which can serve as
the initiation of youth’s financial independence. For example, Lucy is the eldest daughter in her
family and began working in agriculture in her hometown in Guatemala to ensure that she could
participate in the activities that others her age did. She explained this,
My father is our provider. Shamefully, because he drinks he gave little toward our weekly
expenses. The ends wouldn’t meet for my mom. Sometimes my mom would work to
support us. That’s how I grew up. Then I started working at 6 and a half years old. I started
working and my dad would tell me, ‘if you work you will have money, you will have
59
clothes.’ Every celebration there (in her home community) you buy new clothes to change
into the day of the festival. So, my dad would tell me, ‘if you work you can have your own
things.’

Lucy grew up aware of the customs and expectations for cultural participation in her town and
desired to take part in them. At a very young age, Lucy began to think of her socioeconomic
position as independent of her parents’ occupational status. Encouraged by her father to “have
[her] own things,” Lucy worked to attain the items necessary to be a girl and pupil in her home
society. After some time of working in the fields, Lucy decided to migrate to the US in search of
new work opportunities at the age of 15.
Other youth migrate in search of work to mitigate their family’s financial hardships.
xxiii

Ramiro arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 15 and was 24 years old at the time of our meeting.
He recalls that growing up with his family in Guatemala, his parents “no tenían tanto para comer,
para la leche, para alimentación… did not have much (money) to eat, for milk, for food…”
Children in his hometown in Guatemala must choose between attending school and finding work,
of which the latter often wins out. Ramiro’s living conditions were common among those he grew
up with. He explains, “Many people, where I live on a ranch, there isn't much money. My father
is a businessman. He sews clothing, backpacks, pants, all those things. I was already big (mature
or grown up), I was seven years old, and I saw my dad working. I would tell him, “I want to be
like you.” He told me, “you must put effort into school.” Despite his father’s encouragement to
focus on schools, Ramiro could not ignore how difficult it was for his family to make ends meet.
He says, “My idea was not to put effort into school, but to earn money. That is the idea that we
have because we are so desperate for money, to put it in those terms. We don’t focus so much on
studies because what would we eat later? I started shining shoes at eight years old.” The work
children do in their home countries, such as shining shoes, selling trinkets, sewing clothing, and
60
the like, may allow them to get by, but do little to get them ahead in the future. With few
opportunities for work and mobility in his home country, Ramiro chose migration.
Francisco’s migration story demonstrates how youth respond to the lack of economic
opportunity through migration. Francisco is 25-years-old and has lived in Los Angeles for eleven
years. He attended school in Guatemala until the third grade when his father told him he could not
return the following year due to the costs of education. Francisco began working in a cornfield by
day and then assisted his father in sewing blouses to be sold in a nearby city in the evening. With
little opportunity for advancement and experience in sewing, Francisco migrated to Los Angeles
in 1998 at just fourteen years of age, a path his fifteen-year-old cousin took just months before.
When I asked why he decided to migrate, Francisco spoke to the poverty of his community and
the power of the US dollar when converted to quetzales (Guatemalan currency). He said, “It is
because of poverty. Here if I earn $100, in Guatemala that is 700 quetzales, so that is a lot. It is a
big difference… It’s for that. That is the only reason many children leave there.”
In many agrarian, pre-industrial contexts, children bear what are considered adult
responsibilities in the contemporary US context. Lucy began working at six-years-old and Ramiro
at eight. Others describe beginning work such as selling knick-knacks on the streets of their towns
as young as three years old. Children gain skills through the performance of household and
workforce tasks that normalize their employment away from their households. Youth begin
working at young ages to make ends meet, and migration is viewed as an alternative to stagnation
and exclusion. The lives of migrant children workers contrast with the sentimentalized, protected
definitions of childhood that prevail in the US today and exemplify the adultification of children
in impoverished communities such as those from which these children originate and enter (Estrada
2013; Kwon 2014).
61
Once in the US, young migrants in search of economic opportunities identify as workers
that are responsible for themselves and their families. For example, Ruben migrated at 14 years of
age and was 24 at the time of our interview. With nine years of experience working in Downtown
Los Angeles he explains that when he migrated he, “…had the mentality of coming here to work
because the poverty is overwhelming. I am here in Los Angeles in search of better, well, un mejor
estado económico (a better economic condition).” Similarly, another interviewee, Francisco,
relayed, “I see that we are, we are very poor where we live. And me, my goal is like, my goal is to
have a house. In the future, well, I can’t live there with my parents my whole life. That why, and
because of the exchange rate, too, the money, I thought about that. That was my decision when I
came here.” Poverty and the lack of economic opportunities for social participation, stability, and
mobility can cause youth to feel a sense of hopelessness in the future and nonbelonging in the
economic, social, and educational structures. As economic actors in their home country, leaving
home may allow youth to consider opportunities for their individual and household survival in the
short term, as well as mobility and belonging in the future. The early employment of children in
their home contexts also exposes them to the negotiation of currency conversion and earnings
investments. Francisco, who wanted a house of his own, took his aspirations for independence
from his family, home ownership, and knowledge of labor and currency conversion together when
considering his decision to migrate. Youth establish expectations for their well-being, and
aspirations for their lifestyles, businesses, and education that cannot be met within the economic
and employment structures of their home countries.
Young people think about their future economic position and possibilities of reaching their
goals as they grow older. The real and perceived inability to achieve these goals blocks youth from
full participation in the home country, fostering a sense of hopelessness and non-belonging in the
62
home society. This research shows that strategies for mobility are not solely adopted by adult
migrants but can be taken up by adolescents who view their opportunities for labor market
incorporation and economic mobility dwindling as well. Unable to access opportunities for work
to fund their educations or day-to-day survival, the Central American and Mexican labor market
landscapes present risks of social death. The absence of mobility opportunities for the youth
impedes the achievement of goals young people set for themselves, including, obtaining an
education, building a home, and starting a business or family in their home countries. Migration
to the US presents the promise of achieving these aspirations in the home or host society.

Violence

Violence is not new to Latin America. Political instability in Central America is rooted in
three civil wars and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
xxiv
Since 2014, Honduras and El Salvador
have hosted the highest intentional homicide rates in the world, with around 600 homicides per
100,000 people in Honduras in 2016 and 80 per 100,000 in El Salvador. Guatemala has been the
sixth or seventh highest in the world during this time, with 30 homicides per 100,000 people. In
Central America and Mexico, the US war on drugs and deportation policies fueled by the war on
gangs has increased the proliferation of violence. Indeed, there is a correlation between the
increases in children under the age of 12 and young girls migrating and gang and cartel recruitment
of these groups (Villegas and Rietig 2015). Poverty, suffering, and behaviors such as alcoholism
or familial neglect are linked to a history of political violence and state terror (Menjívar 2011).
Violence may be both real and perceived, and enacted by family and community members and
through separation from parents, guardians and caretakers. Twenty-eight percent (28%) of my
sample reported that their unaccompanied migration was related to violence in youths’
communities and homes.
63
Many respondents reported experiencing violence perpetrated by gang members or
domestic violence from their parent or guardian in their homes and communities of origin. During
fieldwork in early 2016 I met a young woman from El Salvador who migrated at the age of 15
after her father was murdered in her home. Her family lived in a corner house that had a balcony
view of two street intersections—a desirable location for local gang surveillance. The gang leaders
targeted her family and when her father resisted their intrusion, he was shot in the head. She left
El Salvador soon after. Burglaries are also common. When I asked Liliana why she migrated from
El Salvador to Los Angeles at fifteen years of age, she said,
Oh, for many reasons. I left my house for many reasons, because of things that happened
when I was a young girl. Robbers came into our house twice. I grew up with my grandma
and the robbers came into our house, broke many things, they grabbed us, they threw us
around… So, I didn’t want to be in my house anymore. I was very nervous. I was very
afraid.

Others experience violence within their own families (Gonzalez Lopez 2015; Menjívar 2011), as
was the case for Glenda who described the physical abuse she endured because of her parents’
alcoholism. With some trepidation in dishonoring her parents’ names, Glenda details the physical
and emotional insecurity she felt:
My mom isn’t… well, it makes me uncomfortable to say, but my mom isn’t good. My dad
isn’t either. I tried to justify it at first, but then no, because they both drank and then would
get mad at me for no reason. And you know the families over there are like, how do I say
it? I will say angry. They want to hit you for no reason. That's how my parents were with
me. I did not understand why. The people you think are going to protect you are the worst
of all. That’s how my parents are. As soon as they would start drinking. And I would ask
them not to drink, but they would drink just to fight… It is something so ugly. It is so sad.
I don’t know. I became traumatized.

For some young people who do not come into direct contact with acts of violence against them,
the prevalence of violence increases their sense of physical and emotional insecurity. Eduardo,
currently 21 and living in East Los Angeles, migrated from El Salvador. He explained that he
decided to migrate at the age of 11,
64
Because there’s nothing over there. Over there in El Salvador there’s a lot of killings and
a lot of people die over there for no reason. They just die. People out there killing people
so they can get like bread to eat and what not and it’s really hard out there and it’s like…it’s
just really hard out there. And I saw that it’s…you know…everyone say that over here is
nice. In the United States, it’s the land of opportunities, so I figure you know why not,
why not die trying.

Eduardo did not experience violence first hand, yet the threat of violence in his community
motivated his unaccompanied migration. Eduardo explained that in the face of insecurity, young
people prioritize survival. When violence (and death) are inevitable, youth like Eduardo believe it
is better to die attempting to reach new opportunities than to die at the hands of gangs or law
enforcement. He describes how he thought about his future at the age of 11, “I was trying to figure
out a way how to like survive and how to …how I was going to take care of myself” – a stark
contrast to the idealized notions of protected childhood described by Zelizer (1985). Eduardo also
speaks to the agency of young people who, independent of an adult, strategize means of survival
in the face of physical and emotional threat. For some, this includes risking their lives in the hopes
of arriving in the US.
In addition to domestic violence, physical and emotional violence arises when children are
abandoned by parents or guardians. The case of Uriel, whose mother voluntarily left him at the
age of eight so that she could live with her boyfriend in another town exemplifies how abandoned
children navigate their independence and eventual migration. Growing up in extreme poverty,
Uriel began working in Guatemala City at the age of two: “I went to the street to offer [shoe
shining] to people. I earned twenty-five or twenty [quetzals] in Guatemala. That’s what I earned
for a weekend to work all day.” Twenty quetzales is about three US dollars for two days of work,
which he used toward purchasing food and soap. Though Uriel migrated to the US to find work,
he insists that he would have remained in Guatemala if his mother had not abandoned him.
Describing youth migration patterns, Uriel says,
65

Y ahi todo, la mayoria de los ninos sufren mucho por, por violencia… There [Guatemala]
most children suffer a lot because, because violence; because of abandonment by fathers,
from mothers; and because many of them are abused. They get hit a lot. I would say I did
not like living there.

Children who face physical and emotional abandonment and abuse lack a sense of security and
belonging in their homes and communities. Uriel embarked on his migration journey, figuring
independence in the US could lead to less suffering and more safety and opportunities in the future.
Children can also feel abandonment and a sense of non-belonging when they are left behind
by family members, typically parents, who are living in the US. Wilber migrated from Honduras
at the age of sixteen in search of his mother, who migrated to work in the US twelve years prior.
xxv

Wilber lived with his grandparents in Honduras, where he vividly remembers the days after his
mother stopped remitting money to Wilber. He explains that at 15-years-old he began asking about
his mother, telling his grandfather, “It’s unjust that I am 15-years-old and don’t know my mother.
I want to meet her. Whether you help me or not, my goal is to meet her. Even if I have to go alone,
I am going.” Now 19-years-old, Wilber is living in Los Angeles but was never able to find his
mother.
More overt forced familial separation is seen in the cases of children whose parents or
guardians were persecuted and killed, destabilizing the young person’s sense of security and
community life. After being abandoned by his parents who moved to different cites, Horacio
witnessed the murder of his grandparents and uncle in El Salvador at the age of nine. Now thirty-
one, Horacio described the scene:
I was a little kid when I see my grandma and my grandpa, and they came, a bunch of them
they came, dressed, I don’t know if they were Americans or Guatemalans, but they had
different uniforms. They didn’t have the Salvadoran uniform. They put all my family on
their knees, they started giving orders. They put them on the side in a line and they shot
them on the side of the head. Everybody, everybody. In front of us. I barely, two years ago,
got my family’s death certificate, and how they all died, they all got bullets in the head.
66
They all died like that. No questions, no nothing, just like that. Everybody in a line,
everybody on their knees. My grandma, my grandpa, my uncle, everybody, like that. In
less than minutes, they eliminated the whole family.

At the age of nine, and with a three-year-old brother, Horacio became homeless. A neighbor took
Horacio’s brother in but left him to fend for himself as he was old enough to work. Horacio
collected recyclables, such as cans and glass, in dumpsters and on streets and sold these items for
a few cents. To subside his hunger, thirst, and suffering, Horacio began sniffing glue. He lived on
the streets until the age of eleven. He describes his experiences living in El Salvador:
So, when you’re on glue, over there, you’re like the lowest, that’s like the cheapest drug.
You can get high with a dollar. Actually, no, 75 cents of a dollar. It changes who you really
are, with 75 cents I would get so messed up. I mean really messed up. I didn’t have nothing
to lose. So, when you use glue you forget about everything, you don’t eat, you don’t drink
for days, that’s why I got an ulcer, I’ve been having ulcers since maybe if I can remember,
from 11, yeah, 11 or 10… I was thinking I was going to die before 20.

Horacio chose to migrate at the age of eleven because of the instability and nonbelonging he
experienced in his everyday life caused by violence and worsened by severe poverty and
subsequent drug abuse. He acknowledges this when saying, “I didn’t have anything to lose.”
In his research with Honduran youth, Jon Wolseth (2008) writes that “everyday violence
and the persistence of grief” related to death and gang violence causes urban youth to become
“acutely aware of their own diminished opportunities… [and] the inability to have a productive
future in Honduras” leading to their social death (311). Youth in Nicaragua similarly report
feelings of social, economic, and political insecurity due to violence in their home society (Rodgers
2006). Elucidating the effects of youth’s exposure to “street-level politics,” Dennis Rodgers (ibid.)
explains that, “…The circumstances of insecurity and social breakdown in urban Nicaragua, the
continued economic crisis, political corruption, and high levels of disillusion, despair, and apathy,
have all combined to create conditions that are comparable to a context of ‘social death.’ The
possibilities of collective social life, particularly at the local level, have undergone a process of
67
steady erosion” (290). Domestic, community, and state violence disrupts the everyday lives of
Central American and Mexican youth. Youths’ physical and emotional insecurities disenfranchise
them from their community’s social fabric, fostering ideas that migration can offer increased
opportunities for safety and social belonging.
Adventure and mixed motives

Researchers describe migration as significant for youths’ transitions into adulthood as
leaving home symbolizes a rite of passage adulthood, independence, and adventure in youths’
departure from the home community. This research has primarily focused on young men
(Hamilton and Bylander n.d.; Monsutti 2007; Reuhs 2015). Mexican migration research shows
that young-adult men typically migrate into the US, while women, who face strict patriarchal
restrictions, participate in internal migration (Donato 1994). Among my respondents, a Salvadoran
woman and a Guatemalan man-- both the youngest siblings in their families— explained their
migration as motivated less by a particular need and more by desire.
Dolores’ older sister was working in the US two years when Dolores, who became
accustomed to receiving gifts and photos, set out to join her. At the age of twelve, Dolores dreamt
of living in Los Angeles. Three months after sharing her desires with her mother, she made her
first attempt at migrating from El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico and into the US Unlike
existing literature that describes parents as opposed to girls’ migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994),
Dolores did not experience the resistance of her mother. One week into the journey and well into
Mexico, Dolores felt homesick and worried that her mother was crying for her daughter to return.
Dolores left the group unnoticed and returned home, where she found her mother was not as
distraught as Dolores imagined. One month later, she made her second and final attempt to enter
68
the United States— this time feeling more confident since she "knew what to expect and what it
would be like.”
The respondents in my study who explain migration as the pursuit of adventure suggest
that youth do indeed have individual and active desires for migration that are less influenced by
displacement caused by conflict and other external constraints, and more so by their own active
pursuit of opportunities to achieve their aspirations. Though only a small segment of this sample,
the decision to migrate to pursue a new social life demonstrates how exposure to youth migrant
peer networks can influence their desire to migrate in hopes for a new life. Familiarity with satellite
communities in the US, coupled with desire to be active agents in their future, makes migration
viable. I would be remiss to ignore that claims of migrating for adventure may be a face-saving
strategy for youth whose histories of violence and poverty may be traumatic or embarrassing for
them to discuss with me during interviews. For example, while Dolores explains her migration as
tied to desires to see the photos her sister sent home to El Salvador come to life, her labor and
remittance sending once in the US suggest that poverty could have also prompted her migration.
An additional 16% of my respondents named mixed motives for migration, including:
violence and economic opportunity in the form of education, violence and economic opportunity
in the form of work, and economic opportunity and the pursuit of adventure. A 2016 survey study
of Central American minor migrants ages 12 and under in 10 shelters run by the Mexican
government child welfare agency finds that among minor migrants with mixed motives for
migration, “violence appears most often as a reason for migrating among minors with mixed
motives, as opposed to the search for better opportunities, which appears more often as an
exclusive motive” (Lorenzen 2017: 744).
xxvi
This is true among my respondents who migrated
much earlier and at older ages than those included in the survey study, but whose migration was
69
motived by economic opportunities of work and school as means out of conditions of violence for
themselves and their families left behind. These findings reveal that youth see themselves as active
in various social spheres and that migration is a response to social, economic and political
displacement and nonbelonging.
In all, the lack of mobility opportunities and violence cause youth to be fearful, hopeless,
and disillusioned about their lives in their home countries. Youth who are unable to access
symbolic and material resources to securing their future, feel socioeconomically stunted and
unable to incorporate into their home countries as their social age grows inconsistent with their
goals and aspirations. Social erosion can lead to social death by causing “the extinguishing of
hope in a future, the contracting of social spaces for youths, the diminishing of opportunities for
advancement, and the chronic disinvestment in youths because of state policies” (Wolseth 2008,
314). While the local and global political and economic structures influence the conditions of
poverty, violence, and social exclusion, youth motivating force in their migration is the desire to
progress meaningfully into personal, familial, and community development. I argue these feelings
urge a greater social phenomenon of non-belonging for youth who are coming of age and
establishing aspirations for the political, economic, and social futures their home communities
offer. Migration poses alternatives to these realities and offers hope for increased social
participation, either in a new land or in their home countries upon return. Next, I investigate the
role of parents and guardians in young people’s decisions to leave their home countries and
communities.
ADULTS’ ROLE IN YOUTHS’ UNACCOMPANIED MIGRATON JOURNEY

While young people enact agency in migration, parents and guardians, when present in a
young person’s life, may support or advance their children’s unaccompanied migration journey.
70
The degree of support that hopeful young migrants obtain from parents’ and guardians’ ranges
from active efforts, such as organizing finances or the migration guide, to quiet acquiescence.
Parents and guardians encouraging migration

Adult parents and guardians might actively guide and encourage youths’ migration to the
US. This guidance was commonly received by young people who lived with adults that recognized
the potential for mismatch between a young person’s expectations for their lifestyles and the
opportunities available to them as they continue to age (biologically). For example, Omar arrived
in the US at 15 and was 21 at the time of our interview. He described how one afternoon his mother
told him, “I would like for you to go there [the US] because there is not much money and for you
to overcome (superar), for you to become a better person (llegar a ser una mejor persona), for
you to construct your house.” Omar’s parents discussed his opportunities for migration with an
uncle already living in the United States who later lent the family money to contribute to Omar’s
migration.
Parents and/or guardians can also plant the seeds of migration when the young person’s life
is at-risk of violence. For example, Jorge from Guatemala said his migration was in part forced,
“You could say that my migration journey was forced. [It was] a journey of, ‘if you don’t want it
(migration), that’s your thing. Either you leave or [the gangs] kill you,’ a warning his father
imparted on him. Yet Jorge described the decision to migrate as his own. In cases where youth
were abandoned in their home countries but possessed networks with adults abroad, these
individuals stepped in to support their decision to migrate. At the age of fourteen, and with an
eleven-year-old brother, Ervin decided they “needed to leave” and enlisted the support of his
grandmother living in the US. He recalls:
When I was a kid, I had this idea that I need to enjoy life as much as possible because I didn’t
think I was going to make it to be an adult. I was just kind of like …I knew because so many
71
of us were dying. So many of my friends were dying that I just thought I’m not going to
make it. So, I told my grandmother that I needed to leave and she got together a little money
and then she sent it to us. My grandmother, she never went to school, she worked minimum
wage jobs in the United States and so she didn’t have much. She sent me whatever she has
and so it was my brother and me. My brother is younger than me, he was 11 and I was 14
when we decided to leave.

Ervin’s grandmother, like Omar’s mother above, initiated discussions of migration to the
United States. Ervin concludes his story of departure by saying “we decided to leave,” indicating
that the final decision was, at least he feels, his to make.
While previous research discusses the resistance of fathers against their daughters’
migration, several male respondents detailed their father’s attachment to them as sons, especially
in cases where they are the youngest son.
xxvii
Ramiro, who migrated at 14 and is now 26, said his
father resisted his migration but with the active encouragement of his mother, he gained his father’s
support. He details:
Well, he said, “You are going to turn into a gang member there. That’s what you are going
to be. I don’t want you to go.” That’s how it started. So, I thought, “what am I going to
do?” Then I went to my mother and since my mother knows how to convince my father, I
told her, “mom, help me convince my dad that I can go to Los Angeles.” Soon enough she
started telling me, “okay, my son.” And my dad, thank God, had a little bit of money and
he got me pay for my passage over here.

The adultification of young people in their home countries through work and household
practices prompts youth to think of themselves as autonomously making the decision to migrate.
In one instance, a father was offered the “opportunity” to migrate. Physically unable to make the
journey, but with economic needs, he passed the offer to his fifteen-year-old son, Timoteo, in
hopes that his youngest son could work abroad and remit money to their family. Timoteo
recounted:
La última opción era yo… I was the last option. My father told me that I was too young, that
he didn’t want me to do it because I was a young son who didn't work, didn’t know how to
navigate a city, I didn't know many places. He was scared that I would do it. Well, he asked
me to make a decision. He said, “the opportunity is here, the decision is yours.” He said,
72
“you are my youngest son. I don’t want to force you to do anything that will make me feel
guilty later.” So, he told me that it was my decision. I was fifteen years old. I thought about
what I was going to do, what I was about to get into. But, well, I took the risk, because it was
a tremendous risk, and yeah, I decided for myself.

Adultified youth participate in family and community networks where migration resources
are shared. Active parents or guardians can initiate discussions of migration and connect children
with trusted guides, family members or “conocidos” (acquaintances) that they can hold
accountable for the well-being of their children along the migration journey. Parents, guardians,
and adult figures can pull savings together for young people and might also contact relatives in the
home or receiving society to collect funds to afford the migration journey. Yet time and time again,
respondents described the “final decision” as being their own.

Youth negotiating caretakers’ silence and resistance

Youths’ agency in migration is showcased in examples of when parents and/or guardians
and adult figures were absent from or resistant to youth’s decisions to migrate, but they still
undertook the journey. In these cases, migrant youth were responsible for their migration. Adult
figures tend to withdraw from the youth’s migration decision when they cannot provide resources
or opportunities to fulfill the young person’s desire for social life (employment, security, and
adventure). Contrary to the image of a careless parent or guardian depicted by politicians and
pundits in the aftermath of the 2014 unaccompanied minor migrant crisis, various youth describe
how emotional adult caretakers become as their children leave home. For example, when Lucy,
whose father encouraged her to think of herself as financially independent when he could not
support her, left her home on December 2004, she recalls that her mother did not want her to
migrate because, “estaba acostumbrada conmigo” she was accustomed to having me in the house,
to go with her where she went.” Lucy describes that her mother “sufrió mucho cuando me vine
73
acá… ‘mejor no te vas,’ me dijo. (suffered very much when I came here… She said, ‘Just don’t
go.)’ Adult figures are resistant when they thought the young person was not prepared to undertake
an undocumented, unaccompanied border crossing.
Adult caretakers’ ability to weigh in on the decision to migrate is weakened when they
cannot financially provide for their children. Hilberto’s parents did not interfere when the sixteen-
year-old brought up his decision to migrate because they would not be able to provide alternatives
to migration. Hilberto recalls,
They didn’t tell me anything because they cannot help me. Over there they didn’t tell me
anything except, “well if you made the decision, we can’t tell you anything because sooner
or later you will have to build your house and we cannot do anything for you.” So, they let
me choose. Even though they didn’t want me to come over here they can’t, they couldn’t
do anything about it. Over there I cannot study, I cannot do anything so they just let me be.

Horacio’s explanation reveals that resource impoverishment limits caregivers’ ability to help youth
through their life course and with the achievement of their goals as they age. Unable to support
youth, as in the case of Hilberto’s parents, “they let [youth] choose.”
Young people who encounter resistance from their parents, especially young women who
desire to migrate for work or education opportunities, negotiate with their parents to receive their
parents’ approval. Marta migrated from Guatemala at the age of sixteen and was twenty-three
when I interviewed her in Los Angeles. Her parents resisted her migration because they could not
guarantee that she would be received by a supportive relative or friend.
xxviii
She said,
I decided to come here, and I asked my mom if she’d give me an opportunity to come here
(Los Angeles). They said no because my brother was here, and he said he would not
welcome (receive) me. But I told my mom and my dad, “please trust in me and I promise
to send money once I am there. I will support you.” So, I came to this country with the
need to work because I saw how we were living. I saw what my parents were living too.
So, I decided to migrate. The whole journey was difficult.

Parents, guardians, and adult figures were resistant to youth’s migration if they deemed them too
74
young to leave their home, as in the case of Liliana, introduced above, who wanted to escape the
violence of robbers and gang members in her community. Her grandparents resisted her departure,
but she said the final decision was hers “because in the first place, my grandparents were not in
agreement because I was too young.” To convince her to stay, they promised Liliana that “life
continues here,” but she told her grandparents, “I cannot take it anymore, I feel as though they are
waiting to get me outside.” Her fear of violence was greater than the disapproval of her
grandparents. “I felt the need to leave inside me. So, I came here,” she explained. In other cases,
like that of Marta above, economic necessities were greater than concerns for safety because of a
person’s age. Junito’s father opposed his migration because,
I was too young. [My father] said he would fight to maintain us like he was, but I saw the
need to come here. Like I told you, over there you don’t earn much and at that age, like
I’m telling you, one needs their own things too. We lived in a small house. You see the
need there.

Isabela explains that despite her mother’s disapproval and sadness as Isabela expressed her desire
to migrate north, she moved forward with her plans to migrate and told her mother, ‘yo quiero
irme.’ I told her, ‘I want to go.’ On the hand, I didn’t really want to leave because I didn’t want to
leave my mom alone. But on the other hand, I had to leave to get ahead.” Although her mother
did not want her to leave, Isabel says, “no me quedo otra,” meaning, “I did not have another
choice.” Nearly all respondents understood their migration as a personal choice to achieve their
own goals and aspirations, for themselves or their family units. Parents, guardians and adult figures
who are involved, work to facilitate some component of the migration process. Youth with absent
or resistant parents arrange funding, finding a guide, and the reception context of their migration.

75
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

This chapter examines why unaccompanied Central American and Mexican youth embark
on an undocumented migration journey and the extent to which adult caretakers (parents and
guardians) are involved in the migration process. Childhood scholars posit that to fully understand
our social worlds, we must build theory around the unique experiences of children, accounting for
their agency and social interactions.
xxix
I find that despite existing assumptions about children’s
depiction as “luggage” in the migration process, young people talk about themselves as actively
involved in the migration decision-making process. That is, while immigration theories center on
the role of adults in negotiating family or community need and opportunities for socioeconomic
mobility through migration, children also participate in these processes. Furthermore, that young
women are increasingly involved in decisions to migrate. Finally, young boys are sentimentalized
by parents, particularly fathers, who wish for their young children to stay by their side.
Unaccompanied minors understand their migration as independent of their parents’
migration status because of their sense of diminishing economic and educational opportunities,
safety, and social participation in their home countries as they come of age. Children, in essence,
feel a sense of non-belonging in their home communities. Structural conditions of violence,
poverty, and displacement undoubtedly underlie the migration of young people without parents
and papers. Situating discussions of unaccompanied minor migration within these structural
conditions diminishes the ways in which youth and their caretakers experience them in everyday
life. To understanding of the causes of migration, we should also note unaccompanied Central
America and Mexico youths’ response to the shrinking range of political, economic, and social
opportunities for stability and mobility in their home societies.
76
The contemporary moment of unaccompanied minor migrant migration is undeniably
different as more recent data from the UN High Commissioner of Refugees and the National
Immigrant Justice Center reveal that violence has become an even greater factor in driving the
current wave of migration. Analysis of youth agency and autonomy in the migration decision and
the role and parents and other adult caretakers thus also differ within the context of increasingly
forced migration (Kennedy 2014; Lorenzen 2017). Still, research conducted with young adults
who arrived as unaccompanied minors gives a window into how children are active agents in
global migration, and not limited to being “luggage” or outside of the migration decision making
process. In his quantitative study of European youth’s migration aspirations in times of economic
crisis, Christof Van Mol (2016) writes, “it can be expected that young people’s migration
aspirations (or lack of them) are related to wider life goals in terms of improving their personal
situation in the long run. It is imperative that research into migration dynamics takes the goals,
motivations, and aspirations of individuals into account” (1305). Because of youth’s adultification
in the household, community, school and workplace, youth develop aspirations for their futures
and strategies they employ, including migration, to pursue these aspirations. I argue that the real
and perceived loss of opportunities for incorporation in their home society as they come of age as
a response to structural conditions such as the absence of economic opportunities, violence, and
social participation frame unaccompanied minors’ understandings of why they migrate without
parents and papers.
Poverty and violence shape adult caretakers’ degrees of involvement in youths’ lives as
well as their ability to offer additional or alternative avenues for incorporation in the home society.
Caretakers range from encouraging, resistant, or absent from a young person’s migration decision-
making process rests on the adult’s. Despite an adult’s involvement, youth claim the decision to
77
migrate as their own. The varying degrees of involvement of adult caretakers and youths’ claims
of autonomy speak to the adultification Mexican and Central American youth experience in their
home society, their independence in accessing financial and social capital, and their potential for
agentic incorporation strategies in the host society. This also points to the ways in which the forces
of early adultification are also enmeshed with notions of individualism. Despite the ways that
youths’ narratives are couched in deep histories of migration and social networks that prompt their
global movement, they claim narratives of independence and autonomy in migration.

78
CHAPTER 3
Unparented youths’ social tie configurations in Los Angeles

In the previous chapter, I discussed how limited economic and educational opportunities,
unsafe households and neighborhoods, and the desire for adventure prompt youth to migrate
without parents or legal papers. Resource impoverished parents, guardians, and communities in
Central America and Mexico can cause them to be minimally involved or entirely absent in youths’
decision to migrate. Similar conditions can structure the dynamics of social ties unparented
immigrant youth find in Los Angeles. In this chapter, I explore what I term youths’ ‘social tie
configurations’ to show how youth with supportive relatives fare the best in their settlement in Los
Angeles, while those without relatives or mentors are worst off. I do so by examining the dynamics
of financial and emotional support non-parent relatives and community figures provide youth.
Unlike the research suggests that Latinos are inherently familistic and that ethnic solidarity grants
immigrants with supportive social networks (Baca Zinn 1982; Fulligni, Tseng, & Lam 1999),
unparented youth face uncertainties of receiving support, which compounds the difficulties of
being separated from one’s family as a minor and entering the US as an undocumented immigrant.
How youth fare in the host society is shaped by how they are received and their access to sources
of support that mediate the absence of parents.
Previous research discusses the lack of labor market, educational, and legal structures of
support for undocumented migrants in the US (Chavez 1992; Gonzales 2015; Hamilton and
Chinchilla 2001), which increases the importance of social networks in patchworking resources
(Enriquez 2011; Kibria 1993; Menjívar 2002; Suarez-Orozco, Pimentel, Martin 2009). Research,
policy, and media reports surrounding contemporary unaccompanied minor migration—that of the
2014 surge and thereafter— focuses on children and youth who are formally placed with sponsors
79
in the US and who are assumed (and expected) to have access to a traditional incorporation
trajectory that prioritizes family, school, and community life and delays entry into the
workforce.
xxx
The trajectories of unparented youth are diverse and unpredictable. The extent to
which youth are supported in their settlement in Los Angeles is firmly rooted in their access to
supportive social tie configurations. Francisco elaborates on this.
I met 22-year-old Francisco at a Saturday evening church youth group in Pico Union, where
he introduced himself as having arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala at the age of fifteen.
Francisco’s older sister left Guatemala two years before him. And while she lived in the same
community Francisco now lives, he did not receive the warm welcome he expected.

Aquí es, es muy difícil porque te separas de tu familia, de tus hermanos, tus hermanas. Lo
más difícil es cruzar aquí, desde Guatemala hasta llegar aquí. Es un camino donde no
sabes si vas a llegar o te quedas ahí o te va a pasar algo y, pues, por eso… para una
persona de… un menor de edad, al llegar aquí es muy difícil. Y a veces no encuentras el
apoyo necesario aquí. Aquí yo sé que puedo llegar a ser alguien, pero si alguien me apoya
también, porque solo no encontramos por dónde ir o así… es por eso.

Here it is very difficult because you get separated from your family, your brothers, your
sisters. Crossing [over] to get here from Guatemala is the most difficult [thing]. It’s a
journey where you don’t know if you are going to make it or if you will stay there or if
something will happen [to you]. That is why… for someone of… a minor, to get here is
something very difficult. And sometimes you don’t find the necessary support here. I know
I can become someone (amount to something) here but also if someone supports me
because we don’t know where to go on our own.

As Francisco suggests, youths’ potential to “become someone” can be stagnated when
there are no conventional familial networks of support. In this chapter, I examine whether and to
what extent undocumented, unparented immigrant youth are supported upon arrival in the US
through ‘social tie configurations,’ or the social tie dynamics that unparented immigrant youth
encounter in their host community. Life course theory highlights the importance of family
members in shaping individuals’ life chances by providing these primary means of support, which
80
are expected to ease the transition into adulthood for young people (Hardie and Seltzer 2016). In
their study of the differences in support parents provide to young-adult children, Hardie and Seltzer
(ibid.) distinguish between two forms of support: actual and perceived. Actual support includes
economic and social capital that children receive from their parents, such as coresidence,
educational and monetary support, and advice. Perceived support refers to whether young people
feel supported by their parents and whether they would turn to their parents for advice. Even if
untapped, perceived support can grant a sense of emotional security; that is, it provides emotional
capital. Immigration scholars distinguish between financial support, which can include interest-
free money lending, and emotional support, consisting of love and caring, sympathy and
understanding, and/or esteem or value available from significant others (Kornienko, Agadjanian,
Menjívar, and Zotova 2017).
xxxi

Studies of native- and foreign-born youths’ coming of age draws attention to the ways in
which the social ties youth develop shape their social and economic outcomes. The material and
emotional capital from parents is critical in weathering the uncertainties of the immigrant context
of reception that racializes newcomers, offers a segmented labor market with few mobility ladders,
and hostile immigration policies (Marrow 2009; Telles and Ortiz 2008). Parents transmit actual
and perceived support to their children through material and emotional capital and usher them into
a supportive co-ethnic community that may serve as a springboard to mobility and buffer them
from experiences of discrimination in broader society (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Bean, Brown,
Bachmeier 2016; Smith 2006). These theorists assume that immigrant youth come of age in
households headed by parents to which discipline and guidance are supplemented by the coethnic
community. Migration researchers have not fully considered how and to what extent unparented
immigrant youths’ access material and emotional resources through social networks and safety
81
nets.
xxxii
I add to the understanding of these processes as they relate to unaccompanied minor
migrants by examining the sources of social ties and dynamics of support that youth receive and
the potential social and financial challenges that can block youths’ access to acquiring support.
Unaccompanied immigrant youth without parents in the US can encounter an array of network
dynamics in their receiving society.
Social network and social capital studies reveal the unpredictability of networks in
providing consistent support. Family ties may be fragmented when settled immigrants are unable
to assist newcomers, while new, fictive kin relationships can develop among similarly-situated
community members. I propose a tripartite typology of social tie configurations that unparented
migrant youth encounter in the US: (1) unparented youth with supportive relatives, (2) unparented
youth with a supportive mentor(s), and (3) unparented youth without relatives and without
mentors. By centering social tie configurations, I challenge the normativity of parental presence in
the incorporation trajectories of immigrant youth and differentiate between material and emotional
support from non-parent networks. I show that ‘unparented’ youth begin their incorporation
processes further behind immigrant youth—documented and undocumented— who migrate with
their parents and are ushered into the host society by them. Those with supportive relatives fare
better than the other groups, as they receive material and emotional support. Youth in community
groups acquire mentors and peer groups that offer emotional support, but rarely secure material
support. Finally, as I will begin to explain here but detail in greater depth in the next chapter, the
social tie configurations that youth encounter during their initial settlement can shape their long-
term incorporation trajectory.

82
IMMIGRANT YOUTH NETWORKS OF SUPPORT

Immigrant incorporation scholarship frames children as inherently having access to
parents’ educational, financial, and cultural resources, from which they can begin to acquire capital
from the education system, community organizations, and work opportunities to achieve greater
incorporation and mobility (Feliciano 2005; Kao and Tienda 1998). A family’s socioeconomic
background determines children’s neighborhoods and schools (Lareau 2011; Vallejo 2012; Waters
2000), the childrearing practices parents adopt (Lareau 2011), and the roles and responsibilities of
youth within the household (Enriquez 2016; Estrada 2012; Kwon 2015; Valenzuela 1999). Dual-
parent and extended family households where grandparents and older siblings play a role in
motivating and controlling adolescents can significantly improve immigrant youths’ likelihood of
achieving upward assimilation (Kasinitz, Waters, Mollenkopf, and Holdaway 2008).
xxxiii
The
conflicting demands and the inability to provide children with supervision can negatively affect
their educational and employment outcomes (Portes and Fernandez-Kelley 2008.). In this way,
increased sources of material and emotional capital support a positive incorporation trajectory.
In addition to strong familial and co-ethnic ties, researchers find that access to a ‘really
significant other’ or a non-parental figure who can mentor and take ‘a keen interest in a child’ is
decisive in immigrant children’s socioeconomic assimilation trajectory (Portes and Fernandez-
Kelly 2008). Immigration experts Portes and Fernandez-Kelly (ibid.) argue that a non-parent adult
can “guide” a young person in “the right direction.” Stanton-Salazar (2011) identifies “institutional
agents” as supportive figures. These are “high-status, non-kin, agents who occupy relatively high
positions in the multiple dimensional stratification system, and who are well positioned to provide
key forms of social and institutional support.”
xxxiv
Gonzales’s (2015) research on undocumented
students in Southern California finds that ‘trusting relationships’ with teachers or other adults are
83
a key variable in determining the educational outcomes and feelings of inclusion among
undocumented youth as they transition into adulthood and ‘illegality.’ In her research with
upwardly mobile Mexican Americans, Vallejo (2012) argues that access to a mentor, obtained
through organizations, parents’ employers, etc., is a key mechanism in advancing access to social
capital and ascension into the middle class.
With time, shared experiences, interests, and values, close friendship ties can develop into
“fictive kinship” (Lee 2013; Stack 1974). “Fictive kin” refers to social relationships that are not
based on blood or marriage but “on religious rituals or close friendships ties, that replicates many
of the rights and obligations usually associated with family ties” (Ebaugh and Curry 2000).
xxxv

Within immigrant communities, fictive kinship can function to reinforce cultural norms, exercise
social control, and offer material and socioemotional support.
xxxvi
In migration research that
assumes parental presence in youths’ lives, fictive kin are supplementary to the young person’s
access to opportunities and identity formation. The mentors described above may be considered
fictive kin when bonds develop outside of the institutional context in which they are developed. In
all, parents, extended family, and mentors buffer children from societal sentiments and
mechanisms of exclusion as they discipline and guide them towards success.
xxxvii
Little is known
about the social ties youth develop with family and community members in the US in the absence
of biological parents.
xxxviii
My research shows that Central American and Mexican youth who leave
their home countries without parents and papers face uncertain social tie configurations. I define
‘social tie configurations’ as the household and community-level social ties youth develop with
non-parent relatives, co-ethnics and peers, community leaders, and
Identifying the social tie configurations that determine youth’s access to material and
emotional support is important because of the various forms of vulnerability these youth face,
84
including poverty, exploitation, and violence (Canizales 2015).
xxxix
Migration is associated with
loss of identity and role, language and culture, and networks and ties. Sudden loss of access to
multiple networks can cause psychological distress. Migrant parents also experience traumas of
family separation (Abrego 2014; Levitt 2001), and adult women whose husbands and children
migrate report high levels of depression (Aranda, Vaquera, Sousa-Rodriguez 2015). Studies show
that non-migrant children who are left behind by migrant parents feel the emotional burden of
being separated from their parents (Dreby 2010; Parreñas 2005). Research on asylum-seeking
children, which focuses on emotional well-being from psychological and medical perspectives,
finds that unaccompanied children are extremely vulnerable to emotional problems linked to
unaccompanied migration trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and
anxiety (Wernesjo 2011).
xl

Research with unaccompanied and unparented Guatemalan Maya garment workers finds
that youth suffer from loneliness, depression, and anxiety related to familial separation (Canizales
2015; 2018). The traumas of being unaccompanied are compounded with the stresses of being
undocumented in the US. Existing research on undocumented youth’s emotional and mental
health, which presumes parental presence and school enrollment, points to symptoms of anxiety,
confusion, and frustration as youth experience “the chronic stress of no place to belong” (Gonzales,
Suarez-Orozco, and Dedios-Sanguineti 2013). Undocumented status, or illegality, can also lead to
dimmed aspirations, as well as feelings anger and hopelessness, as they encounter disadvantages
associated with their blocked access to opportunities in the future (Gonzales and Ruiz 2014). Their
precarious legal status also incites the stress and fear of deportation and societal rejection
(Gonzales and Chavez 2012). This work underscores the importance of meaningful relationships,
85
mentors, and supportive institutions (i.e. schools, churches, workplaces) in the settlement and
incorporation of undocumented, unparented immigrant youth.
While the capital inherited from parents and community are critical in the settlement of
immigrant newcomers, there is evidence that immigrant networks and supportive social ties
deteriorate under conditions of poverty, job insecurity, and lack of legal protections for immigrants
(Menjívar 2000). Scholars who have conceptually decoupled networks and social capital find that
social ties within institutions may be stagnant, or become exploitative mechanisms for
“downgrading, rather than platforms for upward mobility” (Cranford 2005; see also Portes and
Landolt 2000). The absence of supportive institutional resources and financial capital among
immigrant groups weakens the strength of social capital and can go as far as to create ethnic
opportunism that can feed into co-ethnic exploitation (Mahler 1995). Additionally, the structure of
social networks can directly “facilitate and perpetuate exploitation” (Rosales 2014: 2565) or cause
setback in incorporation processes (Canizales 2018).
xli
Finally, access to networks can be
organized by gender, which shapes institutional participation and patterns of social integration
(Hagan 1994).
In what follows I will describe the primary obstacles to incorporation that these youth face
as they settle in the US without parents and papers. This chapter introduces a tripartite typology
for the social tie configurations unparented youth encounter, and what dynamics of material and
emotional support these configurations offer them. I also ask what factors contribute to the
fragmentation of some networks and formation of others. I will show that despite the
characterization of Latino families and communities as familistic and collectivistic, resource-poor
families living in the US may be unable to provide complete or any material and emotional support
to the unparented youth who arrive at their doorsteps. This, however, may be normalized among
86
youth who originate from fragmented families or communities and whom are adultified through
experiences of work, absence from school, and financial independence in the home country.
OBSTACLES TO INCORPORATION

The undocumented youth in this study arrived in the US having fled blocked or limited
opportunities for incorporation in their host communities in Central America and Mexico. Los
Angeles promises opportunities for work and education that youth view as necessary to move
themselves or their families—who remain in their country of origin— out of these conditions.
Thus, much of their initial settlement experience revolves around work and their transnational
relationships and economic obligations. As I will show in the next chapter, this transnational
orientation changes overtime for those who become embedded in US institutions and are oriented
toward their local community. Whether and to what extent this change occurs is closely linked to
the forms of support youth receive.
Unparented youth come to the US with various forms of trauma, which came to the fore
during my fieldwork where youth would often talk about their home countries, migration journeys
and describe the anxiety and fear they felt upon arrival in the US at the sound of a helicopter, the
sight of local law enforcement in a uniform, or nightmares of having left friends and relatives in
the desert to die, as one respondent was forced to do at the age of 14. They are physically,
emotionally, and mentally exhausted from their undocumented migration journey and many detail
becoming physically ill in their first days or weeks in the US.
One of the immediate challenges unaccompanied child migrants face in their initial
settlement is paying off their migration debt. As workers, and without the guarantee of familial
support, youth’s most pressing need upon arrival is finding housing and employment that will
enable them to pay off their migration debt, which can range from 3 to 11 thousand dollars
87
depending on age, gender, and distance of travel. This money is borrowed from relatives in the US
or the home country, or neighbors and family acquaintances who expect prompt repayment. Some
lenders, family members included, charge interest during the repayment period which creates an
urgency to repay debt quickly. Respondents said they spent anywhere between 1.5 to three years
paying back their debt. Managing and repaying migration debt was the first test of financial
responsibility, onto which daily living expenses such as, rent and bills, food, clothing, phone, and
school only added pressure. Youth described that upon arrival they were surprised that “aqui se
paga todo (here you pay for everything).” Everyday expenses such as the cost of rent, laundry and
public transportation can become burdensome for many. This is especially true for those who
originate from agricultural communities, where families live off their land and draw on natural
resources to complete everyday tasks.
Workplace, household, and community conditions can also pose obstacles to incorporation.
As youth share with me, they quickly discover that, “uno no viene aquí a recoger dinero” (one
does not come here to pick up money [off of the streets]). Instead, the same neoliberal economic
policies that govern their work options, conditions, and livelihoods in Central America and Mexico
dominate the US labor market. Youth enter secondary labor market occupations such as garment
work, restaurant or domestic service, and the like that require arduous and repetitive labor for very
little in wages. The Los Angeles labor market and the nature of the work of undocumented
immigrants limit their options for financial stability and impact their mental, emotional, and
physical health in the US.
Unparented youth also confront the difficulties of being separated from their parents,
siblings, communities and culture. Constant thoughts of the home country and those left behind
can cause an immigrant to live in a state of ‘perpetual mourning’, where migrants feel sadness over
88
the loss of their ‘families, homeland, language, identity, property, religious or cultural rituals,
geography, or status of their home countries’ (Zavalla 2011, 158). Unparented youth experience
loneliness or depression as separation may be indefinite (Canizales 2015). I encountered
unparented young people who, because of low wages, cost of living, and lack of safety nets,
experienced homelessness, unemployment, alcoholism, violence, and mental health instability
evinced by depression and anxiety. Various youth coped with these realities in the past or at the
time of our meeting by drinking alcohol, taking drugs, engaging in prostitution, and other
behaviors that threaten their orientation and adaptation to US society (Canizales 2018).
The disadvantages of migration trauma and debt, economic precarity and labor
exploitation, compounds with the fears of social interaction within a society that is unwelcoming
of undocumented, low-skilled and dark-skinned Latino migrants (Chavez 2013). Discrimination
and harassment can take place in communities where gang and police activity are prevalent—a
characteristic of Pico Union and Westlake/MacArthur Park.
xlii
Reports of sexual harassment are
common among young women who describe the unwanted, and often hostile, advancements of
their male supervisors at work or male partners of female relatives in the US who are married or
‘con pareja’ (in a couple or relationship). I will elaborate on these experiences in the sections to
follow. Taken together, this context of reception for undocumented and unparented immigrant
youth and absence of adult caretakers may lead one to assume that they are unable to become
embedded in institutions and local community and incorporate into US society; yet the
interventions of material and emotional support might alter this assumed experience. The
conditions leading to migration, traumatic migration experiences, and obstacles to incorporation
that undocumented and unparented youth face lead me to ask where youth turn to for support.

89
SOCIAL TIE CONFIGURATIONS

Within my sample, I find that there are three social tie configurations that characterize the
family and community social contexts that receive undocumented and unparented immigrant
youth.
7
Table 2.1 shows that 46% of the total sample were met by a supportive non-parent relative.
I also consider where youth turn when their non-parent relative is unable to provide settlement
support. Some turn to individuals or organizations that provide mentors (39% of the total sample),
and others are left without support (15% of the total sample). Unparented youth who come to the
US without the expectation of being received by a non-parent relative directly enter these latter
configurations as well. Indeed, gender of both the unparented young person and the relative
receiving them influences the dynamics of support, as I will detail below. Throughout this chapter
I distinguish between material and/or emotional support.

Table 3.1 Social Tie Configurations, n=75

Social Tie
configurations
Number
female
Percentage
female
Number
Male
Percentage
Male
Total
number
Total
Percent
Supportive relative 13 37% 22 63% 35 46%
Mentor 6 21% 23 79% 29 39%
Without support 3 27% 8 73% 11 15%
Total 22 29% 53 71% 75 100%

I. Unparented with supportive relative(s)

As Table 2.2 demonstrates, unparented migrant youths’ non-parent relative(s) can be older
siblings, aunts and/or uncles, and cousins.
xliii
Support from relatives ranges from full financial and
emotional support, to modified support dynamics that reflect the resources relatives have available
to them. In cases of extreme resource impoverishment, family members can become estranged.

7
The reader should be reminded that this is not a random sample.
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Still, arriving at the door of a non-parent relative, or living in the same community or on the same
street, does not guarantee the availability of material and emotional support.

Table 3.2 Relatives receiving unparented migrant youth, n=35

Non-parent
relative
Number
female
Percentage
female
Number
Male
Percentage
Male
Total
number
Total
Percent
Sibling 6 33% 12 66% 18 51%
Aunt and/or
uncle
5 42% 7 58% 12 3%
Cousin(s) 2 50% 2 50% 4 11%
Grandparent 0 0% 1 100% 1 3%
Total 13 37% 22 63% 35 100%

Youth with supportive relatives fare better when there is more than one relative living in
the US willing to share the burden of support. This was the case for Armando, who explained that
his two older sisters came together to provide not only a place to live, but support in repaying
migration debt and daily living expenses. Both of Armando’s older sisters were single and had
been in the US for over 5 years when he arrived. His oldest sister lived in the San Gabriel Valley
of Los Angeles and offered Armando a place to live, free of cost. Another sister lived in the City
of Los Angeles and paid Armando’s migration debt in order to delay Armando’s entry into the
labor market and could instead focus on education and learning the English language. After
learning some English, Armando took on a job as a dishwasher and slowly moved his way up to
be a server in an American restaurant. Armando presents a much different narrative to those
described above. He recognizes how the intervention of his sisters allowed him to enroll in English
classes, make friends, choose a workplace that felt comfortable for him and the flexibility to move
workplaces if he so chose.
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When I asked Armando how he believed his settlement experience would have been
different had his sisters not helped him, he offered his girlfriend as an example, saying, “I see how
she works a lot. She has been here for six years and she still does not speak English. She works
and works and does not go out. Se siente incomoda con la gente (she feels uncomfortable around
people).” Armando’s girlfriend lived in Los Angeles alone and spent the majority of her time
working to make ends meet. The financial strains of initial settlement can cause youth to become
isolated, which impinges on their ability to develop social networks that transmit resources. In
concluding our interview, I asked Armando if he could put me in touch with her for an interview
and he responded that she would not have time but that even if she did, she would likely not want
to meet with me. Receiving material support alleviates the stress and anxiety youth face in settling
in Los Angeles. Material support also implies emotional support that offers youth a sense of social
security in interacting in the host society.
Relatives also offer youth the emotional support in regard to when and how to
communicate with others. My interview with Glenda –introduced in the previous chapter as
migrating because of domestic violence fueled by her parents’ alcohol addiction— provided a
unique window into how these steps are communicated to young people by their relative. While
Glenda knew her uncle lived in the US, she did not know he was married and had children (a son
and a daughter). I interviewed Glenda at a Los Angeles immigrant community center, and Marta,
her aunt, accompanied her. During our interview, Marta hovered protectively nearby and was
hesitant to leave Glenda alone with me. To alleviate her trepidation, I invited Marta to join us and
she sat across a patio table from Glenda and I, interjecting from time to time. Glenda
enthusiastically detailed how she unexpectedly received the support of her uncle and his wife,
Marta, upon arrival in the US Marta proudly said, “I tell her, ‘You have to study. In my house, you
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will not lack a roof or food.’” Glenda agreed, “She always says that. She is always supporting me,
telling me to do this or that.” Acknowledging that the financial resources come from her husband,
Glenda’s uncle, Marta says, “Of course, she is supported by her uncle, too.” When received by a
supportive relative who provides financial and emotional support, youth are also getting a sense
of direction as to what to prioritize as they settle in the host society according to the individual
who receives them.
In Glenda’s case, the relationship she developed with Marta was significant because her
demeanor toward Glenda vastly differed from Glenda’s biological mother. When I asked Glenda
to describe her family in the US to me she said,

Glenda: Here? Oh, wonderful! Starting with her (Marta) and mis hermanos (my siblings),
because I love them like my siblings. I have become accustomed here. I know when they
get home, when he is getting home late, or…

Stephanie: Who is “he”?

Glenda: Oh, my brother who sometimes gets home late. And now I know I can ask where
he is and where he is going. Or my sister, Michelle, who is around the house. Anytime I
need anything, I have it there. Or even my uncle. I know he has un modo rarito (strange
attitude) but I love him like that.

The financial and social support that Glenda receives from her uncle, aunt, and cousins facilitate
the formation of strong familial ties. Her aunt takes on a motherly role and her cousins are now
her siblings. Glenda’s uncle, who provides for the family financially, is her father figure.
xliv
Glenda
exemplifies that having a family member present that is available for her to interact with and whom
she is learning the customs, habits, and modos rarito help her feel a sense of stability and place in
the US. This outcome is not by change, but an intentional intervention on Marta’s behalf. Marta
recognizes Glenda’s need for emotional guidance and began describing her role in this. Marta
began,
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Since the beginning I noticed she was depressed and had a lot of trauma. I would tell her,
“You have to overcome that. You need to have [a sense of] security in yourself. You are
one of a kind. You are not like anyone. You are unique.”

To which Glenda responded, “I know everything because of her. She has showed me so many
different things.” Glenda is receiving financial and social support from her uncle and his family,
but also the emotional support from Marta, who recognizes Glenda’s emotional vulnerability.
The support of relatives is not always as full as that received by Armando and Glenda. In
fact, it is most likely to be modified froms of material and emotional support. Their relatives,
respondents said, were unable to contribute directly toward the migration debt but attempted to
alleviate the financial burdens of migration and initial settlement by covering other expenses such
as rent, food, clothing, personal products, or by providing youth with such things as phone cards
or cellular phones to call families abroad until they are financially self-sufficient. Many young
people reported that they were responsible for their own migration debt and took up weekend or
after-school jobs to begin paying this off. Others served as liaisons to potential work opportunities
that would initiate their way to financial stability.
During the winter of 2016, I began recruiting interview respondents at a Los Angeles
English language adult school, where I went from class-to-class explaining the goals of my study
and distributing flyers with my contact information. I met Gilberto in one of these English classes.
At 20-years-old, Gilberto had been in the US for three years at the time of our interview. He
explained that he came to the US from El Salvador hoping to learn English, graduate from high
school, and return home as a professional. Gilberto’s goal was to start a business that would allow
him to support his mother and two siblings. Gilberto’s grandfather and uncle offered a place to
stay, but promptly made clear that Gilberto would be financially independent. When expressing
his interest to attend school, Gilberto’s uncle told him, “aqui uno viene a ganar dinero (one comes
94
here to earn money).” Not expecting to take on so many living expenses upon arrival, Gilberto
knew financial independence would delay his plans. To aid his financial independence, Gilberto’s
uncle pointed him to a neighbor who needed help with her business. Gilberto spent his first two
years in the US working at a swap meet for a woman described as exploitative and verbally
abusive. These are conditions he endured to guarantee that he could repay his debt.
She doesn’t pay me a lot but because I can’t find another job I have to endure. Sometimes
I get mad, but I have to endure. She’ always mad or scolds me. I have to work to pay my
cellular, to buy anything I want, any activity I want to do. I can’t go out or buy anything if
I don’t work. That’s why I endure everything I do. But sometimes yes, I leave with a
headache. It’s difficult but I know I have to pay for everything.

Gilberto had a designated place to live upon arrival in Los Angeles, but this did not
guarantee that he would receive the material support to pursue his educational goals. Along with
experiencing financial insecurity and stresses, Gilberto feels emotionally distraught because his
uncle would not support Gilberto’s desire to attend school. However, his grandfather and uncle
worked to provide items such as groceries or deodorant when Gilberto needed a hand, or a calling
card to speak with his mother in El Salvador.
Uriel arrived in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles at the age of 15, where he was received by
his brother, Matias. At the time, Matias worked as a floor manager at a Downtown Los Angeles
garment factory. When Uriel asked Matias to help him find a weekend job so that he could remit
money to their mother, Matias took him to the same factory that employed him. The factory owner
turned Uriel down for a job, saying that Uriel was too young to work. Matias leveraged his
reputation as a good worker to convince the factory owner that Uriel would be an asset to the shop
and Uriel was granted the job. Uriel explained to me that this was one of the ways he felt his older
brother supported him, by drawing on his resources to help Uriel meet his goals. Uriel recalls, “For
me, when I got here, my brother told me, ‘I will help you with what you cannot do, and you will
95
do the same for me.” Uriel is receiving a tangible resource from his brother through an employment
referral (and indirectly, through acquired income). This encounter, however, was significant to
Uriel because it demonstrated to him that he could count on Matias in the way that he promised.
Uriel equally valued the material and emotional gains in being received by his brother.
It was often the case that young people received greater amounts of emotional support and
advice from non-parent relatives who could relay their experiences and hopes to younger migrants
but did not have much in terms of material resource. Isabela arrived in Los Angeles at the age of
14, where she was received by her older brother and sister. Now 19-years-old, she recognizes how
her siblings have attempted to alleviate some of her financial burdens so that she might pursue an
education and encourage her to continue working toward her goals.
When I came over here I started living with my siblings, one brother and one sister. I
immediately felt comfortable living with them because they supported me in my studies, I
don’t pay much in rent. Yes, I am paying but it is not much. I live with a brother, my sister,
my brother’s wife and my nephew. The five of us live in one house together. That’s it.
Even though I am working and studying, when I am at home we get along well.
My brother supports me the most… He tells me that he wants me to keep studying. He tells
me, “I want you to keep studying, to graduate and to have a career. I would like to help you
but I don’t have the means.” That's what he tells me. My nephew is studying too and my
brother has his family. I understand him.

Throughout our interview, Isabela commented on how tiring and difficult she felt her life is
compared to what she imagined she would arrive to. However, constructing a comparative
framework helps Isabela. The emotional support and advice and moderated financial support
Isabela receives from her older siblings that did not have supportive relatives to guide them when
they arrived in Los Angeles gives her the strength to continue juggling multiple jobs and school.
Finally, corroborating previous research on resource poor migrant networks, I find that the
presence of a non-parent relative does not guarantee material or emotional support. Some migrant
youth might be turned away from living with a family member entirely—as I will describe in
96
greater depth below— and others may live with a family member who does not provide material
and emotional settlement support. When he left his hometown in Guatemala at the age of 16,
Joaquin borrowed money from his older brother who was already living in Los Angeles. He lived
with his brother for four years but was expected to be financially responsible for paying his
migration debt, finding a job, and paying the bills to make ends meet. Aside from the unavailability
of financial capital, Joaquin also describes his general sense of loneliness even while living in the
same apartment with his brother.
Stephanie: You lived with your brother when you first arrived?

Joaquin: Yes. We were together for four years. But almost not. We didn’t spend time
together really. We were never together. We lived together, but…

Stephanie: Was that because you work so much?

Joaquin: We work. Well, yeah, we work. And for example, sometimes he doesn't Sunday,
Monday, and me on Saturday, Sunday. And he has separate friends. And I have separate
friends. It was rare that we would see each other. Sometimes on a Monday. But sometimes
he wouldn’t come home. We didn’t spend time together.

Though living in the same apartment as his brother, Joaquin recalls spending very little time with
him. When Joaquin was no longer living with his brother he said, “It didn’t feel different. I went
on the same way. Well, yeah, there are times when one feels alone but, but, what can you do?”
This elucidates that sharing a residence does not equate support, and unaccompanied minor
migrants might desire or need more active resources—both material and emotional— as they settle
in the US. Youth who have relatives in the US but whom find them unsupportive might come to
join a community group and acquire a mentor and peer group, while others are left bereft of
support.

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II. Unparented with mentor(s)

When youths’ hopes for familial support are not fully realized in the host society or when
youth enter the US without family to turn to, they begin an independent settlement process.
Acquiring support may occur as their time in the US passes. Returning to the findings of Sarah
Mahler’s (1995) study, she explains that in the unavailability of kin networks, newcomer migrants
are encouraged by the support of “other unnamed individuals” who come to their aid. These
individuals are like the “really significant others” introduced above. I refer to the individuals that
unparented youth meet through community involvement as “mentors.” By becoming involved in
organizations young people develop ties to a mentor whom may eventually become fictive kin and
can be a source of guidance and a bridge to peer groups.
A recent study of mentorship outcomes with foster youth finds that among the most fruitful
mentoring relationships are those developed with natural mentors, or “naturally occurring
important adults in a youth’s existing social network [that] can include teachers, extended family
members, neighbors, coaches, and religious leaders” (Greeson 2013, 40).
xlv
After spending some
time in the US, unparented youth might learn of community groups through co-workers, co-
ethnics, and friends that open doors to meeting supportive mentors and peer groups. Table 2.3
shows that, among those with a mentor in the US, fifty-one percent (51%) acquired their mentor
through self-help and support groups, another eleven percent (11%) acquired a mentor through
religious organizations like churches and youth groups, three percent (3%) through job and
educational training programs, and another three percent (3%) through recreational groups such as
hiking, running, Zumba or karate.
xlvi

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Table. 3.3 Community ties to mentor(s), n=29

Community ties
to mentor(s)
Number
female
Percentage
female
Number
Male
Percentage
Male
Total
number
Total
Percent
Self-help/support 0 0% 9 100% 9 51%
Religious 5 63% 3 38% 8 11%
Job and school
training
1 11% 8 89% 9 3%
Recreational 0 0% 3 100% 3 3%
Total 6 21% 23 79% 29 100%

Without an adult relative in the US to guide their settlement, youth feel hopeless or
uncertain about their futures in the US. Mentors give a sense of direction and support to youth who
feel they are being told, “There is no support for you. You have to find your way,” as one young
man expressed during a support group meeting I observed in early 2015. Mentors are critical in
encouraging youth to employ self-help practices, to obtain jobs and education, attend community
groups and events, and pursue new opportunities and resources. Mentors also assuage
overwhelming feelings of isolation, loneliness, and hopelessness that many young people struggle
to overcome.
As detailed in the introduction, this research began with a support group for
unaccompanied immigrant youth workers in Downtown Los Angeles, led by a man named
Wilfredo. Wilfredo is among the mentors with which I spent the most time. His informal support
group, Voces de Esperanza, hosted my participant observation of for four years. Wilfredo is a first-
generation Salvadoran immigrant who was in his early 50s when I first met him. He co-coordinated
a group alongside a 1.5-generation Mexican man in his mid 20s. This group, which I call Voces de
Esperanza, has no funding or contractually-secure meeting space, but still meets every Friday night
between 7-9:00pm to answer one simple question: How was your week?
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During this time, the group participants, which ranged from as many as thirty or as little as
eight Guatemalan Maya garment working youth, would share around their daily activities, family
interactions, and work, church, and social life. Wilfredo acts as a mentor who exposes support
group participants to American ideals of self-care and -responsibility. Wilfredo is not a mental
health or psychology professional, but through his experience as a first-generation Salvadoran
immigrant in the 1980s and as a former catechist instructor in Pico Union, he recognizes the
‘traumas’ and ‘disorientation’ of unaccompanied young adults and guides them to think about
strategies for achieving stability. He does this by “desarrollando (developing)” in the group’s
seven areas of focus (social, emotional, physical, spiritual, financial, cultural, and intellectual).
Wilfredo, and other mentors, can influence how youth organize (or think about organizing) their
lives. This is the case of Ernesto, who explained,
Stephanie: When you left Guatemala, what did you feel was your responsibility or goal?
Did you have one when you came here?

Ernesto: When I came here? I didn’t come with a dream. I didn’t know anything about
setting goals. I didn’t think about what I was going to do or where I was going to go. Well,
I think, because over there (Guatemala) they tell you that there is a little bit of everything
here (the US). I didn’t come with a dream and that affected me a lot because even today,
this day, I have realized that I have wasted a lot of time because I didn’t have a direction.
I don’t have anything. I have only worked.

Ernesto met Wilfredo, his mentor, three years prior to our interview. He was introduced to
Wilfredo by a friend after sharing that a broken relationship might have induced his depression.
Ernesto said,

[My friend] took me to talk to him. Then [Wilfredo] told me we would keep talking.
Sometimes I would forget to meet him, but he would call me, and I noticed that he
encouraged me a lot. I started going to [Voces de Esperanza] and it is really encouraging
to see people like yourself who are struggling, fighting, and studying.

Wilfredo and Voces de Esperanza represent one of the ways youth can become connected to
mentoring figuring and community organizations. Mentors are individuals who unparented youth
100
can share ideas, thoughts, confusions with, while also gaining tangible resources, social capital,
and “animo (encouragement)” from as they navigate US culture, education, social, and legal
systems. Their mentors provide tangible ties to organizations, practices, and beliefs that can bring
stability to the young persons’ life. In attending this group and engaging with the leadership and
mentorship of Wilfredo, youth learn American behaviors and rhetoric of individualism and self-
responsibility.
Mentors demonstrate their material and emotional support by introducing group members
to professionals who provide them with information on health, policy, education, finances, and the
like. Early on in my research I attended a Voces de Esperanza meeting where a professional social
worker was invited to discuss the topic of fear and the physical manifestations of fear. Youth in
attendance that night spoke about how their inability to speak English language caused them to
feel fear in social settings, citing physical reactions such as shaking or sweating as indicators of
their fear. As they learned that these are common responses to nervousness, the youth were given
strategies for coping with these feelings and reactions, including holding onto an object such as a
handkerchief during conversations or taking deep breaths before speaking. In this way, the Voces
de Esperanza coordinators facilitated psychological coping skills through self-awareness talk and
common stress management strategies. During my four years with Voces, I observed lawyers,
community organizers, English teachers, dance instructors, mental health professionals, and
professors give seminars or simply advise youth in their specialty during a group gathering.
Finding opportunities to facilitate weak ties between unparented young people and those
outside of their community was often a point taken up by mentors. In fact, one of the mentors of a
work training program whom I met through a resource fair I co-organized during the summer of
2014 for recently arrived unaccompanied minors asked me to lead a summer English class for
101
unparented young people who did not attend English language school. I agreed to lead a bi-weekly,
two-hour long class for the duration of the summer. We met in the Koreatown district of Los
Angeles seven times across three months. Each week, between seven and eleven young people
would gather with questions on how to translate phrases such as, “Where is the fitting room?” and
“Where is the bus stop?” which they felt were essential to navigating Los Angeles. Not only was
a resource being brokered to unparented youth by setting up this class, but I also became a mentor
during classes as I explained to young people the difference between slang and formal English
sayings and when it is appropriate to say, “Hey, what’s up?” versus “Hello, how are you?” These
examples show that despite not providing material resources that directly translates into changed
work, living, or family conditions, they introduced youth to opportunities for community
development, self-management, and increased self-esteem. Further, the simple fact of having a
mentor who advocates for and invests in youth gives a sense of confidence, encouragement, and
companionship.
As my time in the field and familiarity with the daily lives of unparented immigrant youth
progressed, I witnessed the importance of church organizations in introducing youth to community
leaders and peers.
xlvii
Churches are central in the lives of unaccompanied youth whose parents in
the home country have little advice to offer but to encourage their children to attend school. Unable
to protect them, parents turn to their faith and their belief in the power of God to guide their
children. Mentors that youth met through religious organizations worked to guide youths’ spiritual
development, a critical resource in maintaining a sense of hope for the future. Religious mentors
were typically older migrants with a greater amount of time in Los Angeles community and the
church community, specifically. Unparented male youth identified male actors within the church
that mentored and guided them, and unparented female youth pointed to specific women who
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supported them. At the start of this study, a Guatemalan man in his early thirties named Tonio sat
with me at a coffee shop to talk about unparented immigrant youth in the church youth group he
coordinated for the past nine years. He explained that financially independent young people often
do not attend school or have the time or discipline to read books (I will discuss this more in the
next chapter), making church seminars and readings are the extent of unparented churchgoers’
education. Along with spiritual guidance, young people obtain human capital by participating in
leadership or vocational seminars. For example, each Sunday afternoon a group of about 15 to 20
young Maya men gather at Iglesia Sagrada for seminars on self-esteem, responsibility, pastoral
care, and other leadership related topics.
During one of the 3pm gatherings in early 2014, Ignacio, a 27-year-old dressed in pressed
slacks and dress shirt, gave a presentation on the definition of “liderazgo” (leadership). He flipped
through slides projected onto a white wall that read: “ser líder de uno mismo” (be one’s own
leader), “ser líder de mi familia” (be my family’s leader), “ser líder del grupo” (be the group’s
leader). Overseen by parish leaders, these seminars provide human capital through leadership
training, fosters social status among young people (Min 1992) and encourage participation in
community events and groups that increases solidarity and community commitment (Canizales
2015). Religious mentors motivate youth to attend mass, participate in youth groups and various
cultural and religious events that embed youth in a community that granted them a sense of space
and place in Los Angeles, but also to increase social participation and interaction with others
(Canizales 2018). I describe some limitations of the church organization social networks below.
Not only do mentors become guiding figures, but the group that youth become involved
through mentors becomes a family through everyday membership and participation. Sociologists
Ebaugh and Curry (2000) write that, “fictive kin often include immigrants in family social
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gatherings, such as special meals, celebrations, holidays, and evening and weekend socializing.
Especially for single male immigrants, who often have difficulty establishing social relationships
in their work settings because of both linguistic and cultural barriers, the social support provided
by fictive kin is very important” (204). The value of protected space and consistent companionship
became clear when I met Yesenia during the summer of 2016 at a youth group gathering at Iglesia
Sagrada. Yesenia migrated at the age of 16 and thought to return to her home country after just 15
days of living in Los Angeles because of depression induced by loneliness. She met an older
Mexican woman at work who directed Yesenia to Iglesia Sagrada. Once there, Yesenia
participated in various youth-based seminars and programs. Like many other youths I met while
observing Iglesia Sagrada community and youth groups, group membership offers a unique social
circle, akin to cohorts, where young people meet peers of their same age or shared interests. Youth
express developing feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood that counter their solitude. Finding
similarly situated peers allows youth to feel hopefulness and pride in their shared experiences.
Yesenia described how these relationships developed for her:
I couldn’t find a place where I felt good. I am grateful that they supported me, because
they really did support me a lot… It’s always about support. We can work like little ants.
They support each other and support each other. Not like crabs where one gets out and
then sticks out their leg, so the others don’t follow. We are all in this together. They tell
you, “you can do it.”

Yesenia, and others, talk about their peer groups as families that offer encouragement and
companionship, necessary to combat isolation, loneliness, and sadness caused by separation from
one’s family.
While the majority of youth with supportive mentors participate in organizations that offer
various forms of emotional support, others rely on organizations that also grant material support.
Mentors may also provide financial support to unparented immigrant youth through direction on
where to seek employment and managing money, how to sign-up for classes and alternative
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education programs such as the General Education (GED) program that advance employability. I
met unaccompanied immigrant youth in a job placement and school training program in East Los
Angeles in fall 2015 and began conducting interviews with young people who participated in
mentorship programs set up by a volunteer named Jeremy, a Mexican-American 32-year-old man.
Shortly after, I interviewed a young person who was left homeless and struggled to manage his
money after he lost the support of his older brother who became alcoholic. During our interview,
he explained the challenges of managing money and anticipating expenses.
As youth, it is difficult for us to save money. Then we get sick or something and it’s like,
where do we go? And then it’s worse because we don’t have parents here. Imagine? It’s
difficult. So, you have to know how to manage your money. Jeremy told me that it’s
important to learn to manage my money and to spend money on what is necessary first. He
also told me to save money. I used to spend everything I earned but now I am learning that
I can save some money.

Managing monthly and daily expenses overwhelm financially-independent youth with stress,
anxiety and worry, as they are often not only responsible for maintaining themselves in the host
society but supporting relatives left behind in the home country as well (Martinez 2016). Bogged
down by the responsibilities of navigating settlement alone and disillusionments of life in the US
can cause youth to feel helpless, angry, depressed, and go as far as to use drugs or experience
suicidal thoughts and attempts (Canizales 2015). Mentors can intervene by providing
encouragement and “animo,” as is described above, but also provide safety nets when resources
allow.
When experiencing dire financial need, mentors can go beyond offering information on
where to seek out economic opportunities and provide material support that allows youth to make
ends meet. For example, nine respondents were homeless prior to meeting a mentor who put them
in touch with an organization or an individual who could take them in. Many of the youth I spoke
to expressed not knowing that temporary housing was available, but that the connection made by
105
their mentor gave them confidence in pursuing this alternative to homelessness. Among one of the
mentors who provided housing was Gustavo. Alongside his wife, Gustavo is the director of
program I refer to as Casa Joven, which welcomes eight young men into a home to live free of
charge. In an interview with Gustavo he explained that he did not only want the young people to
have a place to live, but to know how to maintain a home. The eight men lived in a five-bedroom
home in exchange for full-time enrollment in school, upkeep of the home and garden, and an
agreement to abide by curfew and utility usage rules. Through his guidance, these young people
practiced skills such as cooking, gardening, and computer literacy. In this way, young people were
being instructed in maintaining a home, self-sufficiency and responsibility, while also being
secured with financial stability enough to pursue education.
As youth receive material support from their mentors, they can develop lasting bonds of
emotional support. Samantha came to Los Angeles with the promise that her step-father would
look after her at the age of 14. She met Gustavo, Casa Joven director, through her boyfriend at the
age of 16. At the time, Samantha’s boyfriend lived in the home that Gustavo ran for
unaccompanied homeless male youth. Samantha was the first and only girl to have been taken into
Casa Joven. She now lives on her own and said it had been a several months since the last time
she received any help from Gustavo and his wife, feeling as though they had done enough after
taking her in. However, she expressed confidence that no matter where she goes she could rely on
Gustavo and his wife for advice and encouragement as she continues to seek out education and
work opportunities on her own. While literature explores the potential of significant others, or
mentors, in shaping students’ lives by guiding them through academic and leadership
opportunities, the mentors in this study direct youth towards tangible resources like housing and
jobs, organizations, behaviors and practices that would help navigate financial, physical, and
106
spiritual life, and identity. As youth connect with brokers and their local community, they feel a
sense of emotional support.
Returning to Table 2.3, it is important to note the gender differences in the sources of
mentorship for unparented immigrant youth. Notably, more young men participated in the weekly
informal support group held on Friday evenings than women. Additionally, women with
supportive mentors were more likely than men with supportive mentors to have acquired their
mentor through church organizations. These patterns likely reflect gender ideologies and
occupational structures that confine women to private spaces, or religious spaces when in public
(Hagan 1994; Menjívar 2000). The overrepresentation of young men with mentors in job and
school training programs in this sample might reflect young males’ greater likelihood of reporting
experiences of drug and alcohol addiction and homelessness. In such extreme circumstances,
young girls might be able to turn to patchwork the support of relatives or engage in romantic
relationships that allow them to make ends meet (Abrego 2014).

III. Unparented without supportive relatives and mentors

The final social tie configuration examined here is that of unparented youth without
supportive relatives and mentors. Immigrant youth who do not establish networks of support have
settlement experiences saturated by disillusionment with their opportunities in the US and
loneliness. In total, I conducted eleven (11) interviews (15% of the total sample) with youth who
were bereft of networks of support. Due to the difficulties I encountered in recruiting respondents
who were bereft of networks of support and building rapport with organizationally disconnected
individuals, these focus groups allowed me to participate in conversations where youth probed
each other on the challenges they faced upon arriving to the US, their successes and failures, and
hopes for more recently arrived groups of unaccompanied child migrants in Los Angeles.
107
Unparented youth are left without supportive networks for several reasons. The most
common cause of social tie fragmentation occurs when the social ties unparented rely on stem
from impoverished households and communities that cannot take on the burden of supporting a
newcomer, as well as when gendered social expectations disrupt the flow of resources within a
social network. Some youth may have been left behind when their older sibling(s) decided to leave
Los Angeles to return to their home countries or to move to a different city in search of work.
xlviii

Additionally, four respondents in this subgroup of unparented youth lacked supportive networks
because they were the first in their family to migrate, meaning they did not have social networks
from which to draw material and emotional resources. In this way, each new interaction with
individuals and institutions are experienced as risks and lessons of trial and error about who is
trustworthy.
Confronting the obstacles of incorporation detailed above is especially difficult for youth
without networks of support. In particular, managing finances is the most commonly discussed
during interviews as presenting a shock upon arrival and a challenge during the settlement process.
This is especially the case for youth who have not grown up with the US dollar, such as
Guatemalan youth accustomed to the quetzal and Mexican youth accustomed to pesos, as well as
youth who come from agrarian communities where they did not pay monthly rent or other living
expenses. Just as the other youth in this study, unparented youth without networks of support must
find a place to live and a job that covers the cost of migration debt and daily living expenses. The
stakes of doing so are much higher for young people who do not have a cultural, social, or
institutional bridge—be it relative or mentor.
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In my interview with Julian, who is the eldest child and first in his family to migrate to the
US from Guatemala at the age of 16 after his father passed away, we discussed his “greatest
obstacles to adaptation,” a question I posed to all respondents in this study. He responded,
Julian: Well, I think the thing that was the most difficult for me to adjust to was having
money.

Stephanie: Really? Why is that?

Julian: Yes, because like I told you, I got sick and I couldn’t work. I didn’t have money. I
didn’t have a way to… I couldn’t pay my debt. We (migrants) always arrive with debt but
I was really delayed because I couldn’t work a lot. I would work two hours, half a day,
something like that. I would leave work to go to the hospital, hospital, hospital, with
doctors. Sometimes I would pay $400 only on doctors. I said, I cannot get adjusted to the
money here. I really thought I would always have something to eat here. Then one day, I
ate, and someone told me I needed to pay for the food I hate. “oh!” I didn’t have money. I
didn’t have money or clothes because I didn’t have family here. There are many people
that have family here and it is easier to manage money that way. They give you $20. I have
to get little bits of money here and there to pay rent. That is the most difficult for me.
Getting money together.

Julian needed to adjust to using currency in everyday life, which he described he was not
accustomed to since he came from a family and community of rural farmers. To make matters
worse, Julian became ill within his first weeks of settlement and did not have anyone to turn to for
help. Perhaps with the support of a relative or mentor he could have learned of natural remedies
(Menjívar 2002) or of the most affordable clinics in his neighborhood.
Two other young men experienced severe illness after migration because of the
contaminated water they were forced to drink while crossing the desert into the US.
xlix
One
accumulated $900 of debt at local clinics as he sought out a remedy for persistent vomiting and
migraines. Another became depressed because he was unable to leave his home to find a job
because of his illness. He also felt sad that he did not have his mother to look after for him. The
family provides material and emotional support that allow youth to pursue other forms of
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incorporation, when they do not receive financial support youth must navigate the disillusionment
of the settlement experience alone— often compounding with preexisting migration trauma.
Interviewees in this group were often reluctant to speculate how their settlement
experiences would have been different if they had supportive networks. I was hesitant to probe as
to not stir up sadness or anxiety related to family separation or uncertainty for their futures.
Framing respondents as the true experts in unaccompanied child migration, I asked that they reflect
on the 2014 surge of Central American children and families. During a conversation with
Guatemalan coworkers from the same factory in 2015 I asked that they detail what they thought
the unaccompanied youth who were making headlines during the summer of 2014 would need as
they settled in US communities. Talking amongst themselves as I jotted down notes they
explained,
I think that… Well, I don’t know how old these kids are that are coming right now, but I
think that one way to help them is to try to like, to try to help them decide what they want
to do from the moment they get here. What is it that they want to do? And then try to look
for financial means, maybe from organizations, because… for example, someone arrives
here, like in my case I got here and maybe I wanted to study or something… Well, not
really, but say I wanted to study, there would not have been anyone to “mantenerme”
(financially maintain me). There isn’t anyone. I mean, you have to work. You came here
to work. Here, if you don’t work you go straight to the street. So, that’s what you can do
with the youth that are coming today. I got here at 16, too.

If someone would have helped me, if someone would have financed my school or where
to live, I think I would at least be in college right now. Something like that. Right? But
because it wasn’t like that… There is a lack of resources over there (Guatemala) and over
here. So, you go little-by-little.

Rodolfo added that youth need the emotional support of advice and encouragement from a mentor
or guide to understand what “they really want to do” to pursue their goals in the US.
Understanding to say, okay, if you want to study, for example, one has to look into what
they really want to do. For example, these days I would like to be a teacher, to teach kids.
I really like that. But it’s someone’s job to ask a child, “what do you like to do?” then they
can get an understanding of what that job is like, they can learn about it.

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I mean, it’s not always work and work. We need to study too, we need to read, we need to
expand our minds, we need to socialize. You cannot become isolated. All of that is
necessary. Because, for example, if you only focus on one thing, we won’t be able to get
ahead. That’s when you get into the emotional conflicts of loneliness and discomfort with
yourself.

These comments reinforce the importance of obtaining material and emotional support to achieve
a sense of stability as they settle in the US. As youth point to these sources of support as necessary
for other similarly situated unparented young people arriving in a new land, they reflect on the
missing links in guiding their own trajectories.
It is important to note that young people who did not have a supportive relative or mentor
available to help them were not entirely without social ties. Social ties can be established with
individuals from work, roommates, and/or neighbors. Indeed, the interaction above occurred
between co-workers who were aware of the other’s unparented status. However, my point remains
that unparented young people require social ties with individuals who have access to resources that
are not immediately accessible to them, as well as people who assume a caretaking role.
l

The social ties with coworkers or cohabitants are less likely to be fruitful in providing
material and emotional support as these social ties are embedded within the same resource
impoverished or constrained conditions. This is perhaps best evinced by the two young men who
committed suicide in their apartments during the time of this research. Despite living with
individuals who worked in the same factories and had similar schedules, these young men spent
most of their time outside of work in their rooms, often drinking alcohol to drown their loneliness.
The death of 26-year-old Esteban was not discovered until two days after he hung himself from a
hook in his bedroom ceiling. When I arrived at the apartment later that day, his roommates
discussed that they were aware of his loneliness and desperation for his family but had little help
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to offer to soothe his suffering. They spoke with little remorse, elucidating the normalized realities
of this community.
Financial instability limits undocumented, unparented young people’s ability to enter
community organizations with which to engage in bridging social ties, expanding their exposure
to opportunities outside of the daily life they see and know, by keeping them in workplaces. When
I spoke to interviewees about their friends or who they would spend leisure time with, some replied
that it was better to be alone than to be involved in the activities that would deter their positive
settlement or achievement of their dreams. For example, one young woman explained that the
women she lived with when she arrived offered their friendship and invited the young woman to
activities, but they typically involved drinking and the company of older men. Martin, who was
26-years-old at the time of our interview, arrived in the US as a 14-year-old and was not so
fortunate as to sidestep these offers. As the first in his family to migrate, he did not have non-
parent relatives to support him. He began working and was unable to enroll in school or participate
in community groups. Feeling lonely, Martin spent evenings after work with his three older male
roommates. Martin spoke about how his dreams were lost for “very complicated” reasons.
Martin: What happened to me was very complicated because when I got here, um… I got
lost in addiction. I got lost in an addiction with the people I lived with. They are always
drinking. There are people that are really good at offering things. This person would tell
me “just drink one [beer] and nothing will happen. It’s okay.” I would start drinking with
them on Saturday. The first weeks I would drink with them on Saturdays. But little by little
I started to drink more. I have only come out of that in the past year.

Stephanie: Why did you accept their offer? Were they your friends? Do you think they
were helping you?

Martin: I was very timid. Timidity is very strong. It’s like a trauma. It’s really hard [to
deal with]. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Now I think I can manage it better, but I could not
handle it before, so I drank. I would drink 2 beers, 3 beers, and then I could talk to people.
Then I started taking drugs to pass the time. That’s how I fell…

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As Martin dealt with the traumas of unparented settlement, he established ties with
similarly situated individuals who were unable to provide supportive material and emotional
resources. Remaining embedded in homogenous social networks wherein individuals lived in his
same neighborhood, worked in the same occupation and struggled with similar traumas of
migration and settlement, disadvantaged Martin. In his moment of addiction, Martin was unable
to receive his younger brother who arrived three years later. Much like the young people who
obtained a mentor through their community involvement and were motivated to support others,
the young people who did not receive support, including Martin, expressed concern for those
unaccompanied youths who were making headlines during the time of this research. In fact, two
individuals in this subgroup mentioned during our interviews that they were now helping a younger
cousin and a younger brother, respectively, in getting settled in the US Both of these young men
were taking on the recently arrived persons’ migration debt and discussed the importance of getting
the young person enrolled in school, speaking the English language, and plugged into community
organizations where they could meet peers and role models.
DETERMINANTS OF SUPPORT

The social tie configurations proposed here are not mutually exclusive, nor are they secure
or permanent. A young person with relatives in the US can be left without networks of support if
a family member does not take them in. A young person with ties to community organizations can
be left without support if their ties to a mentor or peers go awry. Sociologist Cecilia Menjívar’s
(2000) seminal study of Salvadoran immigrant networks in the San Francisco Bay Area shows that
conflicts can emerge, and networks severed when newcomers overburden scarcely resources co-
ethnic members with demands for support. My research (Canizales 2018) finds that the newcomers
can too be overburdened by the needs of the resource-impoverished communities they enter into
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and they can isolate themselves in turn. In this section I detail the determinants of support from
relatives and mentors.
Eleven (11) unparented youth in this study came to the US expecting to encounter
supportive relatives but found that resources and hospitality fell short. Corroborating previous
research, relatives were unsupportive in cases where they lacked material resources, such as space
in their homes or income, to welcome a young person. Barrie Thorne and her colleagues (2001)
write, “Because Central American and Mexican conceptions of family include extended kin, taking
care of ‘other mothers’ children’ may not be seen as a problem, especially if the parents send
remittances. However, when money is short, extra children may be experienced as a burden” (14).
This was the case for Beatriz, a 22-year-old Salvadoran who arrived in the US at 16, who migrated
with the promise that her older sister would pay her migration cost of $6500 as well as her school
expenses in exchange for Beatriz babysitting her children (Beatriz’s niece and nephew) on
weeknights and Saturdays. However, when her sister lost her job as a garment worker, Beatriz was
required to pay her entire migration debt and begin working. Beatriz took up a job as a domestic
worker, which she describes as violent and exploitative and pays her sister for rent, the family
phone bill, and her own personal expenses. A scenario quite different from what Beatriz imagined
when she left her hometown.
In some resource-impoverished households, relatives expressed willingness to financially
support the young person under specific conditions. In two separate interviews, two male
respondents detailed that uncles offered financial support in exchange for their enrollment in
school. For example, Mauro, a Salvadoran 25-year-old who arrived in Los Angeles at 16, expected
to receive the support of his aunt and uncle when he arrived. While they were indeed willing to
support Mauro, it was not in the way he imagined. Mauro migrated to the US to work to remit
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money to his mother; however, Mauro’s uncle and aunt made clear that they would only support
him financially if he attended high school. Unwilling to break the promise he made to his mom,
Mauro began working in a bakery to make ends meet. Mauro was then financially independent.
The mismatch between the migrant youths’ and adult hosts’ aspirations created the conditions in
which the host was viewed as unsupportive by the migrant and left youth fending for themselves.
In some cases, the unparented migrant received support in funding the migration journey
(through a loan) from an older sibling in the US but found that it would be the extent of the support
they would receive. After the unparented youth’s arrival in the US, older siblings can return to
their home countries after meeting their migration goal of saving money or building a home,
becoming frustrated with their inability to achieve occupational mobility or an education, or to be
reunited with children they left behind.
li
Ester arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 16, where she
intended to live with her older sister. However, soon after Ester’s arrival her sister returned to
Mexico to be with her son. Ester lived with various acquaintances over the next two years. Now
30-years-old, Ester has finally settled with her partner in the City of Long Beach, south of Los
Angeles and describes her state of confusion during this time. This experience is very similar to
Jaime, whose older brother said he would receive him in the US but returned to Guatemala just
four months after Jaime’s arrival in Los Angeles. Jaime was unexpectedly made responsible for
paying $8000 dollars of migration debt, as well as finding employment and a new place to live.
More frequently, however, relatives become unsupportive when social tensions run high
within a household. Gender and sexual relationships were central to conflict among family
members that resulted in a relative’s inhospitality.
lii
A young female migrant, Laura, who expected
support from a male uncle or brother in the US experienced difficult settlement when her uncle’s
female partner disagreed with the arrangement. Laura explains,
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Yes, I arrived directly (in Los Angeles) with my tíos (aunt and uncle) because I have a
brother here who said I would live with him, but my uncle didn’t agree because he (Laura’s
brother) lived with only men. That why I didn’t… they didn’t want that. So, what I did was
I decided to stay with my tíos, they are a couple… but many things happened because I did
not get along well with my uncle’s wife. I suffered with her, but I thank God because he
lifted me up.

Laura described how her uncle’s wife abused her by hitting her and denying her food. Laura’s
experience contrasts sharply with Glenda, who was not only financially supported by her uncle but
socially and emotionally supported by her uncle’s wife who enthusiastically commented during
our interview. The household dynamics the young women encountered demonstrate that youth
cannot guarantee a warm welcome from female relatives, despite the cultural expectation that
women are the nurturers and caretakers. In Laura’s case, her uncle’s patriarchal advantage as
breadwinner was undermined by the physical and emotional hostility she encountered by his wife.
Lucy migrated to Los Angeles in 2004 at the age of 15 and anticipated being received by
her male cousin. One morning Lucy’s cousin told her they were heading to Pico Union, Los
Angeles to visit Lucy’s older sister. Lucy was unexpectedly left with her sister, which launched a
series of tensions among them.
Lucy: When I came over here my mom told not to come because “your sisters are married,
and you are a woman and I don’t want any problems.” She told me that. I told her, “no, I
am going to my cousin’s” So when they left me at my sister’s, I called my mom to tell her
that I was with my sister and my mom told me, “see? I told you not to go with your sister.
She is married.”

Stephanie: What is the problem with her being married?

Lucy: Because she has a husband and if you are a woman the man might take advantage
of you. And it is true because I lived with my sister and my brother-in-law bugged me. He
would greet me and touch my shoulder. We had problems because I would tell him, “when
you want to greet me or when you want to say, ‘good afternoon’ it is not necessary for your
to grab me or to touch me.

Stephanie: did your sister notice his behavior?

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Lucy: I would tell my sister that I didn’t like that he would touch me. My sister would tell
me not to get upset and maybe she felt jealous, but she never said anything. I would tell
him not to touch me, but he stilled bugged me. I think it bothered my brother-in-law that I
would tell him to stop…

The conflict between Lucy and her brother-in-law continued to unfold after he kicked a soccer ball
into Lucy’s stomach, which she felt was an act of retaliation for rejecting his advances. Lucy
stopped acknowledging her brother-in-law, causing him to become angrier toward her. Lucy
explains that her sister eventually became suspicious that the tension arose because something
happened between her husband and Lucy. When Lucy’s sister confronted her husband, he blamed
Lucy for being suggestive toward him, causing Lucy’s sister to turn against her.
liii

Finally, male migrant youth who reported unmet expectations of support by a relative in
the US described how cultural gender norms impeded their ability to call on their networks. If a
female relative was married, she was said to be living with in her husband’s household. Within
this frame of a woman’s dependence on male head of households, youths felt they could not request
the support of a third party. Rolando, now 24, arrived in Los Angeles from Guatemala at the age
of 15 and provides another example of how gendered social expectations can determine
possibilities of support. He said,
I thought I would live with my sister, but my sister got married so she went (to live with)
that person. My brother was married too but he brought his wife to live with us. Four of us
live together. That’s how the family is in Guatemala, too. When a woman gets married they
go live with the man. It’s the same here, too. When a man gets married the woman lives in
his home. That’s how the family is.

Others who could not count on the support of their sister or aunt adopted this same cultural logic.
For example, Theo thought he would live with his sister and attend high school in the US but was
not received by her because “she lived with her husband and her son. And another person lived
there so I could not stay with her.” He went to live with his older cousin who could not offer
material or emotional support. Theo began working in Los Angeles and explained that,
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During those days I cried a lot because, I’m telling you, my dream was to keep studying. I
told my cousin, “I want to keep studying.” I told him that and he told me, “Look.” He said,
“I would lie to support you, but I have my own family here. You have [responsibilities],
too. The money you borrowed you have to pay back with interest. You have a family, too.
Your dad isn’t working anymore, and you have to help your brothers. They want to study,
too.”

Among unparented immigrant youth, married female relatives are perceived as unavailable to grant
financial support for young male migrants. This corroborates the work of Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez
(2015) who finds patriarchal privileges for tíos (uncles), while the absence of matriarchal privilege
disadvantages their kin of origin as tías (aunts) are unable to leverage resources for support. When
a resource-limited male relative with his own family is receiving a young male migrant, the latter
is expected to be financially independent. Santos evinced this when he explained that although his
brother helped him find a job in the US, he did not receive direct material support from his brother.
When I asked if his brother helped him pay his debt after finding a job, he said, “Honestly, no. I
paid it myself because he already had this family here.” Unparented youth who do not obtain the
support of non-parent relatives can join the ranks of those who enter the US without supportive
family networks and learn to navigate community organizations and acquire a broker or mentor or
continue their settlement without networks of support.
As detailed above, youth without support of a relative can turn to organizations. During
interviews and throughout my ethnographic observations youth identified individuals and groups
that they felt significantly guided their access to resources and understanding of US institutions
and customs. Observations and informal and formal interviews with mentors drew out a common
characteristic when they discussed why they remained involved in youths’ lives as mentors:
immigrant background as either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants. Immigrant
integration scholar Jody Agius Vallejo (2012: 86) finds that “socially mobile Mexican Americans
are more likely to give back to kin and coethnics” and frame their giving back practices “within
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an ‘immigrant narrative’ of parental struggle and sacrifice” (See also Smith 2006; Flores 2017). I
find that mentors observed the struggle and sacrifice that young people make to arrive in the US
and to find stability in their daily lives; thus, take the responsibility of giving back material and
financial means of support.
Wilfredo is an immigrant from El Salvador who arrived in the US at a young age as an
undocumented immigrant. Although he is now a legal permanent resident, he lives with
undocumented family members and uses his legal protection to seek out and disseminate resources
to his community. Likewise, Jeremy, a job and education counselor for the East Los Angeles youth
center, is the son of two Mexican immigrants who grew up in East Los Angeles, a Mexican
immigrant enclave in Los Angeles County. Though his daily work is geared toward helping
unparented young-adult males, I frequently ran into Jeremy during immigrant know your rights
forums and community events geared toward providing education, health, and legal services to
recently arrived unaccompanied minors and their families. Time and time again I encountered
people of all ages who were compelled to donate time and resources in response to the surge of
summer 2014. Along these lines, Agius Vallejo (2012) explains how unlike those who grew up in
middle-class privilege that “are more likely to adopt an ethos meritocratic individualism… those
who grew up poor and witnessed their foreign-born parents work hard to get ahead strongly adopt
the immigrant narrative, which pushes them to give back to their parents and their extended kin
who continue to struggle” (93). In his longitudinal ethnographic work with transnational immigrant
families, Sociologist Robert Smith (2006) also refers to the interaction between home and host
society ideologies and practices as the ‘immigrant bargain’. In the research at hand, those with a
shared immigrant background who have access to material and emotional resources that might
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serve unaccompanied young people evoke a sense of responsibility for the immigrant youth
settling in their communities and work to disseminate these resources.
Giving back was not only practiced by adult figures but taken up by young people as their
tenure in the US increases. Acquiring a mentor instills in young people the desire to mentor others
(Canizales 2015). Specifically, during my time at Voces de Esperanza I observed how participants
were advised to think about how self-help can lead to helping others. In one instance, Wilfredo
said: ‘Each one of you can get better ... If you want to do what’s better for other people, see how
to better yourself. Do that for yourself, and you will help others. Fight for that internal reconquista
(reconquest).’ Individualism does not necessarily mean ‘do your own thing’, but it is associated
with personal empowerment, an ‘internal reconquista’, to pursue unique interests and skills that
might ultimately better one’s community. This type of talk became more evident over time, not
only in the detail in which youth talked about helping others, but also in the number of people who
adopted this mentality as they thought about helping others.
Andrés, a 20-year-old who had been living in the US for five years at the time of our
meeting, explained how after having learned to prioritize himself, he began to realize that others
around him required leadership and support. As I sat with Andrés in a Pico-Union community
garden, he vehemently expressed:
I have to prepare myself more to help someone. Right now, I don’t have the preparation to
be able to help someone. I need to learn more, I have to work harder at school. So that one
day I can help someone in my community. Where I come from there are many people in
my community that way. So, I need to put more effort into my dreams and my goals and
more than anything prepare myself more, to be okay with myself to be able to help
someone.

Andrés adopted this approach to self-responsibility as a means to contribute to his
community through his exposure to his mentor and the support group context that teaches
individualism in a collective and collaborative setting (see also Canizales 2015). Other youth also
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put the ideologies their mentors introduced to them into practice in the context they were embedded
in.
Francisco, whose was introduced in the introductory excerpt, discusses how his martial arts
instructor became his mentor and helped him understand that the decisions he made today affect
his future. Rather than becoming involved in drugs or alcohol like many of his peers were,
Francisco began looking for “healthy” ways to stay busy and have fun while also building
community.
I am in a group with my brother-in-law. We are in a group that maybe isn’t like being in
church, but we have a group of friends that gets together on weekends and we go to the
mountains, go running, or go to the beach… We meet with other youth and support each
other. We learn that there are ways to have fun and invest our time in something positive
that doesn't bring future consequences. We started the group a year and a half ago. There
were five people the first time. Four months later there were fifteen people. Now we have
thirty people.

Francisco is now a mentor for his peers, mediating information about jobs, school, and community
groups and self-help practices that promote the incorporation of young people in their Los Angeles
communities by increasing participation in their local communities and interactions with others.
In the absence of mentors, they become mentors and develop fictive kin relationships with
similarly situated peers.
Not all non-kin ties are transformed into fictive kin relationship and not every individual
is likely to develop kinship ties. Networks of support among resource-holding adults and
unparented youth can become fragmented when tangible resources are scarce and the organization
within which the networks are embedded are not suited to meet the needs of unparented young
people. This was evinced in my observations at two Catholic churches in Pico Union, Los Angeles
between 2013 and 2015 (Canizales 2018). The church is the primary source of support for
undocumented, unaccompanied Guatemalan Maya youth workers in Los Angeles upon arrival and
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initial settlement because it provides refuge, solace, and solidarity with coethnics, granting them
organizational membership and social support. Yet over time, there is a mismatch between the
needs of unaccompanied youth in areas of finances, education, and sexuality and romantic
relationships, and the structure and resources of the churches they participate in (Canizales 2018).
This mismatch causes precarious migrant youth to experience financial and socioemotional
(emotional and mental health) retraso, or setback, that hinders incorporation (Canizales ibid.).
One of the practices intended to guide young Catholics in their faith and development is
the practice of receiving a padrino or madrina (godparents), a mentor or guide who assumes
spiritual and financial obligations, upon first communion. First communion is an anticipated rite
of passage for these disenfranchised young people as it connects them to a church body and
promises a familial relationship. In cases where youth do not have parents or guardians in the host
society, such as those in this study, padrinos might find their responsibilities are much greater than
if the child’s parent also lived in the host society. In church, it is taboo to discuss sex and sexuality.
Oftentimes, padrinos do not have the resources necessary to assist unaccompanied youth who
struggle with homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and emotional and mental health
instability. Eighteen-year-old Mauricio experienced this first hand when after three years of living
in the US, he turned to his padrino when his garment factory wages did not cover his rent for the
month. Unable to help him, his padrino turned him away and Mauricio spent ten days living on
Pico Union streets before entering an adult homeless shelter. In this case, the mechanism intended
to provide churchgoing youth with support (i.e. copadrazgo) was ineffective when youths’ primary
financial needs were not met and the community these mechanisms are embedded in also
experienced resource impoverishment.
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There are various financial, educational, and emotional consequences of interrupted
expectations of support that compound the traumas of migration and family separation. Theo
described that his transition into living with his cousin and working in the US was disappointing
as it did not align with the goals he set out upon migration. He explained,
When I was in Guatemala I did not think that I was coming here to suffer. I came here to
find something better but it’s very different because you need to pay your migration debt,
you need to pay your rent, you need to maintain yourself because here no… no one helps
to pay your rent, your food, anything. It’s very difficult.

Like Rolando and Theo, unsupported, unparented young people report feelings of disillusionment
with their familial dynamics and their lives in the US. Mauro, introduced earlier, explained that
without the support of his relatives, life in Los Angeles looks much like the life he left behind in
El Salvador. When I asked what Mauro expected to encounter here, he said:
Nothing like... Maybe because of the fact that people that go back, they make USA seem
like I don’t know… But to be honest, here you have to work, you have to do everything
for yourself. Basically, you’re on your own, right? It wasn’t like I’d imagined. I thought it
would be easier, but it’s not. It’s still the same. Just a lot safer.

Much like the respondents in Mahler’s (1995) study of Salvadorans in the suburbs of Maine, Mauro
and others in this study express disillusionment, disappointment, and hurt because of the lost hope
in familial support. Disillusionment can contribute to the fragmentation of family ties, as was the
case with Lucy. Lucy’s mother encourages her to reach out to her sisters, but Lucy remains
resistant. She says, “the day that my sisters need me… I am the youngest one and they are the
oldest. The day that they need me I am not going to help them. I am going to turn my back on
them. I am not going to lend them a hand just like they did to me.” Lucy’s expressions of rejection
of her family contradicts the idea of Latinos as inherently familistic.

123
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Migration theories highlight the ways in which migrant networks inform where someone
settles in the host society (Hagan 1994; Massey, Durand, Malone 2003), as well as how they fare
once there.
liv
Immigrant youth are assumed to have the support of kin, typically parents, in their
migration and settlement. How children fare in their transition into adulthood reflects their position
in the context of reception and the resources they receive from their parents and co-ethnic
community in navigating any disadvantages they encounter there.
This chapter introduces a tripartite typology for the familial context of reception
unparented youth encounter in the US: supportive non-parent relatives, supportive mentors who
can become and/or introduce youth to fictive kin, and youth who are bereft of support networks.
By exploring three groups of young migrants’ challenges and successes as they adapt to life in the
US without their parents, this chapter highlights the importance of social relationships and
networks, showing that youth transitions are linked to young people’s ongoing and new
relationships with mentors. Relationships can be key in shaping the nature of youth transitions as
they may encourage young people to take advantage of opportunities (Huijsmans 2012; Tisdall
and Punch 2012) and think of themselves as potential mentors for others (Canizales 2015).
Youth face various challenges to incorporation, including migration trauma and debt,
family and community separation, cultural dislocation, and labor market and educational precarity
in the US. How youth navigate the challenges associated with migration to and settlement in the
US is guided by their social tie configurations, which provide access to material and emotional
resources. Undocumented and unparented youths’ social tie configurations explored here include:
having supportive relatives, meeting supportive mentors, and being bereft of support. Youth with
long-settled supportive relatives are more likely to receive financial and emotional support and in
124
variations. Youth who are initially without support can come to find community organizations that
give access to mentors. Mentors are likely to offer emotional support; yet the community
organization can provide temporary resources such as job training, housing, or financial
management skills. Unparented youth without networks of support identified both material and
emotional support as necessary for the positive settlement of recently arrived unaccompanied child
migrants.
By hinging the incorporation experiences of immigrant youth on parents, and viewing
extended family and community as supplementary, research ignores the alternative avenues of
support that youth encounter upon settling in the US Further, the primary focus on socioeconomic
background and educational, financial, and cultural resources among adult figures, has limited our
understanding of the emotional and psychological impacts that tight-knit networks provide
newcomers. While material support garners youth financial resources (i.e. rent and food),
behaviors and practices, such as prayer or self-help talk, emotional support addresses the emotional
and psychological needs that accompany separation from family and unparented entry into a new
society and the organizations within it. Emotional and mental health stability also shape youths’
institutional participation and pathways of incorporation.
Finally, researchers have considered the ways social networks among adult migrants
become fragmented, and the economic and social consequences of these processes (Menjívar 2000;
Dreby 2015; Mahler 1995). Little research has examined the influence of resource impoverishment
and gendered social expectations on the social ties adults develop with youth and the extent to
which actors who are presumed to provide support, such as older siblings, aunts, and uncles, can
meet these expectations. Supportive non-parent relatives and mentors could provide unparented
youth with resources when their own socioeconomic and cultural conditions permitted. Those who
125
were unable to offer a hand, were often apologetic, wanting first to facilitate youths’ settlement in
Los Angeles. Unparented youth without networks of support identified both material and
emotional support as necessary for the positive settlement of recently arrived unaccompanied child
migrants. In the next chapter I draw on the typology presented here to examine unparented
immigrant youths’ patterns of participation into core social structures such as the labor market,
school and local community.

126
CHAPTER 4

Orientation and adaptation
Youths’ everyday participation in work, school, and community life

Lack of economic opportunity, violence and insecurity, and the desire for adventure
prompts youths’ migration to the US where, without a parent, they encounter and navigate various
social tie configurations. Los Angeles promises opportunities for work and education that youth
view as necessary to move themselves or their families—who remain in their country of origin—
out of the conditions they flee. Thus, much of their initial settlement experience revolves around
work, their transnational relationships, and economic obligations. Navigating settlement requires
what youth describe as the need to “orientar (orient)” themselves to the US “sistema,” or way of
life in the US, to get by. One respondent explained, “El sistema que nosotros tenemos allá es un
poco diferente al de aquí. Uno tiene que adaptarse (The system that we have there is a bit different
from the one here. One has to adapt.” These terms, employed by respondents throughout my
fieldwork, show how immigrant youth experience incorporation as a process.
I draw on the term “orientation” to refer to how youth come to learn about the US sistema
that consists of work and employment, housing (rent and employment), enrollment in school,
public transportation, and other institutions and responsibilities they take on as unparented youth
in the US. Difficulties with “orientación” can cause youth to feel overwhelmed with responsibility,
isolated, and to become involved in drugs and alcohol, homelessness, and report feelings of
anxiety, depression, and uncertainty about the future. “Adaptación” often came up in interviews
as youth described how their desires to return home changed over time. “Me voy adaptando (I am
adapting)” or “Ya me adapte (I have adapted)” were commonly used refrains to describe youths’
feelings of stability in navigating everyday life in the US, including work and school opportunities
127
and schedules, family and community relationships, customs such as holidays and festivals, way
of dress and consumption patterns, and aspirations for the future. Youth become oriented and
adapted to various institutions as their time in the US increases. Continuous orientación and
adaptación to local institutions, I argue, contribute to youths’ embeddedness in the host society.
This chapter considers how undocumented and unparented youth participate in three
spheres of interaction between immigrants and the host society—work, school (both traditional
high schools and adult English language schools), and the local community. Immigrant
assimilation theory outlines how immigrants fare within institutions and is guided by the
assumption that youth are students. Traditional theorists might attribute youths’ transition from
orientation and adaptation to various institutions to a process of acculturation that is inevitable as
time in the US increases.
lv
However, I examine how youths’ social tie configurations guide their
entry into and patterns of participation in work, school, and community life, offering a greater
understanding how the institutions that youth become embedded in shape their incorporation
experiences and feelings of belonging.
This work shows that not all youth participate in the same institutions and have access to
the same resources for incorporation. How they interact with these institutions in the host society
is guided by their initial motivations for migration and can take new forms as youth encounter
social tie configurations that enable access to capital that mediates the tensions between day-to-
day survival and prospects for incorporation. Hence, increased institutional embeddedness over
time paves incorporation pathways.
lvi
As such, youth whose networks expand and whose
institutional participation increases can experience greater incorporation and feelings of belonging
in their local context. Meanwhile, those who remain outside of the core institutions of work,
school, and community life are not locally incorporated, but remain transnationally oriented.
128
Existing research that positions youth migrants within a family unit assume their immediate
entry into school as parents negotiate the workplace (Gonzales and Gleeson 2012; Suarez-Orozco,
Suarez-Orozco, Todorova 2008). Studies examine how immigrant youth then move through
education and from education into employment. A recent focus on undocumented immigrant youth
draws attention to the ways illegality can block educational achievement or deter pathways into
higher education (Enriquez 2016; Gonzales 2015). Employment and financial independence are
typically confronted after youth age out of secondary education. When immigrant children and
adolescents work, it is conceptualized as contributing to overall family income or for personal
spending money. Strategies such as translating between business-owning parents and customers
(Orellana 2009; Park 2005), between parents and schoolteachers, doctors, and other figures (Katz
2014; Kwon 2015), or between immigrant families and their potential customers through social
media (Estrada 2013) and caring for young siblings (Valenzuela 1999) are employed to pool
resources and maximize income. The frames of immigrant youth as students or, when workers, as
supplementary to adults’ efforts limits our knowledge of unauthorized youths’ social world and
the potential obstacles they face in becoming incorporated into the social institutions of work,
school, and civil society.
Undocumented and unparented youth are not guaranteed financial support or entry into
schools. Because they leave their homes at young ages, unaccompanied minors migrate with
incomplete educational trajectories and oftentimes with the intentions of working. Table 4.1 below
shows the employment and education status of respondents at the time of our interview. In total,
68 respondents (91%) were full-time workers, the majority in the garment industry, restaurants
and janitorial and domestic work.
lvii
The “other” category includes those who work as car washers,
129
in construction and the flower district, as warehouse packers, and other service-sector jobs.
8
These
occupations are characterized by long hours and low wages. Many youths are denied meal and
restroom breaks, overtime hours, and come to expect wage theft (Canizales 2015). Work
conditions are so grueling in these occupations that youth describe having migraines, back spasms,
the feeling of ants down their spine, and ulcers due to stress and anxiety while at work (Canizales
2014).
Twenty-two of the 68 respondents who are full-time workers, or 32%, attend adult English-
language schools. Their days can start at 6am on a garment-factory floor sewing for fast-fashion
companies like Forever 21, Zara, H&M and Old Navy, and end at 9:45pm when classes let out.
While the majority of respondents are not received by family, 5 respondents had full support of
their relatives and were full-time students. Because of their complete embeddedness the traditional
assimilatory institution of school, they evince a more traditional Dreamer pathway of orientation,
adaptation, and incorporation. Finally, two respondents were unemployed and out of school at the
time of our interviews.

Table 4.1 Employment and school enrollment status (at time of interview), n=75

Employment and school enrollment status Number Percentage
Full-time workers 68 91%
Garment industry 30 44%
Restaurant 8 12%
Domestic and janitorial work 7 10%
Other 23 34%

Adult English-language school enrollment 22 32%
Community-college enrollment 2 3%

8
Occupations are distributed as follows: 30 garment workers (factories), 8 restaurant workers, 5 domestic
workers, 2 janitors, 1 auto mechanic, 2 car washers, 1 community health advocate, 1 community
organization intern, 2 construction workers, 1 day laborer, 2 disc jockeys, 2 florists, 1 fruit packer, 1 hair
dresser, 1 homemaker, 4 retail and sales clerks, 2 warehouse packers, 2 seamstresses (boutique), 2
unemployed, 5 students
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Full-time students 5 6%
Unemployed 2 2%
Total 75 100%

In what follows, I detail how unparented immigrant youth start their incorporation as migrant
laborers, as their assumed financial independence in the US urges their entry into the workforce.
Whether and to what extent youth remain workers is guided by their social tie configurations that
can usher youth into various work opportunities, schools, and community spaces.
I. Unparented youth in the Los Angeles labor force

The global economic restructuring detailed in chapter 1 was mimicked in Los Angeles, where
the growth and transformation of the local economy transformed the structure of employment by
eliminating mid-level manufacturing jobs that provided immigrants with traditional mobility
ladders.
lviii
The Los Angeles economy shifted from industrial manufacturing in the 1970s, to high-
tech manufacturing and services in the 1990s. As the City grew, the need for low-wage workers in
construction, janitors, waiters, busboys, and hotel workers increased. Researchers show that skill
level and training, social networks, the structure of the labor market, and discrimination of Latinos
can steer them toward occupational niches. Newcomer Central Americans and Mexicans continue
to concentrate in low-wage jobs in service and manufacturing.
Undocumented, unparented youths’ work opportunities are limited by their legal status and
their status as minors (Canizales n.d.). Other disadvantages include their lower levels of education
and lack of English-language fluency. Guatemalan Maya youth who speak one of twenty-one
indigenous Maya languages are linguistically disadvantaged as they must often learn Spanish is a
priority to everyday survival in their host society. Low-skill, low-wage occupations draw in a large
number of new immigrants as they do not draw in native-born workers. Manufacturing and service
occupations often do not require English-language proficiency and have lax legal documentation
131
enforcement. In the segmented labor market, “employers tend to prefer groups that they feel are
best suited to subordination” to fill secondary jobs (Waldinger and Lichter 2003), making
undocumented and unparented youth ideal for these jobs. Despite their low wages and work
conditions in the US labor market, youths’ employment status remains an improvement over the
status of their home countries.
Unparented migrants living in Los Angeles describe that, in their home countries, many begin
working various jobs as early as three-years-old. These jobs range from shoe-shining and
manufacturing to agricultural work to maintain themselves or supplement their parents’ meager
income. Many also assume garment work in factories or, more commonly, in their homes, where
children and their parents sew denim pants, embroider shirts, or attach sleeves and buttons onto a
blouse or other products intended for the US markets. The stories of Rolando and Mateo
demonstrate how individual and family need can interfere with children’s entry into or completion
of educational trajectories in their home countries.

Rolando: I went to school before, but because of money, because there is not money, I
could not keep going to school. No se puede continuar ya. You cannot continue anymore.
I didn’t go to school. I helped my dad. I was 16-years-old when I left Guatemala. I came
here. I told my dad, my mom, my sisters and my brothers. And I came here.

Mateo: I worked in a shoe factory [in El Salvador]. I wanted to keep studying but I am an
orphan. We are six orphan brothers. My grandmother would take care of us. I wanted to
keep studying but my grandmother couldn’t afford the school expenses. So, I started to
work. I studied half of the day. Half of the day at work, half of the day studying. But I
started to like work more because I was able to have my own things. So, money won over
my education.

Youths arrive in the US expecting to work to support themselves and, if ties remain, to also support
their families abroad. Some may enter occupations such as manufacturing, construction, janitorial,
in restaurants and hospitality, service occupations such as car washing and landscaping, and
132
women engage in domestic work (child sitting and housekeeping).
lix
Youths’ entry into work is
guided by their social tie configurations, which can delay entry into the workforce or require it.
Youth with supportive relatives shared the experience of being directed toward attending
school, even when they did not migrate to pursue an education. You might recall the story of
Glenda, who was unexpectedly taken in by her uncle and his wife, Marta, who instructed Glenda
that “You have to study. In my house, you will not lack a roof or food.” Glenda attended a
traditional high school at the age of 17, starting in the 10
th
grade. Glenda explained that after
school, Marta would take her around the neighborhood, showing Glenda how to navigate the local
bus routes so she might independently get around Los Angeles. At the time of our interview,
Glenda had not yet worked in the US, but spoke of her aspirations of attending university and
becoming a chemist in the future.
With the full support of his sisters, Armando shares a similar experience as his sisters lived
and worked as domestic workers to support their family in Guatemala. As the oldest male in his
family, Armando left Guatemala to supplement their remittances. He recalls,
Pues yo tenía la mentalidad siempre de venir a trabajar, porque la pobreza allá es
demasiado (Well I had the mentality to come here to work because the poverty over there
is overwhelming). I wanted to come here to help my sister because she was the one that
was supporting us. So, the truth is that I didn’t have the intention of coming here to study,
only to work.

Although Armando’s intentions were to work, as the previous chapter detailed, once in Los
Angeles, his sisters stepped in to help him pay his migration debt and delay his entry into the labor
market. He lived with one sister free of charge while the other committed to paying his daily
personal and school expenses. With the support of his sisters, Armando attended high school and
eventually took up a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant. As he acquired English-language skills at
school and work, Armando moved to the position of line cook, then busboy, and eventually to
133
server. At the time of our interview he detailed his plan to become a host, which required little
physical labor and promised more consistent hours.
The financial support of long-settled relatives enabled Glenda, Armando, and others to
attend a formal high school and delay entrance into the labor market with the advantage of English
language skills, which I will explore in greater depth below. Amador benefited from this as he was
oriented toward the educational system in the US and gained English-language fluency. He was
then oriented toward an occupation where he could apply his cultural capital and work toward
occupational mobility. In this way, youth with financially supportive relatives begin an
incorporation pathway that more closely resembles the trajectory of Dreamers (Gonzales 2015).
More often youth described a case similar to Isabela, who I introduced earlier as being
received by her older brother who told her, “I want you to keep studying, to graduate and to have
a career. I would like to help you, but I don’t have the means.” Youth whose relatives could not
secure financial support but who provided advice and encouragement sought to facilitate youth’s
entry into education by easing their entry into the labor market. Older siblings, aunts, uncles, and
grandparents introduce young people to individuals who could provide them with jobs or take them
into their own workplace to work alongside them. This increased youths’ chances of being hired
and bolstered their reputation in the workplace. Non-parent relatives offered assistance in finding
employment in lieu of financial support. For example, Adler anticipated being received by his
older sister who was unable to take him in. He, instead, lived with his cousin who encouraged
Adler to attend school but warned that he could not be the one to support him financially. I asked
Adler, who wished to attend school in the US, if he was able to pursue this path upon arrival. He
responded the following,

134
No, when I arrived my sister welcomed me, but she lived with her husband and their son.
Another person lived with them and I couldn’t stay with her. My cousin helped me. He
lives in Canoga Park and he told me that if I wanted to live with him he would help me
find a job there. Then he told me, “if you want to go with your sister when you are familiar
with [Los Angeles], you can go with her” so I went to live with my cousin. He works in
restaurants and after like three days (of being in Los Angeles) he took me to his work and
I started working there.

Adler’s cousin offered a place to live and help in finding employment. Despite not being
able to immediately attend school, Adler felt supported by his cousin who quickly helped him find
a job with no-strings-attached. Supportive relatives are understanding of the tension between work
and school and attempt to mediate this tension through financial and emotional support. Isabela
and Adler exemplify how a relative’s desire to support them financially facilitates youths’
orientation toward work as a means for greater institutional participation through school. Relatives
create space for youth to find jobs that better suit their aspirations for education. The presence of
a supportive relative, however modified, assuages youths’ sense of isolation and urgency in
meeting financial needs.
Conversely, youth who were not received by a supportive relative (i.e. with mentors and
without supportive social ties) spoke about the immediate need to recover from their migration
journeys and find work to repay migration debt and secure a place to live. This might require a
young person to look for work the morning following their arrival in Los Angeles. When
discussing work histories with unparented youth throughout my fieldwork and interviews, they
often refer to the “fight” for survival, using phrases like “Aquí no hay descanso,” or “there is no
rest here.” Others would say, “Aquí hay que buscar trabajo el siguiente día (Here you have to look
for work the next day).” The urgency of paying migration debt and beginning their lives in Los
Angeles paired with their low-levels of education and English-language fluency, push youth into
135
occupations with high concentrations of immigrant, and undocumented immigrant, labor such as
those listed above.
The need to work to support themselves and families abroad might deter youths’ migration
goals, which are not always economic. A 22-year-old Guatemalan male, Juan, who migrated at the
age of 16 explained that after being targeted by gang members for many years in his home
community, he migrated to Los Angeles with the intention of attending a martial arts school to
learn to defend himself.
When I was in Guatemala, since I was the oldest brother and since in my neighborhood
where I lived there are many gangs, when I walked back [home from school] they would
wait for me on the street so that I would give them my money. Or they would harass me.
There were four or three and they were much bigger than me. I would start to cry because
no one would defend me. Since I was in my country I had the dream to also, to go into
martial arts school to defend myself. But I couldn’t over there because it is a lot of money
and I didn’t have money to go to school or go to that kind of school either. I couldn't.

Much like his experience in his home country where economic necessity blocked his ability
to attend school and martial arts classes, Juan’s need to work in the US stifled his ability to pursue
martial arts training. Upon arrival, Juan began working in the garment industry. After two years,
he found work as a janitor for a fitness studio, a small step toward his goal of practicing martial
arts. Unable to secure consistent work week schedule and wages and afford classes at the studio
that employed him, Juan eventually circled back to the garment industry where he continues to
work piecemeal.
lx
While being paid meager, exploitative wages, Juan gained a comparative
framework. His orientation to a new occupation in the US allows him to feel a greater sense of
autonomy in his earnings as workers can presumably control the pace and hours they work.
lxi

The urgency of finding and maintaining work goes beyond individual survival in the host
society. Many migrant youths work to support household income in their home countries and
therefore bear a strong sense of responsibility for families abroad while in the US. Transnational
136
migration researchers discuss the sacrifices of adult parents who work to remit dollars to their
children abroad, which can result in physical and emotional pain (Abrego 2014; Hondagneu-Sotelo
and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2005). Early on in my research I observed that this is an experience
undocumented migrant youth share with their adult counterparts. I attended a support group
meeting in 2013 where a young man confessed that poverty, sadness, and loneliness cause such
suffering that he often contemplates committing suicide.
Vine con una meta aquí. Vine por mi mama. Sufre mucho. Me siento responsable por mi
familia hoy. A veces me siento triste y solo, pero tengo que aprender manejar eso. Mi vida
es diferente hoy. Si me quito la vida, ¿Quién va a cuidar a mi mama?

I came with one goal here. I came here for my mom. She suffers a lot. I feel responsible
for my family now. Sometimes I feel sad and alone, but I have to learn to control that. My
life is different now. If I take my life, who will take care of my mom?

This young man’s sense of responsibility for his mother motivated his labor migration. His
sense of responsibility simultaneously created a daily stressor that pushed him toward thoughts of
suicide and kept him from following through with any attempts at taking his life. Overwhelming
thoughts and emotions were often tied to reports of poor work conditions, poverty, and feelings of
cultural dislocation for youth who are confined to workspaces. Omar,
5
an 18-year-old garment
worker who has spent four years in Los Angeles said he feels stressed that he is working as much
as he is but does not make enough money. He also said that his inability to control his thoughts
about this stress gives him a headache. “It’s that... It’s just that I don’t know what’s happening
inside of me!” he said exasperatedly. The inability to control one’s thoughts and emotions can
have deathly consequences. I attended funerals for two male youth workers who committed suicide
in late 2014 and mid-2015 because of, as others interested to me in the days leading up to and
following these funerals, the stresses of work, the suffering and need of families abroad, and
inability to make ends meet became too much to bear.
137
Unlike youth who receive settlement support upon arrival, unparented youth without
immediate support encounter various financial responsibilities that make entry into low-wage,
exploitative occupations unavoidable. The conditions of low-wage labor affect youths’ mental and
emotional health and threaten the financial stability of youths’ households in the host society, as
well as those in the home country for those who support families abroad. Hence, youth without
ties to supportive figures and community organizations, live work and family lives that are riddled
with struggles to achieve financial, educational, emotional and mental health stability.
Additionally, orientation and adaptation to the secondary labor market and on-going transnational
financial ties keeps youth transnationally oriented. Uncertain of their financial futures, youth
engage in a continuous recalculation of the amount of time they will spend working in the US
before returning home.
Access to mentors and in community organizations can mediate unparented youths’
marginalizing work experiences as they gain insights into new job opportunities and grow in their
understandings of finances and money-management. This became most apparent during the fall of
2014 and winter of 2015 when the topic of “brincando,” or job jumping, began surfacing in various
formal and informal conversations.
lxii
During this time, I began meeting with four young
Guatemalan men on Thursday evenings after they asked me to revise their weekly English-
language school homework and elaborate on comments given by instructors on their assignments.
Each week we spent about one hour reviewing sentences and phrases from handouts given in their
classes. Upon completing our review of their assignments, we stayed back to chat for a few minutes
where they talked week-after-week of their plans to start up a party supply rental company. These
four men met at a church youth group and began commiserating about their work experiences and
desire to leave the garment industry. They recognized the frequency of festivals and celebrations
138
in their communities and began throwing around the idea of purchasing foldable tables and chairs
to rent to their peers. The hope here is to turn enough profit to increase their inventory and
eventually open a storefront in Pico Union, Los Angeles. Meanwhile, during this planning period,
these young men exchanged information on which garment factories had more work, paid higher
wages, and had longer hours of operation. They moved from one factory to another, in search for
a pathway to mobility. Their collaboration motivated their work and spending behavior as they
moved in and out of garment factories while putting savings together to realize their collective
goal.
lxiii

Youth with mentors oriented and adapted to the ‘sistema’ in the US by not only knowing
how to maximize income but by learning how to manage their finances. Youth in community
organizations gain explicit and implicit knowledge on how to prioritize their personal economies
and maximize their wages. For example, Anthony arrived in Los Angeles from Mexico at the age
of fifteen. His wages, he explained went toward indulging his appetite for US culture— foods,
clothing, entertainment, and drugs and alcohol. He was 21 when I interviewed him, and he
described how meeting his mentor Jeremy at a local community center for homeless men 18-21 in
East Los Angeles changed how he manages his finances. He says: “I used to spend everything I
earned but now I am learning that I can save some money.” Adapting to the economic sistema
includes learning how to manage the frequency and amount of money youth send to families
abroad, and in some cases severing ties to increase personal stability (Canizales 2015).
Cesar, a thirty-year-old who lived in Los Angeles for fourteen years prior to my meeting him,
exemplifies how severing financial ties to families abroad can increase adaptation and community
embeddedness. For nine years, Cesar lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment with multiple
people and frequently fell ill as he worked long hours to support his family in Guatemala. He
139
started to overcome depression, alcoholism and drug addiction after meeting Wilfredo and
receiving guidance on the importance of finding one's gifts and purpose and setting personal goals.
Cesar retells this story every few weeks when he attends Voces de Esperanza meetings. When it
is his turn to share, he casually leans back in his chair, his arms hanging by his side, while he
explains that he feels ‘free’. He explains that he no longer feels obligated to send money to
Guatemala each week, but remits money when his personal budget permits. Cesar began to
overcome the emotional and psychological burdens that stemmed from his inability to sufficiently
provide for his family. Cesar left the garment industry for a less exhausting and less exploitative
job as a store clerk. With more leisure time, Cesar explores Beverly Hills, Hollywood and other
parts of Los Angeles that many of the group have not yet visited despite their time in the US.
I detailed in chapter 3 how resource impoverishment can interrupt or dissolve channels of
support among relatives. Youth are impacted by the absence of material support from their
relatives in the US, but also bear the emotional burdens related to feelings of betrayal and isolation.
In many cases, I observed how youth who felt they were gaining social, financial, and cultural
capital and a sense of orientation to resources for adaptation desired to transmit this capital to their
less-advantaged relatives. Take Andrés, a 20-year-old who had been living in Los Angeles for five
years at the time of our meeting. Andrés solemnly shared that he did not know how to handle all
the things he felt responsible for when he arrived in Los Angeles, particularly his alcoholic brother,
whom he felt needed both financial and social support. Andrés carried a sense of failure that he
learned to manage through his consistent support group participation. He said: ‘My brother drinks
and I don’t know how to take care of him. When I started coming here (Voces de Esperanza), I
learned I’m not responsible for my brother. He is responsible for himself.’ Nodding his head as if
affirming himself, he continued: ‘Now I know what I will be doing.’ He described Voces de
140
Esperanza as ‘a place of mental training’ where he learned what his priorities should be. When I
followed up with Andrés some months later, he explained that he had now focused on succeeding
in the US because no opportunities for education and employment await him in Guatemala. Andrés
was not only oriented toward work and his community through support group participation but
was adapting to an American individualistic way of thinking about his financial responsibility to
himself (Canizales 2015). Adapting to the core American beliefs and practices of self-
responsibility enabled Andrés to put his own needs over his concern for his brother. While some
might argue that adopting American individualism comes at the expense of community
collectivism, I find in my previous research that expressive individualism, or one’s focus on self-
development and well-being, complements a stronger identification with certain social identities,
including that of a local community member. Andrés’ adaptation motivated his desire for increased
work and educational opportunities and aspirations for embeddedness in the US that, he believed,
are unattainable in his home country.
Undocumented, unparented youths’ financial obligations and work conditions define their
starting point of incorporation. Their time of entry into the workforce, orientation to specific
occupations, adaptation to wages, work conditions, and spending behaviors, and access to
networks that expose youth to opportunities for greater financial stability and opportunities for
mobility can shape their participation in other institutions in the host society, such as schools.
II. Accessing traditional and non-traditional education and mobility

Of the 75-youth interviewed, five were full-time students and 22 were enrolled in adult English
language school at the time of our interview. Two respondents who lived in Los Angeles over 10
years and were full-time garment workers completed their English as a Second Language (ESL)
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courses and enrolled in community colleges, taking classes like computer engineering,
psychology, and Spanish.
Youth who obtain financial support while in school are more likely to stay enrolled
consistently and achieve higher levels of education. An exceptional example of this is Marvin,
who graduated from a four-year university in Los Angeles with a degree in Bio-Chemistry.
Because of their educational attainment, three respondents in this category would be considered
what Sociologist Roberto Gonzales (2015) refers to as college-goers, or youth who pursue some
college education. I interviewed Marvin in Orange County, where he lived and worked. Marvin
was twenty-eight when we met and was 16 when he migrated to California. He first arrived in
Compton, Los Angeles to live with his aunt, but moved to the California Central Valley to live
with his grandmother and avoid exposure to Los Angeles gangs. He remembers arriving in
Compton and thinking, “wow, this place is beautiful you know like …and so the green lawns, the
houses and air conditioning and hot water.” He began making plans to find work in the area but
was met with the opposition of his aunt and uncle. “The expectation was, ‘okay, I’m going to
work’ but they also expected me to go to school,” he said with a tone of surprise.
When I moved with my grandmother, her expectations were the same. She was like,
“look…” but I wanted to work. I wanted to work…work and I’m going to go to school in
the mornings. But since I didn’t know that school was a whole…like a whole day thing,
since I never went to school, I thought you can show up anytime you want and leave
anytime you want. But, so, my grandmother just put me to work in the fields, so we would
pick tomatoes in some of the fields in the farm area, so pick tomatoes. And then in the
mornings, I would go to school from like …I would start like really early, early like, zero
period like start like at 6:30[AM] to like 2:00[PM] and then I would go pick tomatoes from
like two to five.

While working alongside his grandmother as a tomato-picker, Marvin was not expected to fully
support himself but contribute to the family income. His priority, according to his grandmother,
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was to complete school. This allowed Marvin to stay enrolled in school, learn English, and
eventually pursue other, less physically exhausting, work options.
So that was the expectation that I would provide a little bit of income to my family. And
eventually you know, it’s really funny because eventually I learned English and then I was
tired working in the fields. So, I told my grandmother, I’m going to look for another job
and so I started working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. To me that felt like I was moving
up and instead of a dish washer, I started doing some of the prep cook work and then from
there bus boy and then from bus boy to waiter and so I was moving up. I was moving up
and my grandmother was very proud of me and I was bringing more income to my house.

Marvin’s grandmother’s support enabled him to acquire human and social capital to increase his
financial independence and contributions to the household.
In my sample, four respondents, including Marvin, had DACA at the time of our interview.
Three were males with a supportive relative. The fourth DACA recipient is a young woman with
a long-term mentor. Each of these young people benefited from having someone who kept
paperwork and proof of school attendance and community participation that was later used to file
a DACA application.
lxiv
DACA opens access to new jobs, higher earnings, drivers’ licenses,
healthcare, and banking (Gonzales, Terriquez, Ruszczyk 2014).
lxv
I met various young people
throughout my time in the field that might have qualified as DACA recipients but could not apply
for one of two reasons: 1) because they had not retained documentation and proof of consistent
residence, or 2) because they were full-time workers and could not enroll in and therefore complete
school, both of which are requirements for qualification. The presence of supportive relatives
facilitates unparented youths’ achievement of financial and educational stability and orientation
and adaptation to the traditional assimilatory institution of school.
Although Marvin’s initial plans were to find immediate work in the US, he benefitted from
the direction of his aunt, uncle, and grandmother who all urged him to attend school. Because of
his consistent enrollment in school, Marvin acquired mentors such as his teachers and peers who
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encouraged him to access resources for immigrant youth, including tutoring and college
application support. He remembers the nervousness he felt around his DACA application as well
as the intervention of his school principle, and how his life changed after receiving DACA.
To me it was a scary experience because I came a month before I was 16. So, I didn’t
know if I was going to qualify for it because I didn’t know if I was going get enough
evidence to show that I was here before the age of 16. The only evidence I had was a letter
from my principal at my school saying that he was here before the age of 16. That’s all I
had. And so, I sent my…I put together my package on my own. I didn’t have the resources
to pay for a lawyer or anything like that and so I did it on my own just like going through
forms… And I got it. I got lucky and I got it and so I’ve been…I still have that…I’ve been
in DACA for…this is my second time yeah, so. I’m glad. It has changed my life really.

Marvin went on to describe the ways in which DACA represented a symbolic welcoming
into US society, that legitimized his presence. Pairing DACA with the support of his relatives
afforded Marvin the opportunity to attend a prestigious public university in Los Angeles and
participate in various community and work opportunities while there.
It just gave me a sense that for the first time, I felt like America told me, ‘Welcome’… For
the first time you know, even though you know it’s not what we expect or what we want
for our communities but it’s something, you know? And to me as someone that had to deal
with being an undocumented or I guess a lot of my young adult life, it’s made a big
difference. It allowed me to get my job at [the University]. It allowed me to pursue what I
wanted to do you know without anyone questioning me for my social security number or
anything like that.

Marvin received various forms of support upon arrival that would allow him to obtain a high level
of education that granted legal protection, however, temporary upward mobility in the workplace.
Yet, his experience was not shared by many as only five youth in this study were full-time students.
Marvin’s trajectory is rare among my respondents, as most youth are full-workers with
uneven access to schools. Twenty-two, or 32%, of youth who are full-time workers were enrolled
in school at the time of our interview. For financially-independent, working youth, enrollment in
adult English-language school is often not an attempt to be immersed in the American culture
(though this might occur unintentionally), but a means to gain skills that advance their position in
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the labor market. Learning English allows youth to advocate for the payment of overtime hours,
work schedules, or everyday tasks with English-speaking supervisors. For some, the desire to
attend school does not equate opportunities for education, as work is necessary for survival and
employers may not be amenable to accommodating school schedules that cut into business hours.
The conflict between work and school schedules became apparent when I asked interview
respondents if they encountered any obstacles to school enrollment or consistent school
attendance. The cost of enrolling in non-traditional schools was commonly cited during interviews
and in informal conversations as one of the greatest obstacles to first-time enrollment, sustained
participation, or re-entry into schools. Once free of charge in Los Angeles County, these adult
language classes now average thirty to forty-five dollars per term. Jennifer, a 25-year-old garment
worker from Mexico, elaborated on how the rising costs of education kept her out of school.
Right now, when I enrolled they charged me thirty dollars. Plus, you have the books and
everything. When I got there, like twenty days later, they started charging more and it was
either eat or go to school. But it was when I got there that they started to charge. I know it
is not a lot, thirty dollars, but for me… for me, it’s my rent. I always try to be punctual with
the things I have to do. At least I think so, right? (laughs). But I have to pay rent and I only
eat what is necessary.

Jennifer worked full-time to support herself, applying most of her monthly earnings toward
rent. She so carefully monitored her spending that she only ate “what is necessary.” While she was
able to make a sacrifice for an additional expense of thirty-dollars per month to learn English, her
inability to pay beyond this amount led her to leave school after just twenty-days of enrollment.
Youths’ precarious financial situations is evinced in the instability that can be caused by an
unexpected expense.
While it may be unsurprising that financial obligations and low-wages keep youth out of
classrooms, what is surprising is the number of people who tell of the explicit intervention of
employers who claimed youth (who were minors upon arrival in Los Angeles) did not need to
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attend classes to learn English in a society that sentimentalizes childhood and esteems formal
education. Employers offered increased work hours and the potential of interacting with English
speakers while at work as an alternative form of learning. This was typical for those in retail/sales
and domestic work where youth had a greater likelihood of interaction with native-born English
speakers. Other employers threatened youth with job termination if they chose to leave work early
to attend a night class. This occurred with one of my most vocal interview respondents, Rolando,
who, when asked what obstacles he faced in attending school, said:
I think the obstacle we (youth workers) face is, eh… sometimes, when we have a lot of
work, sometimes they (employers) don’t let you leave work. What they tell you is, ‘well,
if you leave early you don’t have a job tomorrow. We will fire you.’ So that’s that. That’s
the primary obstacle. Then at school, the instructor tells you to arrive early or not at all. I
have to be strict with myself in order to learn.

The practices and expectations in work and school spaces, along with youths’ financial obligations,
create tensions that impede youths’ participation in formal school spaces. For some, like Rolando,
the immediate economic insecurity that comes with attending school outweighs the potential long-
term benefits. Economic precarity can reproduce itself among financially independent immigrant
youth.
Education researchers describe a “newcomer disadvantage” in educational attainment
among immigrants who arrived as teenagers, as they struggle to enroll in school and transition into
the job market (Landale, Oropesa, and Llanes 1999). I find that for undocumented youth workers,
this disadvantage can be mediated when immigrant adolescents have mentors and peer groups that
are pursuing educational opportunities, as youth often learn of school-related opportunities through
their peers. I introduced Laura in the previous chapter as a young woman who came to the US
expecting support from her uncle; however, upon arrival she was physically and verbally
mistreated by her uncle’s wife. To support herself, Laura began working as a live-in nanny in a
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Los Angeles suburb. She was confined to her job for three years as she saved money to repay her
migration debt but began participating in a church youth group once the debt was cleared. Laura
met an older woman, Yesenia, who encouraged Laura to get involved in the group and offered her
a place to stay on the weekends so that Laura would not have to live alone at her employer’s home.
Laura’s involvement in the youth group exposed her to unparented working youth who attend
school, join sports teams, participate in dance groups, among other community events. At the time
of our meeting, Laura was in the US for seven years and enrolled in English classes for 8 months.
No longer isolated to the workplace, the support Laura received through increased community
participation and the guidance of a mentor helped to reshape her educational and emotional
stability trajectory.
Mentors acquired through community organizations may also give more specific direction
on how to navigate US institutions. At 27-years-old, Jerónimo has been living in the US for 13
years. When Jerónimo arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 14, he immediately began working in
a small garment factory in Downtown Los Angeles. Separation from his family and feelings of
loneliness in the US caused what Jerónimo describes as depression and drove him toward five
years of alcohol and marijuana addiction. Jerónimo’s addiction worsened his loneliness as he lost
touch with his family in Guatemala. Jerónimo recalls stumbling into a Pico Union Catholic church
one Sunday afternoon where he met a catechist instructor— a Mexican immigrant in his late 20s—
who helped him overcome his addiction. Jerónimo became embedded in his local church, attending
mass and youth groups, and began redirecting his energy toward organizing a group for young-
adult men that continues to meet six years later. Jerónimo established a trusting relationship with
a mentor and years later continues to turn to him for advice on what steps to take toward increased
emotional, financial, and social stability. In organizing a youth group, Jerónimo is making himself
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available to mentor similarly situated youth. After eight years in the US, Jerónimo decided he
would not return to his home country and began attending school to learn English and increase his
work opportunities. Jerónimo’s orientation and adaptation led to his local community
embeddedness and locally oriented plans for the future.
As youth are oriented toward financial stability and occupational mobility by mentors and
peers in community organizations, they develop aspirations for the future that are rooted in local
community institutions. Age of arrival and tenure in the US are also important factors in youths’
orientation to the local community, as those who spent more time in the US and were entering
adulthood expressed greater certainty about the absence of opportunities for mobility in their home
countries and their desire to set roots in the US. This was the case for thirty-year-old Joel, who
arrived in Los Angeles in 2000 at the age of 16. He spoke softly in the coffee shop where we met,
which sat on the edge of Koreatown in MacArthur Park. This area, Joel detailed, is where he spent
many years roaming the streets in his alcohol addiction. “Tome demasiado.... I drank too much for
maybe three years, more or less. From 16 to 18, 19 I drank a lot, but nobody knew I had a problem.”
Joel continued to work through his addiction, remitting small amounts of money to his family
abroad to build a concrete foundation for a home they expected he would also eventually fund.
Fourteen years had passed since Joel’s arrival in Los Angeles when we met, and I asked about
whether his plan to build a home was near completion. “No,” Joel said.
…because the plans changed. The house… well, I tell them… I can have a house but if I
continue to be ignorant or if I continue to be lost in addiction, I will never be able to help
anyone. What I really enjoy is helping others because that was something someone did for
me when I was 22-, 23-years old. Of course, I am still interested in having a house, but I
also want to go to university or to college. But if I build a house, I don’t even know if I am
going to return. I do not know if I will go back. If I cannot finish university, I will stay here
so I can finish.

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I met Joel during a sort of intermediary period where he successfully funded a foundation on which
to continue building a house for him and his family to live if he returned to Guatemala. Yet, the
orientation and adaptation in Los Angeles that stemmed from his time in the US, experiences of
overcoming addiction and receiving mentorship, and exposure to US educational institutions and
opportunities for mobility motivated his aspirations for greater embeddedness in the host society.
He shows how working youth outside of schools are oriented toward educational institutions and
potential opportunities for mobility. This orientation can redirect youth toward greater
embeddedness in US society and away from initial intentions of return.
Another 22-year-old who arrived at the age of 15 described how his plans changed because
of his educational aspirations. When I asked what his plans were for settlement or return to his
home country of Guatemala when he first arrived he said,
I gave myself a time period of… Well, I would say that when I was able to buy a house,
help my family and find a job-- a good job—and start a business, that’s when I would
return. But, like I’m telling you, not anymore. Now I have realized something here. I
enrolled in English class in the evenings, and now I want to be successful in school (“llegar
a ser alguien en la escuela”). I want to keep studying as far as I can go. So now, no. I have
not thought about a day to go to my country. Just to stay here and keep studying.

Orientation toward educational opportunities can work to shift their aspirations for embeddedness,
incorporation and mobility to the host society.
Youth who develop educational aspirations but are unable to attend formal school adopt
the ideology that education is key to mobility. Youths’ creativity and agency in maneuvering
institutional marginalization and resource impoverishment captivated my attention when I
observed youth employ strategies in this vein. Youth can create ad hoc programs that fill the gaps
in their educational needs when formal education is inaccessible. For example, in a group that I
participated in during the Spring of 2015 at a Pico Union community garden, each person brought
their own book and read for an hour before spending another 30 minutes of each meeting to discuss
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what they learned. In another group started in Fall 2015, youth read Alice and Wonderland in
English and learned how to use a dictionary. Finally, being that I was a graduate student at a local
and prestigious University, various youth asked me during my four years of research to teach them
English. I hesitantly agreed when a group of six young people approached me with interest in
meeting biweekly, as I did not view myself as an adequate English-language instructor. However,
I was confronted with the reality that these young people were so time and resource constrained
that they resorted to asking me to help.
We began our bi-weekly meetings throughout the winter and spring of 2015. I
contemplated where I would start teaching English and quickly learned that youth had their own
ideas of what they wanted to learn. With scraps of paper, notebooks, and notes in their phones,
youth began asking pointed questions. Each week I collected these scraps and jotted down my own
notes on the phrases youth felt most important in navigating their communities. Examples of
phrases youth requested I translate are: 1) “Where do I get off the bus?” 2) “Where is the
restroom?” 3) “Who punched my time card? Where is my timecard?” 4) “What is the bathroom
code?” 5) “I don’t have [cellular phone] service.” 6) “Do you mind if I play soccer here?” and 7)
“Where can I try this on?” “Can I get another size?” Other interesting requests included how to
order a vanilla frappuccino at Starbucks and when one uses the greetings “hello” versus “hi” and
“what’s up?” Youths’ translation requests illuminates that English is a mechanism that allows them
to feel a sense of confidence in navigating everyday spaces such as work, retail stores, coffee
shops, and to expand their social lives beyond the Spanish-dense communities of Pico Union and
Westlake/MacArthur Park.
Youth with supportive relatives may immediately be directed toward traditional schooling or
mediated school and work participation. Those without supportive relatives confront various
150
obstacles to traditional educational trajectories. Those with ties to mentors and community
organizations can patchwork resources that promote school enrollment or access to non-traditional
flows of human capital. They gain new way of thinking about mobility, the occupational mobility
ladder and opportunities for increased incorporation in the future. Those who are without these
familial and organizational ties face extreme obstacles to attending schools and remain embedded
in the workplace.
III. Community life

Just as relatives ushered youth into workplaces and schools, they also guide youths’
involvement in the civic organizations. When I asked respondents with supportive relatives what
they did in their free time, these young people talked about “mandados (errands)” completed with
the family. This could include visits to laundromats, grocery stores, and swap meets. If there was
a child in the household, the family attended the child’s activities together, like soccer or after-
school events. Participation in community organizations tended to be inconsistent or intended for
entertainment and leisure, such as attending cultural or religious events hosted by community
organizations. Youth who participated in churches attended mass with their families. In this way,
and as described in existing literature, unparented youth with supportive relatives could rely on
their long-settled kin to usher them into the local community organizations. Conversely, the
community participation of youth who grow up in the US without supportive relatives is guided
by their need for support in specific areas of their lives. Youth evince great agency in their
orientation and adaptation as they identify the organizations that would most support their needs
and navigate their everyday participation within these spaces.
Churches are often the first stop for unparented youth who are learning the “sistema,” or
system.
lxvi
When Roberto first arrived in the US from Guatemala at 15-years-old he had “la
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mentalidad de ganar dinero,” or “the mindset to earn money.” He began working in a downtown
Los Angeles factory where he made use of his home country employment skills of sewing seams
of denim pants. His pace in a piecemeal production line, where he earned a few cents per sleeve
sewn onto t-shirts, confined him to the factory floor to make ends meet. Roberto decided to look
for another job and found one as a screen printer for a Los Angeles t-shirt company. He said,
Entonces ahí gané más dinero, ahorré mi dinero y lo mandé a mi papá, a mi mamá,
entonces ya hice mi casa y ya tenía todo lo que… mi sueño que tenía, ya lo hice todo. (So
that is where I earned more money. I saved money and I sent it to my father and my mother.
So, then I made my house and I had everything that…. I had my dream, I did it all.)

While Roberto worked in the US to attain his goal of building a home and began his life in the US
transnationally oriented and with the intention of returning to this home, he observed the
orientation and adaptation of his peers. Roberto noticed that some coworkers spoke fragments of
English and left work early enough to attend night school at 7pm. He questioned why he was not
doing the same.
Then I saw the guys that would speak English and I would say, “why not me?” And more
so now that I was getting involved in the church and everything. So, I told myself I had to
give myself the opportunity. So, I started going to church more, right? That’s when my
mind started to open up. Because before I was very quiet, very timid. Like, if you had met
me before, I would not have been able to speak with you! Really. But through church I
started to open my mind and all of that. I gave myself the opportunity to find out who I am
because I had low self-esteem. The guys from back home would call me, “chaparrito”
(shorty) or the nickname “enano” (dwarf). I would get frustrated. I felt bad and I felt
inferior. But now, thanks to God, I have good self-esteem and I think, poor guys, they don’t
know what they’re saying to me. I have talents. I am a son of God.

Roberto reflects on how the decision to join his local church gave him an “opportunity” to learn
about himself. Although Roberto did not enroll in school, did not learn English, and certainty did
not get taller, the way he thought about his circumstances changed as his “mind started to open.”
Community participation that provided a belief system that increased his emotional stability to
better navigate potentially hostile or demoralizing social interactions.
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As I find in previous research (Canizales 2015), youth who gain emotional and mental
health stability can increase the number of institutions they engage in and patterns of participation
within them. I return to the story of Jerónimo, a 27-year-old who arrived in Los Angeles at 14 and
became embedded in his church organization as he overcame drug and alcohol addictions. As
Jerónimo continued his participation in church, he also became acquainted with Wilfredo, Voces
de Esperanza coordinator, and began attending meetings at the group’s inception in 2010. From
this support group aimed at promoting self-responsibility and personal narrative, he learned the
language to talk about his trajectory through addiction, church participation, and aspirations for
education. This was a significant tool for Jerónimo who felt like he was “nobody” because of his
nascent academic accomplishments. During our interview he said the following:
Before, without having studied, it’s like I always came to this point where I thought, “I am
nobody. I have not studied. I am nothing.” I thought, “what must others think?” Now I
don’t care. It does not matter to me what others say about what I do. I am now in this place
where I do not care what others say about me or what I do. What matters to me is the
commitment I make to myself, the commitments I make to my community, to my friends.
I don’t let myself be distracted by what others think about me.

Jerónimo’s continuous involvement in church led him to an additional group that moved him from
a place of low self-esteem and preoccupations with the opinions of others, to a place of self-
responsibility and confident sense of self. His movement from isolation and drug addiction, to
church participation and support group participation demonstrates how youths’ orientation to one
group can expand their social networks and guide them into new institutional settings. This
suggests is not only a process of orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness, but that this occurs in
a sort of nested fashion. That is, participation in one organization can lead to participation in
another, thus expanding the social networks and sources of support youth have access to.
Community organizations not only provide physical spaces in which to participate and
flows of social capital, but also provided mentorship on how to think about the conditions in which
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youth are living and the trajectory that they unfold. Throughout various organizations that I
participated in—be it church groups, book clubs, recreational courses, education and job training,
or a support group-- immigrant youth were directed toward thinking of themselves as individuals
and focusing on the development of skills, formation of self, and increased confidence and self-
esteem. Contrary to the line of research that suggests individualism threatens collectivism,
however, I find that youth learn the language and practices of self-responsibility as mechanisms
for becoming more socially-minded and locally oriented. This was observed in various ways. In
churches, for example, teachers and leaders encourage young people to pursue a strong and
unrelenting devotion and service to God. In a running group or karate club, youth are encouraged
to nourish their bodies and train for endurance and speed. In a book club, youth might be
encouraged to take on practices like listening to English-language music, purchase a dictionary or
jot down questions they can ask a more fluent English speaker to expand their vocabulary.
According to the group leaders and participants, these practices would encourage a healthier, more
stable and a clear-minded approach to navigating daily challenges.
The notion of focusing on developing the self to build a community is most explicit in a
support group where the intention is to unveil one’s tangible and intangible obstacles economic,
educational, social, and physical and mental health growth and development. On June 13, 2014,
during a support group meeting, Voces de Esperanza coordinator, Wilfredo, encouraged a new
way of thinking about well-being for youth who felt spread thin by the financial obligations they
held to their home countries. He offered,
La persona más importante es uno mismo. Si me quedo, ni hago nada por los demás, ni
hago nada por mí. Hay que estar sano para poder ayudar, aunque sea una persona.
Queremos echarnos más cargos que lo que tenemos. La vida va pasando rápido. Pero
entre ustedes platiquen. Hablen. Formen una nueva fraternidad.

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The most important person is oneself. If I stay [behind], I neither do anything for others,
nor for myself. One must be healthy to be able to help, even if just one person. We want to
put more burdens on ourselves than what we have. Life is moving quickly. But you must
talk amongst yourselves. Talk. Form a new brotherhood.

Throughout my four years attending Voces de Esperanza, Wilfredo consistently suggested youth
prioritize themselves not simply for youths’ own advancement but for the advancement of their
communities, locally and transnationally (Canizales 2015). He elaborates that youth encounter
sufficient obstacles in achieving stability before the ‘burdens’ of others are added. The concern for
others when one is not healthy (financially, emotionally, socially stable), Wilfredo believes, can
hinder youths’ personal trajectory and that of others as youth are blocked from offering support.
For youth workers, this often meant reconsidering their financial obligations. As my time in the
field progressed, I observed how youth began severing financial ties to their home countries in
order to achieve personal financial stability. This was not solely the case for Voces de Esperanza-
going youth, but those who wanted to deepen their commitment to church, school, or recreational
and cultural groups. Embedded within community organizations, youth did not become
individualistic, but thought of ways to transmit the social, human, and cultural capital they gained
to those around them.
As immigrant youth undergo orientation and adaptation, they draw on their own settlement
experiences, their institutional access, and insights gained about their community’s needs, to define
what it means to “help others.” One young man who received support from an East Los Angeles
job training program said, “La gente de donde yo vengo, nadie los está ayudando. Yo quiero
ayudar. Para la comunidad de donde yo vengo tiene que ser algo económico (No one is helping
the people from where I come from. I want to help. It would have to be economic for my
community.).” While he was not yet in a position to provide support, his developing embeddedness
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was working to inspire his to build his community up drawing on the same orientation and
adaptation he was undergoing.
Another 30-year-old Guatemalan who arrived in Los Angeles at the age of fifteen, named
Justino, joined a martial arts group to remain active after long days of work in the garment factory.
After some weeks passed, he noticed that his pace at work quickened. He began to share his
discovery with peers and rallied a group that meets on Saturday mornings for martial arts and
running trails. Javier took an additional step toward orientation and felt himself adapting to the
workplace better, which bolstered his opportunities for community embeddedness. He says,
Justino: But that is what I am telling you. For example, me right now, right now what we
are dedicating ourselves to is what I told you about exercise. It can be someone who just
arrived from Guatemala or wherever, or someone who has already been here for years. But
if we see someone who is sad, worried, stressed about where he is going… those of us that
are here, like me, sin papeles (without papers), we come here, and we go to, for example,
I went to martial arts classes, others go to English classes. Right?

Stephanie: Uh-hm

Justino: We run out of work. We get home, change, you get your things and, bam! You get
back to your house, you eat, study a little bit, and straight to bed. Tomorrow morning, early,
same thing. So, that’s how we live. That’s why so many people are so stressed. Even me!
And what we do is help each other. We say, “take a vitamin, don’t do drugs, don’t drink
alcohol, think about what you are doing, save your money.”

Prior to starting his own group, Justino did not have a mentor, organization or peer group to whom
he turned to but ran the same routine between work and home. His own orientation and adaptation,
and prospects for mobility, caused him to view himself as a potential leader. By viewing
themselves as mentors for similarly situated youth, and those who have recently and are yet to
arrive to Los Angeles, unparented immigrant youth are actively developing the social networks
that they observe as missing from the landscape into which they entered and building social capital
toward their own incorporation.
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The examples suggest that unparented youth turn to organizations that counter specific
obstacles they are facing in their pathways to incorporation. Roberto felt a sense of financial
stability having already built his home in Guatemala and experiencing a bit of socioeconomic
mobility after brincando from garment sewing to screen printing. He struggled, however, with
self-esteem and self-image. His participation in church assuaged those challenges. Youth who
experience homelessness might look to a community organization that supports housing initiatives,
as several youths in this study did. Youth who wish to be more active or feel isolated or afraid to
be out in public might join a hiking, running, or Zumba class. Not all community organizations
support unparented immigrant youth, and time in the US can also cause a mismatch between
youths’ needs in their orientation and adaptation and the services an organization provides toward
these processes.
It is important to acknowledge the salience of gender in organizing immigrant youths’
access to and patterns of participation within community organizations. This research began with
community groups and the sample reflects the paucity of women in shared community spaces.
Women who worked in domestic work, hospitality, or other service jobs often could not attend
community groups because of time constraints related to their work schedules or confinement to
the workplace.
lxvii
Others reported not feeling safe leaving their homes and taking public
transportation at the hours that groups began or finished, respectively. When I asked female
respondents if being a woman affected their ability to participate in community groups, they
unanimously agreed that being a woman posed a disadvantage in how they were perceived and
invited to participate in community groups. Yenifer, a 29-year-old Salvadoran woman who arrived
in the US at 17, observed that this was something that was not only normalized among men but
perpetuated by women as well. Yenifer spoke of how she attempts to combat the marginalization
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of women by telling others of how men and women should work together, “mano en mano,” or
“hand-in-hand.” When we began this conversation, I asked her, “Do you think being a woman
affects your ability to participate in community groups?” To which she sheepishly responded,
“Yeah, sometimes.” I continued,
Stephanie: In what way?

Jessica: There are many people who still have “ese patron del machismo” (chauvinistic
ideals) to say, ‘you are a woman. Why are you going to get involved if you are going to be
maintained [by a man] (si te van a mantener)? That ideology… we are in the 2000s and
even with everything we know, there are still women who abide by that mentality. Women
who come here from other countries. Like, I found this girl who lived here, and we were
talking about women and she would say, ‘El hombre es el dueño de la casa. El hombre
tiene que proveer todo. La mujer no (The man is the boss of the house. The man has to
provide everything. Not the woman.).’ I told her, ‘we should be partners’… We are equals.
We have to have the same rights and we have to go hand-in-hand. I work and you work, I
do chores and you do chores, too. She said, ‘You live in a bubble.’ But I think we should
be equal. But there are people who think that way, people from my country.

Despite glimmers of women’s changing ideologies regarding their own role in their community,
they continue to remain marginalized in organizations and relegated to roles deemed appropriate
for women. For example, in church youth groups, women would prepare food or sing in the choir,
while men gave seminars and led discussions. In recreational groups, men outnumbered women.
Organizations geared toward housing and job placement tended to cater to men, in part because of
the targeting of men by gangs and perhaps also guided by the assumption that women are likely to
be received by kin. This can affect individuals’ perceptions of what services and resources they
have available to them. Just as we have observed how orientation and adaptation to one institution
can trigger the orientation and adaptation toward another and deepen youths’ embeddedness, the
real or perceived blocked opportunities for organizational participation can impede these processes
and cause stagnation in embeddedness.
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The underbelly of unparented youths’ reliance on mentors and community organizations
emerged through my research in two Catholic churches in that examines the role of the church and
religion in youth’s incorporation trajectories (Canizales 2018). Churches are recognized as pillars
of solidarity and support within immigrant communities. The church and its religious practices
provide unaccompanied youth with spaces and resources for incorporation support. Over time,
youth also come to experience financial and socioemotional setback as they become involved in
church subunits that are organized by an ethnoracial hierarchy that disparages indigenous Latinos,
require financial contributions, and teach reliance on God to change one’s disadvantaged financial,
educational, social, and health circumstances (Canizales 2018(. One former church-going youth I
informally spoke to about why he resigned from his position as a youth group leader explained,
“Hay que despertarr. Hay que saber quiénes son los que apoyan y quienes son los que vienen
aprovechar (We have to wake up. We have to know who is supporting us and who are the ones
who come to take advantage.).” While I have considered the role of churches here, other
organizations may produce similar forms of setback. However well-intended, immigrant-serving
organizations can unwittingly reproduce inequality when they offer individualized solutions to
structural marginalization.
The organization with which I spent the greatest amount of time between 2012 and 2016,
Voces de Esperanza, became a social laboratory for potential stagnation in processes of orientation
and adaptation. Voces was well into its first year of weekly meetings when I began my research in
2012. While much talk of orientation to work, school, and community life rumbled during the first
two years of research, by late 2015, Wilfredo became vocal about his disappointment in that some
youth who attended the weekly support group were making little progress in expanding their
community participation beyond the group itself. He commented that each week youth brought
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forth the same issues of timidity, fear of interacting with others, not accepting their ethnoracial
identity, and remained in occupations they recognized as exploitative and out of school. When I
exited the field in 2016, Wilfredo often spoke openly about growing tired and wanting to see the
youth take initiative in leading the group so that they might continue to support one another when
he was no longer able to coordinate the group meetings. Hence, orientation and adaptation can, in
a sense, plateau if young people are not reaching outside of the scope of that given organization.
If embedded in only one community organization, youths’ social networks can saturate and lead
to stagnation in their incorporation. Additionally, youths’ embeddedness in one community
organization does not guarantee an expansion of their networks beyond their peers and increased
orientation and adaptation to others.
Finally, absence from community life shapes also trajectories toward embeddedness and
incorporation. Youth without relatives or networks of support and who are outside of community
organizations confront challenges associated with isolation. Unparented youth without networks
of support and community ties navigate an opportunity desert that causes them to feel isolated
from a supportive community. Young migrant workers like Andres, a 26-year old Guatemalan
garment worker who arrived in the US at the age of 15, find it difficult to penetrate the US sistema.
Arriving in 2001, Andres recalls, “It was my idea to come here but I had absolutely no idea.” He
continued,
Once I got here it became very difficult because I couldn’t study, I didn’t have any family
here to support me, and I couldn’t find work because I wasn’t 18 years old yet. I remember
that I got here, and I would go out [to look for work] every day but nothing would happen.

These experiences resulted in a disillusionment about opportunities available to Andres in the
future. This disillusionment causes youth without networks of support to develop an ambivalence
toward, if not distance from, the people in their local community and associate support with their
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home countries. When I asked Andres who he might turn to for information on resources that could
help him, he admitted that he did not know. I asked if he had a community in Los Angeles—a
question that was received with speculation. I followed up by asking, “¿Que significa tener
comunidad para ti? (what does it mean to have a ‘community’ to you?)” To which Andres
responded,
Well for me, for me, community is… I am going to give you the example of my ranch,
right? The community for us, is a community where you have families, neighbors, friends.
And when something happens, they help each other. That is a community. So like, the
community where I come from, that is a community. Maybe they aren’t intellectuals. They
don’t have degrees, but they mutually support each other. For example, when someone
dies… For example, say there is a neighbor that died barely a week ago, my father and my
mother, they would go help that person. So, it’s between the people. It is love and unity
that makes a community. That is what a community is to me. But right now, if you tell a
person on the street, ‘you know what? This is happening to me…’ They will say, ‘I don’t
care. I don’t care, I have my own life.’ For me that is not community like in my hometown
where they support each other. Over there, if there is a robbery, people get together to
protect you. No one takes anything from you because you are a community. We are united.

Youth outside of networks of support describe a disillusionment with community life in the US
that can cause youth to remember the communities they leave behind with nostalgia, as Andres
did here. Andres, and others who are bereft of supportive social ties place the onus of their
disorientation toward the local community and orientation toward the transnational on the
unwelcoming host society. During my interviews with the 11 unparented youth who did not have
networks of support, I asked if they considered joining a group and what kind of group that might
be. Each responded with some certainty that they would join a community organization when they
did not have to work as much. That is, when their financial situations gained stability, attending
school and learning English would be the first order of business. This reinforces that educational
attainment persists as a dominant narrative for orientation and adaptation to US society. Outside
of schools and civic organizations, however, youth without support remain embedded in the
workplace and oriented toward their transnational community.
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DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The idealized Western life course trajectory places children in schools and community
spaces that protect children and socialize them for entry into and productivity in the labor force
and civic society. Immigration research assumes immigrant children and children of immigrants
enter traditional assimilatory institutions such as family and schools upon arrival in the US.
Research has, under this assumption, studied undocumented youths’ in schools and adult
immigrants (and often parents) in the workplace. Yet this research shows that undocumented and
unparented youth navigate work, traditional and non-traditional schools, and community spaces as
they come of age in the US. By tracing their orientación, adaptación, and embeddedness, we begin
to observe incorporation as more than a socioeconomic outcome, but as a social process that takes
place through interactions with and within institutions.
This chapter details the institutional participation patterns of undocumented youth who
grow up without their parents and without guaranteed entry into schools as they come of age.
Undocumented and unparented youth arrive in the US expecting to be financially independent and
with the intention of returning to their home country. Young people who encounter supportive
relatives in the US might experience delayed entry into the workforce or find that some support
can alleviate the sense of urgency to find work. Long-settled supportive relatives provide buffers
for youths’ first-time entry into the US labor force by directing the workplaces or occupations in
which they enter. Financial support enables youth to be full time students or to attend school
consistently if work is required. Youth with supportive relatives participate in their local
community to the extent that their long-settled kin do. Through their participation in family, school
and work, and community, youth are oriented toward orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness
in their local community.
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Youth without supportive relatives but with mentors and bereft of networks of support
networks are financially independent and required to work for their survival. Their employment in
low-wage, exploitative, and labor-intensive occupations has financial, physical, and mental health
consequences as youth take on various unexpected expenses such as rent, utility and cellphone
bills, and public transportation, while often remaining responsible for the families they leave
behind. Time in the US can orient youth toward common job practices such as brincando and the
importance of the English language in navigating schedules, pay, and interactions with English
speaking supervisors. Financial precarity can keep workers without relatives and supportive social
tie configurations from leaving their employment or enrolling in school, as it could detract from
weekly earnings. Thus, they remain oriented toward, adapted to, and embedded in the workplace.
Youth with mentors and budding or established local community organization ties are
engaged in processes of orientation and adaptation to the US sistema. As feelings of stability or a
sense of adaptation in one area of their lives is achieved, youth are motivated to orientation toward
new institutions that expand their social worlds and promote host community embeddedness.
Youth without networks of support are oriented toward the US labor market out of necessity. To
be bereft of support networks does not mean these youths live entirely in isolation. Indeed, they
interact with co-workers. However, these co-workers might not share information that orients
youth toward new opportunities for incorporation. As youth in community organizations
illuminate, it is exposure to similarly situated peers who are engaging forms of orientation and
adaptation that are different from their own that prompts action.
Organizations expected to be immigrant serving and immigrant incorporation can
unwittingly perpetuate suffering when youths’ needs are outside of the scope of services provided
by that organization. Yet, youth find unconventional means of support through community groups,
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such as peer-organized karate, hiking, and book clubs. With various work and financial obligations
and the time constraints associated with these, entry into community organizations is guided by
youths’ self-assessed needs, priorities, and interests. Just as ‘brincando’ occurs in the workplace,
youth can jump between organizations that might better serve them. In this way, youth evince
agency in their own incorporation through orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness.
The evolving orientation, adaptation and embeddedness of undocumented and unparented
youth in the US suggest that, contrary to existing conceptualizations of incorporation as a
socioeconomic outcome, incorporation can be experienced as a process guided by social tie
configurations and shaped by the unique institutions immigrants participate in. Furthermore, that
youth evince local or transnational orientations demonstrates that time in the US alone does not
equate incorporation.

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CHAPTER 5

Immigrant youth Cultures of Incorporation

The previous chapter examined how undocumented and unparented youth experience
orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness in the home and host societies as they participate in or
remain absent from institutions of work, school, and community life. The process of achieving
embeddedness is guided by youths’ social tie configurations and can result in a shift from a
transnational orientation to the local society as youths’ tenure in the US increases. I now turn to
my final research question: How do youths’ orientation and adaptation to US institutions and
society guide their experiences of incorporation in the US? I find that youth experience
incorporation through what I refer to as ‘Cultures of Incorporation’ that is made up of on-going
processes of forming narratives of overcoming and through giving back practices within their
institutional contexts in order to claim success and belonging in local or transnational societies.

TRADITIONAL MEASURES OF IMMIGRANT INCORPORATION

Immigration scholars working within assimilation frameworks assess immigrant
incorporation using two measures and determine different groups as successfully incorporated
depending on the measure applied to the group. The first of these is a conventional measure of
socioeconomic status (SES) attainment such as education, income, occupation, and
homeownership relative to the native-born American population. The second measures
intergenerational progress, or the “extent to which descendants of immigrants move beyond the
SES measures of their parents’ generation” (Zhou, Lee, Vallejo, et al. 2008: 41). Unauthorized
immigrant youth, such as Latino immigrants, may struggle to achieve incorporation when
measured conventionally given the limitations on education, occupation, and homeownership
posed by their undocumented status. Intergenerationally, however, the undocumented high school
165
or college graduate may achieve a higher degree of incorporation than their parent with lesser
educational attainment. The unconventional trajectory of unauthorized, unparented Latino
immigrant youth poses challenges to the application of these measures because their parents are
not in the US and makes a case for the reconceptualization of meanings of positive immigrant
incorporation.
These measures lead to the assessment of incorporation as a socioeconomic outcome of
educational attainment and occupational mobility. Among the immigrant groups deemed to be the
most successfully assimilated are those with high levels of socioeconomic mobility through
occupational attainment and wealth accumulation such as Cubans in Miami (Portes and Zhou
1993; Portes and Puhrmann 2015), and highly-educated East and South Asian groups such as
Chinese, Japanese, Indian immigrants (Jimenez and Horowitz 2013). In this vein, the citizenship
deservingness claims of undocumented, college-educated youth, referred to as Dreamers, is based
on their potential for contributions to the US labor market and economy.
lxviii

Undocumented and unparented Latino youth face various barriers to institutional
participation as they do not have their biological parents to guide their socialization and
incorporation and may also have little to no access to formal academic mentors and guides. Their
ability to achieve conventional markers of incorporation weaken given these disadvantages.
Traditional theories of immigrant incorporation would have it that these unparented youth will not
achieve positive incorporation. Likewise, those who grow up without a parent and are themselves
the first immigrant generation in their families, do not have an immigrant parent against which
their incorporation can be measured. However, undocumented, unparented immigrant youth are
oftentimes fully financially independent and are vulnerable to labor exploitation and poverty
166
(Canizales 2014), isolation, and mental health challenges of depression, anxiety, and fear
(Canizales 2015; 2018).
Undocumented, unparented youth who enter traditional schools with the full financial
support of relatives have greater access to the socioeconomic markers of educational and
occupational mobility that existing frames of incorporation and citizenship deservingness employ.
However, the majority of youth who arrive in the US undocumented and unparented do not receive
full financial support from relatives. Thus, their everyday forms of institutional participation and
incorporation fall outside of the traditional markers of socioeconomic incorporation of high levels
of educational and occupational achievement. Undocumented and unparented youth workers
without fully supportive relatives continue to live in dilapidated housing in MacArthur Park, to
work in exploitative occupations, delay entry into traditional schooling, and to be undocumented
and unparented. As they face structural constraints to mobility, I argue that youth employ a set of
strategies and practices to maintain a sense of stability and status in their everyday lives, which I
call ‘Cultures of Incorporation.’ In light of their institutional marginality and socioeconomic
disadvantages, incorporation may take on new meanings and avenues of attainment.
Cultures of Incorporation refers to the cultural elements that youth adopt to make meaning
of and practice incorporation when they are unable to draw on the traditional frames of mobility
and membership deservingness. Youth enact these Cultures of Incorporation within the institutions
that their social tie configurations orient them toward. Cultures of Incorporation encapsulates two
elements. First, youth construct narratives of overcoming obstacles to incorporation. These
narratives of the self are important mechanisms of psychological well-being (Canizales 2015). The
second element includes practices of giving back youth enact in transnational and US contexts that
are born out of their embeddedness within these spaces. Together, these Cultures of Incorporation
167
represent markers youth draw on to measure their orientation toward, adaptation to, and
embeddedness into the US sistema that they once felt isolated from. Cultures of Incorporation
shows how youth make meaning of their experiences and how incorporation plays out in practice
within institutions.

MARGINALIZED GROUPS REDEFINING SUCCESS AND BELONGING

Researchers show that immigrant communities that are excluded from the economic,
political, and social mainstream, reconfigure notions of civic life and community in ways that defy
meanings of citizenship and include their own experiences (Brettell 2006; Negron- Gonzales 2013;
Rosaldo 1994). Undocumented Latino immigrants in the US experience a dual-exclusion as they
are physically present but legally excluded in their host society because of their undocumented
status and physically absent but perhaps socially and financially involved in their home community
(Menjívar 2006). Scholars have focused on labor market (Estrada 2012), cultural (Flores 2003),
legal (Coutin 1998; Terriquez 2011), and spatial (Canizales 2015; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014)
alternatives to the denial of incorporation and social inclusion in the mainstream. Two ways that
marginalized groups experience incorporation and belonging are detailed in existing literature.
These are: first, remaking meanings and redrawing parameters of success and second, giving back
to one’s community. I discuss these briefly below.
The power of creating new understandings of one’s experience in ways that counter stigma
and exclusion is perhaps most evident among working-class, minority populations in the US. The
dignity of working-class immigrant identity is challenged in the US where working-class men and
women alike are exploited in low-wage labor occupations (Camacho 2008; Sennett and Cobb
1993). Unable to achieve occupational and middle- class mobility because of the segmented
structure of the labor market, disadvantaged workers must construct new, moral identities.
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Sociologist Antonio Gramsci (1971) writes that marginalized groups develop cultural frames to
organize their thoughts and talk about the injustices they must navigate in their day-to-day lives.
In the Dignity of Working Men, Michele Lamont (2000) finds that working-class men in France
and the US form moral standards, as opposed to economic status, are the key principles of their
evaluations of worth and perceptions of social hierarchy. Similarly, Jennifer Silva (2014) finds
that working-class young adults draw on their ability to manage their emotions in the “mood
economy” as indicative of their successful transition into adulthood.
lxix
Likewise, household heads
who supplement their income with the Earned Income Tax Credit counter the stigmatization of
federal support by drawing on narratives of hard work (Halpern-Meekin, Edin, Tach and Sykes
2015). Finally, working-class children of immigrants who work alongside their parents develop
narratives of responsibility and maturity when ridiculed by their peers (Estrada and Hondagneu-
Sotelo 2013).
lxx
Among informal day laborers, the ability to craft dignifying identities “becomes a
bulwark for maintaining self- esteem” in the face of injury, illness, poverty, insecurity and social
marginalization (Walter et al. 2004: 1162). Essentially, these narratives legitimize claims to
belonging in a society by reimagining and reorienting the markers of success.
Giving back can also signify incorporation and upward mobility in immigrants’ host
society. Among upwardly mobile Latino immigrants in the US, experiences of incorporate are
permeated with practices of giving back to kin and co-ethnics while also maintaining class
heterogeneous ties to their coethnics (Agius Vallejo 2012). Middle-class and elite Mexican
Americans, for example, give back to their parents and extended families who remain is
socioeconomically disadvantaged positions (Agius Vallejo and Lee 2009), coethnic community
through professional associations (Agius Vallejo 2012), starting co-ethnic businesses and banks
(Agius Vallejo and Canizales 2016; Agius Vallejo and Canizales n.d.), and serving in their local
169
communities.
lxxi
A study of Latina teachers concludes that despite various disadvantages as
immigrant women of color in the workplace, they engage in “extra work that Latina teachers
perceive as caring for the community as a social responsibility” (Flores, 2011; 326). These giving
back patterns differ by one’s class background. Those who grow up working-class adopt an
immigrant narrative of struggle and disadvantage that increases their likelihood of offering
financial and social support to families, extended kin, and poorer coethnics relative to those who
grow up middle-class (Agius Vallejo 2012).
Among transnational families, labor-migrant parents’ ability to remit economic and social
remittances to those who remain abroad serves as indicators of personal success in the US. As
economic providers, men’s success abroad is judged by economic indicators such as building a
house or starting a new business (Dreby 2010). Mothers, who are expected to oblige by strict
notions of nurturing motherhood must extend themselves to prove they are “worthy mothers” and
send more of their income to children at home (Abrego 2014:112). While giving back can create
challenges in accumulating achieving economic stability and wealth, real and perceived mobility
and capital accumulation contribute to collectivist orientations (Agius Vallejo 2012; Canizales
2015). Research has not considered how immigrant youth with families abroad engage in giving
back practices. I consider this and analyze how these practices contribute to a greater process of
incorporation.
I draw on this work to propose the ideas of ‘Cultures of Incorporation,’ which includes the
formation of narratives of dignity and pride in the work one does, but also considers the practices
employed within social structures—in this case, work— that counter stigma, exploitation and
exclusion. Cultures of Incorporation allows researchers and policy experts to consider
incorporation as processes that promote health (mental, emotional, and physical) and social
170
stability, which my previous research explores (Canizales 2018), rather than maintaining a
narrowed focus on socioeconomic mobility.
This dissertation has illustrated the various challenges undocumented, unparented youth
face in their adaptation that pose obstacles to incorporation trajectories traditionally defined and
measured. The undocumented youth in this study arrived in the US having fled violence and
poverty and limited opportunities for incorporation and mobility in their home societies in Central
America and Mexico. Los Angeles promises opportunities for work and education that youth view
as necessary to move themselves or their families—who remain in their country of origin— out of
these conditions. Because of the conditions of their migration, undocumented and unparented
youth have distinct incorporation starting points from those of undocumented Dreamers or today’s
unaccompanied minors. Much of the financially-independent unparented youths’ initial settlement
experience revolves around work and their transnational relationships and economic obligations.
This transnational orientation changes overtime for those who become embedded in US
institutions and are oriented toward their local community.
The subject-centered approach taken in this research allows for a centering of how
undocumented, unparented youth in the US “define, experience, and perceive” incorporation and
belonging as they come of age (Zhou, Lee, Vallejo, et al. 2008: 42). In this chapter, I will argue
that as youths’ tenure in the US increases and they actively participate in US institutions, they
develop Cultures of Incorporation that reconfigure their personal meanings of belonging,
successes, and citizenship to include their own narratives. Unparented youth who receive full
support from a relative, as mentioned above, are more likely to achieve traditional rites of passage
into adulthood including formal educational attainment, perhaps acquire a driver’s license and
obtain a work permit. I will show that unparented immigrant youth with supportive social tie
171
configurations of partially supportive relatives and mentors and peer groups, and who achieve
orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness, engage in Cultures of Incorporation based in the local
context. Meanwhile, those without support claim success and belonging in a transnational context.
FORMING CULTURES OF INCORPORATION

Narratives of Overcoming

Narratives of overcoming permeated conversations I had with youth throughout my four
years of fieldwork. Many youths measure their success in orientation and adaptation to life in the
US by their ability to overcome the traumas of the undocumented and unparented migration
journey and initial settlement and migration debt. Among Guatemalan Maya youth, narratives of
overcoming fear of discrimination and identification as indigenous were pervasive.
Narratives of overcoming trauma, fear, and emotional instability were common among
unparented youth who experienced unemployment, homelessness, struggled with addictions or
were largely absent from community life. These narratives were often developed within
community groups in which youth commiserated about their migration and settlement experiences,
especially related to work, school, family, and the emotional and mental health instability
associated with the challenges of navigating these. Voces de Esperanza exposed me to this as the
groups’ aim was to strengthen one’s personal position through self-duty and individualistic
practices and as a first step toward strengthening one’s community and family. For example, I met
Delia in 2012, when she described during a support group meeting that she had a deep-seated fear
of being in public, especially around men, which often kept her home from work or from engaging
in everyday community life. Delia, who was 20 years old at the time of our meeting, arrived from
Guatemala at the age of 14. She did not have relatives in the US but met a young man at the
garment factory where she found her first job. After a few months of courtship, Delia moved in
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with her partner, who quickly became physically and verbally abusive. She reluctantly attended
the informal support group Voces de Esperanza and began to “desahogar,” or vent. Through this
group, Delia describes how she began learning to control her emotions.
Delia: Before my life was scary, very sad. I learned here that someone needs to control
their emotions. I did that, and I feel better. I’m not afraid anymore…

Wilfredo: When you feel better, hopefully you will take advantage of that. When you feel
better. Go take a computer class. Then we can see you on Facebook.

With very little institutional embeddedness to draw from, Delia situates her incorporation to US
society in the support group context of therapeutic self-help and constructs a narrative of
overcoming trauma and fear to signal her increasing adaptation. The importance of social ties in
increasing embeddedness is reinforced here when Wilfredo, the group leader and Delia’s mentor,
encourages her to take another step toward orientation to US institutions and cultural practices
when he responds, “hopefully you will take advantage of that.” Wilfredo encourages Delia to take
a computer class and lightheartedly jokes that they might see her on a social media that group
participants use to communicate with one another, their peers from work and other community
groups, and their families abroad. Delia’s narrative of overcoming forges a pathway into local
community embeddedness and aspirations for broader incorporation.
As my fieldwork progressed, I noticed that the language of overcoming that was used
during Voces de Esperanza meetings permeated conversations outside of the support group as
youth referenced illustrative calls to self- responsibility and increased well-being. For example, on
a separate occasion when Wilfredo spoke about the importance of taking care of one’s own
financial responsibilities to avoid becoming overwhelmed with stress, worry and frustration, he
said: “If the ship is sinking, even if mom and dad are there, let it go. If you are okay, that is
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enough.” In an interview four months later, Miguel Antonio, a nineteen-year-old who has lived in
Los Angeles for four years, asserted his self-orientation by saying:
Voces has opened my mind to the idea that the important one is yourself. Like Wilfredo
says, if the ship is sinking … as long as you save yourself, “bye”, that is the most important
thing. Well, that’s what I’ve come to understand. It’s the reason why Voces is my energy.
It’s my strength. It’s what has helped me. It has taken me out of traumas from different
things.

No longer afraid to speak in public, Miguel Antonio attends English classes and boasts of his
participation. Another respondent describes overcoming fear of being in public alone after
enrolling in self-defense classes, while a young woman overcame her feelings of loneliness and
isolation by signing up for a Zumba class and attending a church-based youth group. In time, youth
begin superando (overcoming) the traumas of isolation, poverty and marginality.
Unparented youths’ overcoming narratives also center around “superando” financial
insecurity for themselves and their families. The claims of success and membership deservingness
of Dreamers is closely tied to high levels of educational attainment. For most financially-
independent, unparented youth attending, a traditional high school is challenging as it interferes
with their workday, which may range from 9 to 13 hours. Unparented youth with ties to families
abroad might be further confined to the workplace as they try to meet their family’s needs
(Canizales 2017).
As financial precarity can cause youth to isolate themselves (Canizales 2014; Canizales
n.d.), overcoming debt can represent a first step toward achieving financial stability. One young
garment worker, Angelina, explained how she joined a community organization where she met
various youth attending a local night school. She enrolled in school for 3 weeks but was unable to
balance her financial obligations. She overcame a “dilemma”—where she had to choose between
studying and eating because of her migration debt—of course, choosing to work. After 2 years of
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making payments, Angelina payed off her migration debt and is becoming oriented and adapting
to new social spheres of school and family. Angelina says,
It was a dilemma because I either studied or I ate… Now it isn’t as difficult… I paid my
migration debt. I can go to school, I can support my family. For example, work declines
around this time and I have a little cushion and I feel better.

Not having yet achieved a tangible goal or measure of incorporation, Angelina measures her
progress in orientation and adaptation by citing her re-enrollment in English school, reengagement
with her family, and her financial and emotional stability.
Finally, given the ethnoracial discrimination indigenous immigrants face, Guatemalan
Maya youth evince unique experiences in their obstacles to incorporation relative to non-
indigenous Latinos in this study (Batz 2014; Canizales 2015; Popkin 1999). Aaron best
exemplifies how ethnoracial discrimination and stigmatization can hinder the incorporation of
young people into their host society by causing rejection of identity and potential isolation. Aaron
is a 25-year-old Guatemalan Maya garment worker, who has been living in the US for nine years.
He articulately describes how this transition occurred in his life. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, he
did not identify as Mayan, but through education and self- preparation he began to awaken to a
new reality:
I did not accept that I am Maya. I felt that I am rejected there. I am rejected here. I could
not find help. I fell into depression and everything was bad; nothing was good. I asked
myself why other people are okay, and I am not. I would tell myself, “Well, it’s because I
am an indio.”

Aaron participates in a weekly support group where he spoke with non-indigenous Latino
immigrants about his Mayan culture. He recalls meeting the support group leaders eight years
before our interview and admiring that they constantly spoke of learning new things. He enrolled
in English as a second language (ESL) courses and began reading books that detailed Mayan
history. Aaron described his feelings in an interview:
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Aaron: I am barely awakening. I thought I was the only one that felt this way but then I
saw that a bunch of youth from my culture and my country are suffering. Many youth are
here but they are not studying and they just work and work. I started studying and noticed
we don’t have leaders. We don’t have anybody.
Stephanie: You said you feel as though you are waking up, to what are you awakening?
Aaron: Well, before I thought I was someone without value ... Before I thought that I was
indio, now I know I am not indio. I am Maya. Why am I Maya? Because my grandparents
and great grandparents are Mayan. My language is K’iche. Now I am seeing the reality, I
am waking up. It does not affect me now when people say, “You are Maya.” I say, “Yes,
yes I am” because I know who I am but the youth who do not know think that they are
being humiliated. It’s not like that.
Promoting a positive ethnic identity formation is a central pillar of this group. Increased
ethnic pride and co-ethnic ties facilitates youths’ process of overcoming the fear of being
discriminated against. This, in turn, can increase social interaction with those within and without
the individual’s ethnic group. This can lead to greater possibilities of incorporation by fostering
social and cultural capital development, and potential economic opportunities. A narrative of self-
acceptance can make young people resilient toward stigmatizing rhetoric in their communities and
beyond.
Notably, all youth in this study, including those with fully supportive relatives, employ
variations of narratives of overcoming. It is the components of these narratives that differ as they
are based in the unique obstacles youth face in their migration and settlement experiences, as well
as on the cultural frames they learn from the institutions they participate in. Workers might situate
their overcoming in finances or occupational mobility, while students may situate their overcoming
in language proficiency or educational mobility. Within their respective institutions,
undocumented, unparented youth develop narratives of achievement of stability in their finances,
education, social ties, emotions and mental health in everyday life to reframe their understandings
of successful incorporation.

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Giving Back Practices

Cultures of Incorporation not only include new ways of thinking about success and
belonging, but also youths’ practices within the institutions that their social tie configurations
orient them toward. Research concludes that helping others is an important part of self-definition
(Abrahams 1996; Agius Vallejo 2012; Canizales 2015). A study of upwardly mobile, middle-class
Mexican Americans demonstrate that those who grow up poor and achieve middle-class status
within one generation develop a collectivist orientation and give back to poorer kin, co-ethnics and
the larger ethnic community (Vallejo and Lee 2009).
lxxii
I add to this research by demonstrating
how embeddedness in institutions in the local or transnational context can shape the flow of
resources from unparented Latino youth to their local and/or transnational communities. Giving
back practices reflect degrees of embeddedness achieved by youth in each of the social tie
configuration categories developed in this research. Practices of giving back to local and
transnational societies is a strategy youth employ to manage their incorporation in a context of
structural exclusion and disadvantage.
Giving back transnationally
lxxiii

Having left their homes at young ages and without the certainty of support and a future in
the US, much of unparented youths’ initial settlement experiences revolve around everyday
survival and their transnational relationships and economic obligations. Indeed, the shared hope
upon arrival to the US is eventual return to the home country. Financial independence, as the
previous chapter shows, can relegate youth to the workplace. Research shows that long-term
attempts to juggle two households in the host and the home society can stagnate and defer
unaccompanied youth workers’ ability to participate in US institutions such as schools (Martinez
2016) or community groups (Canizales n.d.). For some, the only way to achieve stability is to sever
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transnational family ties. This practice was commonly observed when I began this research in 2012
as youth who were experiencing financial, educational, and health instability became oriented to
US institutions and American individualism and learned to prioritize their well-being and adopt a
rhetoric of self-responsibility (Canizales 2015). Overcoming obstacles to incorporation and
attaining real or perceived financial, emotional, and social stability, enables young people to
reengage lost transnational family ties and to give back. For those who do sever ties, such as
Angelina introduced above, the ability to reengage transnational ties symbolizes financial stability
and progress for some unparented youth.
While few youths practiced giving back to their transnational communities because of a
sense of stability, many remained transnationally oriented because they lacked social ties to their
local community outside of the workplace. Without a safety net of support, youth who experience
exploitation in the workplace and poverty in their everyday lives become restricted to what Mahler
(1995) refers to as “workaholic lives,” wherein they are dedicated primarily to work. Immigrants
with workaholic lives experience “workaholism is a product of their need to generate more wealth
than that required for their own sustenance” to include their debts and familial obligations (Mahler
ibid: 92). Workaholic lives are also a product of the US postindustrial economy that produces more
low-wage than well-paid occupations, including those that unparented youth occupy, and little
opportunities for mobility to leave these occupations. Youth work overtime hours and remain
strictly embedded in the workplace as a byproduct of the occupation they are in, which offers low-
wages and little opportunities for mobility within and outside of the industry itself. Youth
struggling to make ends meet, and without social ties that provide reprieve from resource
impoverishment, are relegated to the workplace.
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Although young people may not be attaining job promotions or movement from the
underground or mainstream economies, giving back to families left behind evince successful
orientation and adaptation to life in the US and increased incorporation for those who are
embedded in work and transnational contexts. For example, while Bryan has worked in the
garment industry for six years and has not enrolled in school himself, he has successfully put four
younger siblings through traditional schooling in Guatemala. He says,
I’ve spent a lot of money. I am struggling, fighting for my brother to finish. Many people
tell me, “No, well you don’t have a house. You have been here six years and you haven’t
done anything.” But I always think that I am doing the best thing for my family.

To Bryan, supporting his family abroad, especially in the form of funding education for his siblings
who will later enter careers that will propel the household economies forward, equates success.
After the 2014 surge, more undocumented and unparented young adults attached their success in
the US to their ability to keep their young siblings from undergoing an unaccompanied migration
journey. Others attach their claims of successful incorporation to giving back to aging parents.
Like Francisco who intended to be in the US for 3 years but was rounding out his 11
th
year at the
time of our interview. Francisco explains,
I know that I still not have achieved everything that I said I wanted to do in this country.
But many times… because my dad is old and he always has health problems, I worry for
him. I am scared that while I am here something will happen to him... But being here, I can
do something different. I can help them.

These examples show that much like the experiences of migrant parents who sacrifice their
incorporation and economic mobility in the host society to support those they leave behind—
typically their children—undocumented and unparented youth view their transnational giving back
practices as a marker of success.
Not all youth are able to provide tangible support to families abroad but attempt to draw
on the social and cultural capital they acquire in the US to “mejorar la vida (better the life)” of
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those left behind, as was the case for Timoteo who is the oldest of four siblings. When he migrated
to the US from Guatemala at the age of fourteen after his alcoholic father passed, Timoteo began
working in the Downtown Los Angeles garment industry. He recalls struggling to send at least
$100 per month to his mother and siblings. After some consideration, Timoteo resigned to sending
a small sum when the family reported a specific expense. Interestingly, Timoteo, who attends
weekly mass at a local church, began learning about family dynamics (in a Westernized American
context) and altered the way he related to his family abroad. He said that teachings at his Catholic
church mass, “me ha ayudado mucho a vero como es la familia, como es el ser humano (has really
helped me see how the family is, what the human being is like).” Timoteo then began making a
new contribution to his household abroad via social remittances.
He aprendido mucho lo que es la religiosidad, lo que es la religión y mi mamá y mi familia.
Siempre estoy diciéndole a mi mamá, ‘sabes qué mamá? no tienes la culpa de no saber
cómo motivarnos, pero Dios te va a ayudar.’ Y ahorita estoy ayudando a mi mamá para
saber cómo orientar a mis hermanos.

I have learned a lot about religiosity, about religion and my mother and family. I am always
telling her, ‘You know what mom? It is not your fault that you don’t know what to motivate
us, but God is going to help you.’ I am helping my mom to know how to orient my siblings.

Here, again, we see an example of how older sibling who have experienced undocumented and
unparented life in the US do physical and emotional labor on behalf of younger siblings so that
they might not have to endure similar “sufrimiento (suffering)” that could prompt their desire to
leave their home countries and the life of an undocumented, unparented immigrant in the US. This,
unfortunately, is not the case for all siblings, as many are unable to fulfill these obligations.
In all, youth acknowledge that outsiders deem their absence from school or stagnated
occupational mobility as unproductive—particularly in a political moment when the high-
achieving Dreamer has dominated the immigration debate and news media in the US. Youth might
also work to negotiate their inability to send financial remittances to expectant families abroad.
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However, their institutional embeddedness and transnational community orientations allow them
to draw on a Cultures of Incorporation that encapsulates giving back to those they have left
behind—financially and socially. Despite their lack of mobility in the US context, even across 11
years, giving back to promote the mobility of families abroad serves as a measure of success.
Conversely, youth with supportive social tie configurations, and who experience a local
community orientation engage in Cultures of Incorporation through giving back to local
economies, communities, and culture.
Giving back locally

Undocumented and unparented youth embedded in their local communities but without
fully supportive relatives that orient them toward traditional schools encounter a political climate
that is hostile toward undocumented immigrant workers and unaccompanied youth. Financially-
independent youth workers make claims to incorporation based on their contributions to
institutions in which they are embedded—that is, the US economy and community life—and see
themselves as making significant contributions to these.
My previous work with garment-working unparented immigrant youth demonstrates how
they resist claims of being uneducated and unskilled by detailing the tenacity and artistry necessary
to sew a straight seam, embroider tops, or bead satin gowns. This work, many youths argue, is
difficult and exploitative, but their continuous labor evinces their dedication to contributing to US
society. Wilmer is a construction worker and details a similar frame of productivity and belonging
when he explains,
I am contributing to this country when I work a job in different places, like constructing
buildings. People are building the infrastructure of this country. They are making the
country grow and that is what makes someone part of the country.

He continues:

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…being American does not mean being born in the country or to be a certain color of skin.
It means we are supporting the country and the people who are around us.

Although their occupations and work schedules do not allow youth to enroll in traditional
high schools, learn the English language, or make significant economic gains, undocumented and
unparented young people view the everyday work they do as indicative of their embeddedness in
US society and their belonging. Youths’ local community contributions can be through labor in a
workplace context, through moral mentorship if embedded in churches, to peers’ education if
involved in book clubs, to community health if participating in recreational groups, and so on.
Youth who describe overcoming their traumas of fear, stress, depression and, in some
cases, alcohol and drug addiction develop a personalized commitment to other immigrant youth in
their local communities. For example, Aaron, who is a 25-year-old Guatemalan man, had been
living in the US for nine years at the time of our interview. Aaron is Mayan K’iche but grew up in
Guatemala City where he learned Spanish. Along with his light skin and dark hair, Aaron’s Spanish
fluency often allows him to pass as Ladino or, in some contexts, Salvadoran. Aaron recalls that
when he arrived in Pico Union, he did not like to identify as Guatemalan Maya as he wanted to
avoid discrimination and ridicule. After six years of having only moved between work and home,
Aaron finally enrolled in an English language adult school and began reading books that detailed
Mayan history. As Aaron’s understanding and pride in his culture and ethnoracial identity grew,
he reflected on the numbers of young people who experience similar fears of discrimination but
who lack resources to overcome them. During our interview, he said, ‘Many youth are here but
they are not studying and they just work and work. I started studying and noticed we don’t have
leaders. We don’t have anybody.’ In response, Aaron started a book club at a local coffee shop
and began giving small seminars at his local youth group that focused on self-esteem and
confidence. Youth who are embedded in local community institutions may identify a challenge
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that they have personally overcome and then work to give back to others in their community who
experience similar obstacles to stability and incorporation in everyday life. In this way, Aaron and
various others may establish themselves as community leaders and forge a new generation of
mentors for undocumented and unparented immigrant youth in their neighborhoods.
Youths’ desire to give back to their local communities through leadership and mentorship
was evinced by Andrés, who sat with me in a Pico-Union community garden, and vehemently
expressed that though he was not in a position to help others, it was a strong motivator for his
pursuit of learning the English language. He said,
I have to prepare myself more to help someone. Right now, I don’t have the preparation to
be able to help someone. I need to learn more, I have to work harder at school. So that one
day I can help someone in my community. Where I come from there are many people in my
community that way. So, I need to put more effort into my dreams and my goals and more
than anything prepare myself more, to be okay with myself to be able to help someone.

Those who gain strategies for orientation, adaptation, and embeddedness in the local context see
themselves as potential leaders to peers. Thus, giving back is a characteristic of their incorporation.
Giving back can also be a pursuit of status in a society that is unwelcoming at best and hostile at
worst. By this frame, one can continually become incorporated into their host society as the reach
of their giving back practices expands.
Not unlike existing frames of immigrant membership deservingness, undocumented and
unparented youth draw on their giving back practices as a form of demonstrating their productivity
and contributions to US society. I interviewed Bernice in a church courtyard between mass and
her young adults’ leadership meeting on a sunny Spring afternoon. Bernice is a 26-year-old
Salvadoran woman. She arrived in the US at 16 and lived with her sister for one year before moving
into her employers’ home where she now works as a live-in housekeeper. Bernice does not speak
English, has not attended school, but is very actively involved with her church youth group and a
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Salvadoran community organization, both of which are located in Pico Union. Bernice performs
dance routines in various shows aimed at fundraising for educational projects in her home and host
communities. In the two years I had come to know Bernice before our interview, she most often
spoke of her excitement of having participated in an event that gathered enough funding for ten
computers in her hometown in El Salvador. Uncharacteristic of her usual outspoken self, Bernice
very shyly asked that I not record our interview because she was embarrassed at the thought of me
listening to her voice at a later time. I jotted down notes during our very animated interview. I then
audio recorded a thorough recounting of our interview in my car, which included the following
description:
I asked [Bernice] what she thinks about the term ‘illegal’. She said very clearly that the
term ‘illegal’ is used too harshly and it makes it sound like people come here with bad
intentions and wanting to be a burden on the US. [Bernice] thinks that since being in the
US. she has only helped build the economy and contribute to her community. She
explained that she knows she is a contributing member of society because she works. She
also pays her taxes and that she…if anything is more helpful than the average US citizen
because she’s part of these organizations that are geared towards helping people and
helping their [shared] community. She confessed that she thinks there are many selfish
Americans, selfish citizens who don’t get involved in any of the community organizations
in their neighborhoods, or when you reach out [to them] for fundraising, they say, “what
does this do for me?”

[Bernice] doesn’t see that people are really geared toward helping the community and
because she is-- because she is actively involved in helping the community-- this makes
her a productive citizen. She used the word “productive” to describe herself. [Bernice] sees
herself as productive because she works and repeated that she is interested in helping
people. She doesn’t consider herself American because she is from another country, she
doesn’t speak the language. She considers herself a social citizen. She clarified that if
citizenship is based on participation in community, again, she is an active participant and
citizen. [Bernice] explained that she does her part and that if someone told her that she
doesn’t belong here, she would ask them “why did you come here?” And if they say, “to
make a better life,” she would say “I did, too, but we’re just doing it in different ways.”

Bernice remakes the meanings of incorporation through the formation of a moral identity
based on work, paying taxes and giving back to her community via organizational involvement.
Her moral identity allows her to place value on the forms of community participation she can
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afford—one based in giving back to local community. Finding similar claims of productivity
among immigrant adult workers in Arizona, Cecilia Menjívar (2016) writes that identifying oneself
as a productive worker functions as a “marker of neoliberal citizenship [immigrants] have
learned—through living highly regulated and circumscribed lives—that the state might reward
(with the conferral of legal status) and society will recognize with (at least partial) inclusion” (599).
She compares herself to non-contributing US-born Americans who she says not only do not get
involved in volunteer organizations but refuse to donate funds unless it personally benefits them.
Interestingly, these ways of giving back qualify Berenice’s deservingness of inclusion despite
being labeled as ‘illegal’ or as an at-risk outsider. Thus, immigrant youth with access to social ties
that facilitate embeddedness in the local community make claims of incorporation rooted in the
institutions they have access to. As they give back, young people construct moral identities based
on work, participating in the local economy, giving back to their local community via
organizational involvement and community service.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

I introduce immigrant youth ‘Cultures of Incorporation,’ as a multi-dimensional
understanding of how unaccompanied migrant youths experience incorporation into US society.
In contrast to Dreamers, undocumented, unparented Latino immigrant youth enter the US as
workers, rather than students, without the guarantee of familial or community support. Facing
disproportionate disadvantages, such as migration trauma and debt, financial independence and
labor exploitation, and a society that is unwelcoming of undocumented, low-skilled and dark-
skinned Latino migrants, these youths cannot reach opportunities for traditional markers of social
mobility.
185
Undocumented, unparented migrant youth in the US claim successful incorporation by
crafting personal narratives of overcoming hardship and through giving back practices that are
enacted in the various institutions they participate in. As the lines between the undocumented
immigrants and documented and naturalized immigrants brightens, undocumented young people
embedded in local organizations work to establish moral identities of belonging in the US
institutional context. Interview respondents consistently describe that those who belong in a
society are those who give back and who care about the growth and well-being of their community
and those within it. These moral identities are often formed in contrast to US-born young adults
who my respondents describe as not caring about their neighbors and community.
Cultures of Incorporation suggests that incorporation cannot solely be measured by static
educational or occupational outcomes but includes on-going processes of institutional orientation
and embeddedness within distinct institutional contexts that are guided by social tie configurations.
The Cultures of Incorporation included in this chapter focus on the beliefs and practices of those
without relatives supporting them. This is not to say that youth with fully supportive relatives
cannot practice Cultures of Incorporation.
As we can recall, unparented youth with fully supportive relatives are more likely to attend
US schools, delay entry into the workplace, and join community organizations that their long-
settled adult caregivers participate in. I find that the narratives of overcoming and giving back
practices within these contexts approximate that of the Dreamer youth. Hence, overcoming can
occur within school settings (Enriquez 2011; Gonzales 2015; Gonzales and Gleeson 2011; Negron-
Gonzales 2013; Suarez-Orozco, Hernandez, Casanova 2015) and giving back can take the form of
community activism or transmission of capital within the household (Nichols 2013; Seif 2004;
2011). In these cases, transnational ties can temper (Menjivar 2002). The Cultures of Incorporation
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of unparented youth without supportive relatives allows us to think beyond educational and
occupational mobility facilitated by resources obtained from parents (or adults) as measures of
incorporation. Instead, Cultures of Incorporation introduces youths’ achievement of health,
financial, and educational stability over time as a marker of success.

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CHAPTER 6

Immigrant incorporation as a process in everyday life

Given the growing number of undocumented and unparented youth growing up in US
society today, and the increasing heterogeneity of immigrants’ receiving contexts my work with
undocumented and unparented youth, this research has interrogated how do undocumented,
unparented youth experience incorporation and belonging in US society. I have answered this
question by examining why undocumented, unparented youth migrate to the US and how they
settle in the US, the spheres of society that undocumented and unparented youth participate in, and
what mechanisms within these social spheres prompt their patterns of participation.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, I find that unparented Central American and
Mexican young-adults in Los Angeles and cities throughout the US knowingly journeyed north as
undocumented minors in search of opportunities for social and economic mobility in their home
countries. Once in the US, they come of age not only without legal protection but without their
parents and therefore anticipate financial independence. How youth they settle in the US and
participate in the social spheres of school, work, family, and community life depends on their
social tie configurations that range from fully supportive non-parent relatives to growing up
without supportive social ties.
Access to fully supportive relatives can delay entry into the labor force and instead facilitate
access to education. Their incorporation pathway more closely approximates that of undocumented
Dreamer youth. Some youth might encounter supportive mentors and peers and others may remain
without support. Those who do not secure financial support from their social tie configurations
may enter into exploitative, low-wage labor, like that in factories, restaurants, or warehouses. Like
many undocumented adult laborers (Aranda 2007; Moran-Taylor and Menjívar 2005), they
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initially have the hope of returning to their home countries but find the structure of the labor
market, low wages, the undocumented status, along with the political and economic uncertainties
in their home countries, keeps them in the US longer than intended. As tenure in the US increases,
youth are oriented to US institutions and adapt to life in the US. Youth without supportive relatives
face various obstacles that delay their incorporation, such as financial, educational, and mental
health instability. For many the traditional markers of success such as high levels of education or
occupational mobility are out of reach. Youth draw on their institutional contexts and patterns of
participation in school, work, family, and community—locally and transnationally—to remake
new meanings of belonging. The narratives and practices unparented youth employ in re-imagining
belonging exemplify a new framework for understanding marginalized immigrant groups
incorporation in the US, which I term Cultures of Incorporation.

CENTERING RESEARCH ON UNDOCUMENTED AND UNPARENTED YOUTH
Until now, our understanding of immigrant youth incorporation has relied on snapshots of
youths’ role in migration and their educational and occupational experiences and aspirations. This
research brings various new insights into the study of immigration and immigrant youth
incorporation in the US by centering immigrant youth without migrant parents in migration and
host society incorporation. To do so, I weave together several bodies of literature. Incorporation
and citizenship theory frame children as dependent on households and traditional schools for
resources that promote incorporation. Rather than being ‘luggage,’ scholars have begun to examine
youth agency, investigating how long-settled 1.5 undocumented or American-born youth use their
American resources (like English-language skills) to help their parents and families adapt by either
189
serving as translators or economic contributors to mediate parental disadvantage. Ultimately, we
do not know where unparented youth fit within these theories.
I examine why unaccompanied Central American and Mexican youth embark on an
undocumented migration journey and the extent to which adult caretakers (parents and guardians)
are involved in the migration process. Despite children’s depiction as passive in the migration
process, young people talk about themselves as actively involved in the migration decision-making
process. Unparented youth migrate independent of their parents’ migration status because of their
sense of diminishing economic and educational opportunities, safety, and social participation in
their home countries as they come of age.
Incorporation theorists might expect that undocumented, unparented youth would
experience downward assimilation or stagnated mobility, but citizenship theory proposes that
alternative pathways toward incorporation through everyday social and cultural participation exist.
This research moves immigrant assimilation and citizenship theories forward by looking beyond
the assumption that children are dependent on parents and traditional schools and begin to navigate
social incorporation as they leave these assimilatory institutions.
Patterns of incorporation are shaped primarily by social tie configurations that guide
youths’ orientation to these institutions. Social tie configurations guide the spheres of society and
in what institutions undocumented and unparented youth participate in. I find that they participate
in work, a small minority in traditional high schools, in adult English language schools, and local
and transnational family and community life. Youth are exposed to different incorporation
mechanism within each sphere of interaction, whether it be financial and emotional support of
relatives, the English language in classrooms, cultural ideologies and practices within community
groups, or maintained orientations toward the transnational sphere.
190
Youths’ social ties to community groups and mentors orients them to a larger social
landscape, while also oriented toward American cultural ideologies such as self-help and
individualism. Community groups offer social and cultural mechanisms that help change their
orientation from transnational embeddedness toward embeddedness in US society and
incorporation in everyday life. Youths’ everyday institutional participation becomes not just about
links to transnational obligations, but they develop aspirations that stem from their embeddedness
in the US. Incorporation is deepened when overcoming challenges to incorporation, such as
financial instability or depression and anxiety, within a group setting and, youth develop feelings
of solidarity and commitment to the local community, causing them to see themselves as potential
mentors for similarly situated peers—which feeds back into this incorporation process of
orientation, adaptation and strengthened embeddedness (Canizales 2015).
Unlike unparented youth whose social ties orient them toward US institutions in which
their incorporation increases, those without ties to the local community contract into isolation and
remain confined to participation in work to get them by, not necessarily get ahead. They are
incorporating into the workplace while remaining transnationally oriented. Although some youth
find themselves in this social tie configuration because they do not have relatives in the US or
become involved in community groups, there are cases where youth are left without support
because their ties to non-parent relatives and mentors break down or because youth find that a
community organizations’ need for financial contributions from its members to be too strenuous,
and retreat from them.
Thus, undocumented and unparented youth are actively participating in family, work,
traditional schools and adult English language schools, and community groups. The patterns in
which they participate in these spheres are shaped by their social tie configurations that orient
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youth toward local or transnational community embeddedness. These everyday forms of
institutional participation and incorporation fall outside of the traditional markers of
socioeconomic incorporation of high levels of educational and occupational achievement.
Undocumented and unparented youth workers without fully supportive relatives continue to live
in dilapidated housing in MacArthur Park, to work in exploitative occupations, and to be
undocumented and unparented. Given this, I propose Cultures of Incorporation to suggest that
incorporation cannot solely be measured by static outcomes but must be considered ongoing
processes of institutional embeddedness and orientation within distinct institutional contexts. This
framework takes into account the narratives and practices that unparented youth employ for
everyday stability and status in a context of disadvantage, precarity, and discrimination. Cultures
of Incorporation not only include new ways of thinking about success and belonging, but also
youths’ practices within the institutions that their social tie configurations orient them toward.
Practices of giving back to local and transnational societies is a strategy youth employ to manage
their incorporation in a context of structural exclusion and disadvantage.
Educational attainment is a pillar of success and productivity in the US and proves central
to the narratives of incorporation of the youth in this study, both inside and outside of educational
institutions. Existing immigrant integration policies often include high levels of education or
educational enrollment as a qualification for eligibility. Among financially-independent,
undocumented and unparented youths’ exploitative, low-wage occupations and work schedules do
not allow youth to enroll in traditional high schools, learn the English language, or make significant
economic gains. However, they draw on Cultures of Incorporation that includes the narrative that
the everyday work they do as indicative of their embeddedness in US society and their belonging.
Youth who never enroll or complete school acknowledge that outsiders deem their absence from
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school or stagnated occupational mobility as unproductive. However, their workplace
embeddedness and transnational community orientations allow them to draw on a Culture of
Incorporation that encapsulates giving back to those they have left behind. Despite their lack of
mobility in the US context, even across 11 years, giving back to promote the mobility of families
abroad serves as a measure of success. Youth with supportive social tie configurations, and who
experience a local community orientation engage in Cultures of Incorporation through giving back
to local economies, communities, and culture. Youths’ local community contributions can be
through labor in a workplace context, through moral mentorship if embedded in churches, to peers’
education if involved in book clubs, to community health if participating in recreational groups,
and so on. Youth who gain strategies for orientation and adaptation see themselves as potential
leaders to peers; thus, giving back is very much a part of their incorporation.

LEARNING FROM UNPARENTED LATINO YOUTH IN LOS ANGELES

The study of financially-independent, unparented youth who come of age in adult, work
and community spaces and aware of their ‘illegality’ can advance incorporation and citizenship
theories in various ways. First by considering how incorporation and citizenship can be
experienced as a process of orientation and adaptation to distinct US institutions, not simply
endpoints. Second, by challenging the assumption that children have access to supportive
household. Newcomer youth migrants’ access to institutions that grant traditional forms of
incorporation are not equally accessible by all but are shaped by the material and emotional
resources they receive through their social tie configurations. And third, that despite extreme forms
of marginalization and disadvantage, immigrants can remake meanings of success to context-based
narratives and practices of belonging that defy predictions of a grim future. Theories of
incorporation and citizenship should include the experiences of youth as active agents navigating
193
adult spaces, and the meanings that immigrants make of their experiences. Cultures of
Incorporation offers a frame for developing this line of research.
Empirically, this research moves the field forward by examining the incorporation
trajectories of youth outside of families and traditional schools, whose primary goal is to work,
and who are aware of their undocumented status as they grow up in the US. This population has
remained unstudied until now. While researchers focus on parents and schools as the primary
institutions for orientation to US society and positive incorporation among immigrant youth, my
research shows that immigrant youth are also navigating non-traditional schools, the workplace,
and community groups in their local community context. Through their participation in these
spheres, they are accumulating, negotiating, and in some cases, redistributing various forms of
capital (e.g. social, human, and cultural). Taking note of migrant youths’ agency is critical in
deepening our understanding of youths’ social worlds and their opportunities for and roadblocks
to incorporation in the host society. In this study, youths’ agency is evinced from their decision to
migrate to how they navigate the tensions between school and work. Youths’ agency also
demonstrated in their shifting orientation from the transnational to local community.
The incorporation process of undocumented and unparented youth in Los Angeles
demonstrates that incorporation-promoting resources exist within communities that are expected
to foster downward assimilation or stagnated mobility because they are densely populated by
newly arrived, working-class, undocumented immigrants. The MacArthur Park community hosts
these community characteristics and remains a primary destination for newly arrived
undocumented and unparented Latino immigrant youth looking for work in Los Angeles—and
incorporation is happening in everyday life. Embeddedness in one sphere of interaction between
immigrants and the host society can provide capital to maneuver greater institutional participation
194
and ultimately guide youth toward broader social incorporation. This research shows that
immigrant incorporation can take place within distinct local or transnational community contexts.
The more embedded unparented youth become in US institutions, the more likely they are to shift
from a transnational to a local orientation (see also Canizales 2015). Youths’ shifting orientation
from transnational to local urges a revisiting of the tension between transnationalism and local
community embeddedness, particularly as it is shaped by age at migration and tenure in the US.
Future research might also benefit from a further examination of the role of space and geography
in the availability of social tie configurations, which contribute to youths’ access to material and
emotional resources and institutional participation that guide the orientation and adaptation
process.
As youth enter into different pathways of orientation and adaptation within diverse
institutional contexts, they develop new meanings of incorporation and social belonging that are
distinct from the traditional markers of success. I propose Cultures of Incorporation as a framework
for immigrant youths’ incorporation that allows us to think about incorporation for groups that are
do not have access to traditional educational institutions and occupations that promote upward
mobility. Unparented youth are making sense of and practicing incorporation in social spheres that
are assumed to be adult spaces. The elements encapsulated by Cultures of Incorporation—
narratives of overcoming and practices of giving back to local and transnational communities—
demonstrate that immigrant incorporation and belonging is not only an endpoint, but an on-going
process of institutional participation and self-construction within unique incorporation contexts.
Immigrant youth, rather than being passive in migration and incorporation, are actively navigating
everyday life without parents and papers in the host society—becoming embedded in a local
incorporation context or remaining tied to the transnational community. Cultures of Incorporation
195
for financially independent youth include trying to create value from work. Future research should
more deeply consider how youth global capitalism and in a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric
depicts immigrants as drain on society and when neoliberalism devalues work.

US IMMIGRATION POLICY AND THE FUTURE OF UNACCOMPANIED MINORS IN
THE US

This research began in 2012 shortly after Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was
announced by President Barack Obama. While unaccompanied minor migrants from Central
America and Mexico were crossing into the US at this time (and long before), they did not make
national or international news until 2 years later.
lxxiv
Finding Home continued to develop when, in
2014, unaccompanied children from the Central America Northern Triangle and in the two years
after the ‘surge’ of unaccompanied minor migrants. During this time, the US saw the end of
Obama-era immigration policies that included both increased efforts to deport undocumented
immigrants with criminal records and the recently arrived, while promoting the integration of those
deemed deserving, such as long-settled families and youth.
lxxv

In 2017, Donald Trump won election as president on, among other discriminatory stances,
an anti-immigrant platform. Immigration and border security initiatives and priorities under Trump
administration have included tightening borders, limiting refugees, enacting a travel ban, ending
DACA protections, increasing interior enforcement, defunding sanctuary cities, and ending legal
protection of potentially trafficked children. On January 25, 2017, among his first few days in
office, Trump signed two immigration-related executive orders that aim to intensify immigrant
criminalization along the US-Mexico border and in the US interior. The first of these, “Border
Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” ordered the immediate construction of a
border wall to “secure the southern border of the United States.”
lxxvi
This executive order also set
196
out to hire 5000 additional Border Patrol agents, and construct, operate, control facilities (or
establish contracts with these aims) to detain aliens at or near the US Mexico border. Congress
agreed to fund 5300 detention beds in facilities, increasing from 34000 to 39324. Emphasizing the
disposability and undesirability of immigrants, Trump also called for the prompt deportation of
undocumented immigrants after apprehension. In the US interior, this order reinstituted the 287(g)
Program, which allows local law enforcement agents in western and southwestern states to enforce
immigration law by investigating immigration cases, make immigration-related arrests, and take
custody of immigrants on the basis of both criminal and civil immigration violations.
lxxvii
The
second of these orders, known as the Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,
terminates the 2014 Priority Enforcement, which shielded approximately 87 percent of
unauthorized immigrants from removal. It also restores the Secure Communities program, an
authorizes the hiring of an additional 10,000 ICE agents (DHS 2017). These executive orders work
to criminalize undocumented immigrants in the US by prioritizing their removal.
In a far cry from the strands of receptivity that the Obama administration offered through
protections of immigrant children and youth, the Trump administration has worked to lift and limit
policies and programs that support the settlement and incorporation of immigrant children in the
US—both long settled and recently arrived. In regard to unaccompanied minors, Trump has
tightened the definition of those who can quality for Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a program
intended for abused and abandoned foreign-born children living in the United States, claiming that
the program is taken advantage of by those who apply. Adults who hire coyotes, or guides, to
transport children into the US are being targeted for criminal prosecutions, an approach to
enforcement no previous administration has taken.
lxxviii
The Trump administration is also worked
to end to the legal settlement of children in custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in
197
communities throughout the US and narrow the definition of “unaccompanied minor” to exclude
youth who, although migrating alone, arrive in the US to find a parent or legal guardian who is
able to take legal care and custody of the child, which accounts for all children resettled through
ORR. Finally, to remove protections of children still to come, the Trump administration ended the
Central American Minors Program that allowed minors still in El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Honduras to apply for refugee status and enter the US legally.
lxxix

Under this administration, the long-settled undocumented youth with high levels of
education, community engagement, and who have been heralded as American in every sense
besides legal status and have been looked upon favorably in the immigration debate have come
under attack. Nearly 800,000 undocumented youth were granted legal protections through DACA
since 2012. However, in September 2017, Attorney General Jeff sessions announced that the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would be terminated after March 5, 2018.
lxxx

Sessions espoused various claims for rescinding this program. Among them was that the two-year
reprieve from deportation and work permit, “among other things contributed to a surge of minors
at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences.” Conflating long-settled
Dreamers with children of the 2014 minor migrant border crisis decontextualizes the very different
experiences that have brought these two groups of immigrant youth to the US. DACA-qualifying
youth, as detailed throughout this work, tend to be high-achieving students, unknowingly brought
to the US by their parents, and who have participated in schools and local communities in
traditional enough ways to allow feelings of indistinguishability from their US-born peers.
Conversely, the unaccompanied migrant youth of the 2014 surge left their homes fleeing extreme
violence and poverty. The persistence of home country conditions, rather than rumors of a 2-year
deportation reprieve and work permit, will sustain unaccompanied minor migration. This discourse
198
works to target immigrant children and youth as a threat and justify the elimination of programs
and policies that secures their future and well-being in the US.
Throughout this time, the immigration debate has centered on Mexico and Central
America, among other “shit hole” countries. During his third presidential debate, Trump referred
to Mexicans as “bad hombres.” In his 2016 Person of the Year in TIME Magazine interview,
Trump referred to Central Americans as, “… tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re
killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished” (Scherer 2017).
Similar sentiments were repeated in the 2018 State of the Union address as Central Americans
were conflated with the gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. This language has policy implications
as it guides who is deemed as worthy of protection. Although not explicitly linked to their role in
hosting unaccompanied minors, the targeting of Central Americans continued in 2018 when
Donald Trump initiated the cancellation of Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans-- the
largest Central American group in the US. This not only further criminalizes Central Americans
but works to removing hundreds of thousands of people who could potentially sponsor
unaccompanied minors.
There is no doubt that undocumented youth, today’s unaccompanied minors, Central
American and Mexican- origin immigrants in the US more broadly are experiencing a hostile and
unwelcoming US context. The fate of unaccompanied youth in the US is projected as grim. Yet
this study shows that despite the various disadvantages youth face, they can achieve stability in
everyday life and, through the reimagining of success, can achieve incorporation and belonging.
Addressing the future of undocumented, unparented youth in the US requires action on both sides
of the US-Mexico border. First, to address the continued flow of Central American youth to the
US, the government should focus on efforts that prioritize the strengthening the social, economic,
199
and political infrastructure of Northern Triangle countries could alleviate poverty, violence, and
unstable governments that keep children and families marginalized in their home societies and
migrating to the US to find home. Programs that promote the conditions that led to migration from
Mexico arriving at net-zero, including: healthcare, education, job creation, and integration
programs. A New York Times article by Sonia Nazario (2016) detailed how the three most violent
neighborhoods in Honduras, the murder capital of the world at this time, “got safer” by developing
outreach centers for children where they could meet mentors, get vocational training, and receive
help in finding jobs. The importance of mentors in intervening in the home country is paralleled
by the importance of supportive figures in determining how youth fare in the host country.
In the US, the surge in unaccompanied child migrants and resulting attention to the issue
offers support for comprehensive immigration reform in the US. The legalization, rather than
removal of temporary protection, detention, and deportation of undocumented families in the US
could, in the short term, increase child migrants’ chances of lawful reunification with children who
have experienced trauma, whether from their home countries, their journey north of their
settlement in the US. Under existing practice and policy, communities and families are being
fragmented, meaning that social tie configurations are being weakened and dissolved. Social tie
configurations prove to be critical in determining what institutions youth participate in and their
patterns of participation in each. Social tie configurations ultimately are the guiding mechanisms
of whether youth become oriented locally and become motivated to support others within their
local community or remain transnationally oriented. Hence, supporting the positive legal,
financial, educational, social, and health incorporation of long-settled immigrant adults can have
a positive effect on the young people growing up in US communities. This requires pressing
forward in the legalization efforts of long-settled immigrants, increasing accessibility of
200
information and resources that support legalization efforts, and moving programs forward that
provide local level funding of educational programs.
Two prominent policies have been proposed and/or implemented to support the
incorporation of undocumented youth, yet neither of these have eligibility requirements that
support the integration of long-settled or recently-arrived unaccompanied minors. Both the
Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, proposed in 2001, and
Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals (DACA), signed in June 2012, target unauthorized students
for legalization. Policies assume that immigrant children have access to a traditional childhood
coming of age trajectory that includes full financial support of an adult caregiver and the
opportunity to attend school and choose military service or employment after high school.
Considering the heterogeneity of social tie configurations—and heterogeneity of institutional
participation in turn— in policy-making would expand the grounds for youths’ qualifications for
legal protections by acknowledging that many youths are unable to enter a traditional integration
pathway into educational institutions. Indeed, education and military service requirements
overlook 62% of the unauthorized youth population, including the subjects of this research
(Batalova and McHugh 2010).
For undocumented, unparented youth who come to the US to work to support themselves
and families abroad, legalization could improve enforcement of fair work wages and hours. It
could also eliminate the fear of being fired or deported for reporting unfair treatment and work
conditions. Legalization and the formalization of their employment status may allow youth to
pursue the educational and non-work investments necessary for incorporation, increased
aspirations for mobility, and mental and physical health. The increasing hostility toward Latino
201
immigrants in the US today begs the future research question of how violence experienced from
departure from home country to settlement in the host country impacts youths’ development.
The experiences of long-settled undocumented, unparented youth are undeniably different
from those of the children arriving since 2014 when the spotlight was placed on this population.
Long-settled young people who have, for the majority presented here, grown up financially
independent and outside of traditional assimilatory institutions of families and schools demonstrate
the accomplishments of stability and inroads to mobility immigrant youth make with the most
meager resources. These young people evince agency in navigating two sistemas— that of their
home and host countries. To implement legislation and programming that would formally provide
opportunities for full and meaningful participation in everyday life would only advance their
orientation and adaptation and stimulate their embeddedness in whichever place they find home.
This not only benefits the youth to whom these efforts would be directed but through them, also
has the potential to move immigrant communities in the US and left-behind families and
communities forward.

202
APPENDIX A
RESPONDENT DEMOGRAPHICS

INTERVIEW RESPONDENT DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS (n=75)
Int. no. Pseudonym Age
Age at
Migration
National Origin Gender Occupation
Social Tie
Configuration
Source of
Support
1 Adler 26 17 Mexico Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Cousin
2 Amador 23 16 Guatemala Male Restaurant server Non-parent relative Sibling
3 Carolina 23 16 El Salvador Female Seamstress Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
4 Juan 22 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
5 Francisco 22 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Recreational
6 Yenifer 29 17 El Salvador Female Hair dresser Mentor Religious
7 Griselda 27 16 Guatemala Female Garment worker Mentor Recreational
8 Tomas 19 14 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
9 Felipe 21 17 Mexico Male Car wash Non-parent relative Sibling
10 Flor 23 16 Guatemala Female Garment worker None None
11 Enrique 23 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Sibling
12 Irene 21 15 Mexico Female Fruit packer Non-parent relative Sibling
13 Andres 22 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
14 Carlos 20 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Sibling
15 Aaron 26 17 Guatemala Male Garment worker None None
16 Gonzalo 22 17 Guatemala Male Florist Mentor Support group
17 Migdalia 23 17 Guatemala Female Garment worker Mentor Religious
18 Daniel 19 11 Guatemala Male Florist Non-parent relative Sibling
19 Joel 29 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
20 Marianna 24 16 Guatemala Female Domestic worker Non-parent relative Sibling
21 Fernando 28 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
22 Jordan 25 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
203
23 Omar 20 16 Guatemala Male Restaurant server Mentor Support group
24 Benito 18 16 Guatemala Male Unemployed Non-parent relative Sibling
25 Hernan 25 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Support group
26 Denise 25 16 Mexico Female Domestic worker Non-parent relative Sibling
27 German 18 14 Guatemala Male Shoe sales Non-parent relative Sibling
28 Justino 30 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Recreational
29 Cesar 21 16 El Salvador Male Garment worker Mentor Religious
30 Lorena 23 15 Guatemala Female Domestic worker Mentor Religious
31 Romero 25 15 Guatemala Male Warehouse clerk Mentor Religious
32 Andres 26 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker None None
33 Marcos 18 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Brother
34 Samantha 19 14 Guatemala Female Garment worker Mentor Job/school training
35 Luciano 19 16 Guatemala Male Construction Non-parent relative Sibling
36 Blanca 21 15 Mexico Female Garment worker Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
37 Sherlin 20 17 Guatemala Female Seamstress Non-parent relative Cousin
38 Glenda 18 16 El Salvador Female Student Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
39 Milton 21 17 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Job/school training
40 Lucy 27 14 Guatemala Female Garment worker None None
41 Mercedes 24 17 Guatemala Female Garment worker Non-parent relative Cousin
42 Rolando 24 15 Guatemala Male Garment worker None None
43
Gilberto 18 16 Guatemala Male Swap meet sales Mentor Recreational
44 Isabela 18 15 Guatemala Female Restaurant server Non-parent relative Sibling
45 Javier 18 15 Guatemala Male Student Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
46 Armando 27 17 El Salvador Male Restaurant DJ None None
47 Danilo 25 15 El Salvador Male Party supply rental Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
48 Berenice 24 16 Guatemala Female Domestic worker Non-parent relative Sibling
49 Humberto 21 15 Guatemala Male Car wash Non-parent relative Sibling
50 Cruz 25 17 El Salvador Male Unemployed Mentor Religious
204
51 Amanda 31 17 El Salvador Female Domestic worker Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
52 Pedro 22 14 Guatemala Male Restaurant server Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
53 Anthony 18 15 Honduras Male Restaurant server Mentor Job/school training
54 Esteban 21 11 Salvadoran Male Intern Mentor Job/school training
55 Julian 20 14 Guatemala Male Warehouse packer Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
56 Marvin 28 16 Guatemala Male Comm. health advo. Non-parent relative Grandparent
57 Ruben 23 15 Guatemala Male Restaurant server Mentor Job/school training
58 Sara 24 16 Honduras Female Garment worker Mentor Religious
59 Ernesto 34 16 Guatemala Male Janitor None None
60 Rigo 18 16 El Salvador Male Student Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
61 Oswaldo 27 17 Guatemala Male Restaurant server Mentor Job/school training
62 Hector 34 16 Mexico Male Janitor Non-parent relative Sibling
63 Santos 26 16 Guatemala Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Sibling
64 Rosa 23 15 Guatemala Female Homemaker None None
65 Federico 28 17 Guatemala Male Garment worker None None
66 Jeronimo 27 15 Guatemala Male Auto repair Mentor Job/school training
67 Wily 19 16 Honduran Male Sales Mentor Job/school training
68 Teo 29 17 Guatemala Male Garment worker Non-parent relative Sibling
69 Mauro 23 16 Mexico Male Restaurant DJ Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
70 Mateo 29 16 Mexico Male Construction None None
71
Jonathan 32 17 Mexico Male Day laborer None None
72 Ester 32 17 Mexico Female Student Non-parent relative Sibling
73 Cristabel 28 12 Mexico Female Student Non-parent relative Sibling
74 Edgar 33 14 Mexico Male Restaurant server Non-parent relative Aunt, uncle
75 Luis 22 11 Guatemala Male Garment worker Mentor Job/school training
205
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222
ENDNOTES

CHAPTER 1

i
About 82 percent of the unauthorized population originates from Mexico and Central America,
though increasingly from Asia as well (Public Policy Institute of California 2017). Nearly 53
percent of the undocumented population is male, and 50 percent are under the age of 34 (Hayes
and Hill 2017). Among those over the age of 25, more than half do not have a high school diploma.
The undocumented population nationwide has high rates of poverty and underemployment. In
California, 13 percent are below 50 percent of the federal family income poverty level, and another
19 percent are between 50 and 99 percent of the poverty level.

ii
Comment here about youths’ centrality in immigration debate: DACA in 2012, rescindment of
DACA in 2017, using ‘Dreamers’ as pawns in budget, social welfare, migration, leading to
government shutdown. Feb 18, judge rules to keep DACA in motion.

iii
President Obama referred to the unprecedented rise in the number of unaccompanied children
being apprehended at the US southern border as a ‘humanitarian challenge’ and ‘border crisis’ in
a memo released on June 30, 2014 (www.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov).

iv
In the US, Native American children were targets of discriminatory government assimilation
policy and a boarding school system that led to the kidnapping of hundreds of children. The
practice of boarding indigenous children and adolescents was employed in Australia, where the
aboriginal populations were viewed as “a threat to racial and social order” (Jacobs 2006, 205).
These governments viewed family separation and removal of children from their homes “as a kind
of benevolent policy designed to rescue and protect indigenous children” (206).

v
Asylum applications from unaccompanied minors fleeing conflict, persecution, and poverty in
the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia has increased in Europe, particularly Sweden, Italy,
Norway, and Denmark (European Commission 2015). There are notable similarities in the political
and economic conditions of Central America and the Middle East that are prompting migration,
which contrast the relative peace in East Asia.

vi
This gendered demarcation within these migration waves fits the Mexican migration case better
than the Central American migration case. Mexican migration increased because of the recruitment
of male migrant workers (men and adolescent boys) through Guest Worker Programs (Massey,
Durand and Malone 2003; Rosas 2014). Various studies show that Mexican men have dominated
the migration flows to the US (Delauney 1995; Donato 1994), whereas women are constrained in
their migration by patriarchal restrictions on their movement (Donato 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo
1994; Lindstrom 1997). Central American sending countries evinced a class-based emigration
where the wealthy and entrepreneurial classes were the first to migrate and leave the escalating
political and economic instability behind. Salvadorans migrated to San Francisco (Menjívar 2000)
and Los Angeles (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). With dense migration networks, the working-
class and indigenous populations followed (Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). Deindustrialization
in the US led to the migration of women from El Salvador to Washington D.C. where the filled

223

service sector jobs (Repak 1995). Guatemalan women followed migrant men to Houston, Texas
where men worked in occupations such as grocery stores, where women continued to do domestic
work.

vii
About 4.6 million Mexican laborers were recruited to the United States for farm work between
1942 and 1964 (Cornelius 2001). An additional 3 million Mexican migrants entered the US without
work authorization (Passel and Woodrow 1987).

viii
Sociologist Isabel Martinez (2016) estimates that nearly 5000 migrated to the tristate region of
Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York in the 2000s in search of work to help families survive.

ix
Of the approximately 200,000 people killed and forcefully disappeared from Guatemala, 83%
wee Maya. The heights of this “Silent Holocaust” were reached in 1978 and 1983 under the
regimes of General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and General Efrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt
implemented the scorched-earth policy that led to the eradication of over four hundred Maya
villages.

x
On March 12, 1999, following the signing of the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords and the release
of the Historical Clarification Commission report, US President Bill Clinton publicly apologized
to the Guatemalan people for the role the US played in supporting the military repression. The US
was especially held accountable for the human rights abuses that were detailed in the Historical
Clarification Commission. This apology did little to support the thousands of Guatemalans who
were forcibly removed from their homes, and who migrated to the US fleeing civil war and postwar
violence and neoliberal trade policies.

xi
During the 1870s, Honduran international trade and investment was increasingly tied to the US.
Foreign interests dominated shipping, predominantly bananas from the north coast, and railway
expansion. As markets expanded and trading and transport companies merged, Honduras became
known as the “banana republic” (coined by O. Henry in 1904). Honduras was also prominent actor
during the Contra War (1981-1990), a US air force and military site in the 1980s.

xii
As described by Portes and Zhou, the policies of the host society can be receptive, indifferent
or hostile; the values of the receiving society can be prejudice or non-prejudice; and the
characteristics of the local community include having weak or strong social ties.

xiii
Among wealthy transnational families where parents are not wholly present in an immigrant
child’s life, such as the case of Parachute Kids, children can benefit from the infusion of capital
and resources in guiding their access to opportunities (Tsong and Liu 2008; Zhou 1998). As the
nickname suggests, Parachute Kids are sent to the US to go to school on their own have legal status
and economic resources facilitated by parents. Parents protect and maintain authority over children
by setting their children up alone with a relative or hired help to pursue their best educational
future, providing financial support or assigning guardians to look after their children (Zhou ibid.).

xiv
According to the 1980s Census 1 in 8 children was employed, as working-class families
depended on multiple incomes. Government-led initiatives of compulsory education implemented
in 1880, child welfare, and labor laws that barred children from the workplace were implemented
224

in the 1930s. Zelizer (1985) explains, “lower-class children joined their middle-class counterparts
in a new nonproductive world of childhood, a world in which the sanctity and emotional value of
a child made child labor taboo” (6).

xv
Donato and Perez (2017) and Donato and Sisk (2015) discuss the migration of boys and girls
relative to their parents’ migration experience. Authors find girls are more likely to migrate same
year as parents. Girls more likely to migrate if having a mother with undocumented migration
experience. Boys are more likely to migrate if fathers have undocumented migration experience.

xvi
DACA was implemented in 2012 as a form of a temporary immigration relief for individuals
who, among other requirements, had no lawful immigration status in the United States as of June
15, 2012, came to the US before the age of 16, and are currently in school or graduated. DACA
was granted to nearly 800,000 young people to live, work, and study in the US. In September 2017,
DACA was rescinded and since that time 122 people have been losing their DACA status per day.
This is to say that even those with DACA in this study were all but secure or safe, however,
temporarily assigned, at the time of this research.

CHAPTER 2

xvii
Discussions of why children migrate rely on three primary migration theories. The first
indicates rational choice, known as the Neoclassical Economics (Todaro and Maruszko 1987).
Second, familial risk assessment, referred to first as the Household Model of Migration (Dinerman
1982) and sometimes referred to as “New Economics of Labor Migration,” (Stark and Bloom
1985; Massey et al. 1990). Finally, child migration is thought of as tied to social network
availability (Cumulative Causation, see Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Massey et al. 1990).
Historians refer to this as “chain migration” (Wegge 1998). Each theory highlights how adults
negotiate the best interest of the individual, the family unit, and the community.

xviii
Chavez and Menjívar (2010) state that gang recruitment and violence are central causes of the
migration of unaccompanied child migrants from Mexico, most of whom are older children and
adolescents. The Central American Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El
Salvador represent three of the five countries with the highest violence rates in the world (Kennedy
2014).

xix
See work by Chiara Galli (2017) and Matthew Lorenzen (2017)

xx
Chiara Galli (2017) finds that unaccompanied children seeking asylum alone experience a ‘rite
of reverse passage’ as their legal intermediaries work to construct childhood narratives that
distance migrant youth from adulthood and instead usher them into the role of an innocent child
refugee.

xxi
The New Economics of Labor Migration theory posits the household as a rational economic
unit, “sending” migrants abroad, typically sons, for income and risk aversion. Migration represents
an opportunity to participate in the economic, social, and cultural landscape of the sending society.
Several studies observe that migrant networks function to perpetuate a ‘culture of migration’ in
which individuals value migration as a rite of passage or an affirmation of identity. Among
225

Mexican migrants and nonmigrants, when young men do not attempt migration they are seen as
“lazy, unenterprising, and undesirable as potential mates” (Kandel and Massey 2002, 932).
Corroborating the work on migration as a household decision and individual rite of passage among
Latino adolescent males, similar findings were found among young Hazar male migrants between
Central Afghanistan and Iran, who leave their homes to expand social networks and opportunities
for mobility to achieve adulthood and masculinity (Monsutti 2007).

xxii
Contemporary policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994) and
the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA, 2004) have perpetuated economic
instability through the deregulation of markets and devaluation of the skills of working-class and
agrarian individuals.

xxiii
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA, 2014) reports that
2.5 million people are at risk of food insecurity. More than 40 percent of Salvadorans live in
poverty—and more than 12.5 percent live in extreme poverty. The economic situation is even
worse in Guatemala and Honduras. In Guatemala, 54.8 percent of people live in poverty and 29.1
percent live in extreme poverty, whereas, in Honduras, those figures are 69.2 percent and 45.6
percent, respectively.

xxiv
Civil wars plagued El Salvador (1979-1992), Guatemala (1960-1996), and Nicaragua (1960-
1990). In Guatemala, where the war centered on the privatization of agrarian land, the indigenous
population was targeted for persecution. The government waged a Scorched Earth campaigns that
lit entire aldeas, or hamlets, on fire from the outside-in. Honduras became the center of the US
war on drugs in the Northern Triangle in 2008 through the Central American Regional Security
Initiative (CARSI). US intervention through funding militarization in the region has contributed
to a worsening of violence. Today, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were three of the five
most dangerous countries in the world in 2013—the last year for which U.N. statistics are available
through the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC. In 2013, Honduras had the world’s
highest per capita homicide rate, at 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people; El Salvador ranked fourth,
with a rate of 41.2 homicides per 100,000 people; and Guatemala was fifth, with a rate of 39.9
homicides per 100,000 people.

xxv
Much of the recent publications addressing the root causes of the surge in unaccompanied mior
migration from Central America and Mexico to the US cite the search for parents who migrated
before them as a leading cause (Bhabha 2014; Heidbrink 2014; Kids in Need of Defense [KIND]
2013, National Immigrant Justice Center 2014; Nazario 2006; Somers 2012a; Terrio 2015; United
National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 2014; United States Committee for
Refugees and Immigrants 2013; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) 2014;
Ward 2013; Women’s Refugee Commission 2012).

xxvi
This research concludes that mixed motives indicate that unaccompanied minor migration
cannot be understood in a binary of voluntary or forced migration, but a combination of both of
these. In the CONAPO and DIF Nacional survey, Guatemalans were the least likely to report
violence as motive, as opposed to Honduras, and especially Salvadorans.

xxvii
It is typically the eldest son that is expected to migrate on behalf of families and shoulder the
economic burden when fathers are unable (Hagan 1998; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994).
226

xxviii
Parents and adult figures often do not support the migration of women when they do not have
personal networks. Without the support of others, women develop and rely on female migrant
networks (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994).

xxix
Sociologist Allison J. Pugh (2014) writes that while “childhood scholars have found that age
inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class… the
impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole” (71).

xxx
Unaccompanied child migrants are immediately placed in removal proceedings with UCSIS
upon placement with a family member in the US. To win their asylum claims, unaccompanied
child migrants must demonstrate that they are successfully integrating into school, family, and
community life. That is, children are simultaneously being actively removed by the state while
being required to positively incorporate to prove productivity.

CHAPTER 3

xxxi
A recent study by Kornienko, Agadjanian, Menjívar and Zotova (2017) outlines that,
“Financial support is more likely to be provided to immigrants by network members that have
access to material resources, whereas emotional support is more likely to be acquired from those
in close and intimate relationships or other immigrants going through similar experiences.”

xxxii
Children in elite and upwardly mobile families often have access to adults who work to protect
an idealized childhood and a child’s life chances. For example, parachute kids, or children of elite
Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino families migrate to the US for educational opportunities
with F-1 student visas, typically between the ages of 6 and 17 (Kim 1998; Lin 1998; Orellana,
Thorne, Chee and Lam 2001; Zhou 1998). In the 1980s and 1990s it was common for children as
young as elementary grade level to be sent to the US (Zhou 1998). In her study of Chinese youth,
Zhou concludes, “For these children, going to school in America is considered not only the
opportunity of a lifetime for a better future, but also an extraordinary adventure in searching for
one’s self and for adulthood” (1998, 689). However, parachute kids represent a highly selected,
privileged group from middle-class or upper-class socioeconomic families.

xxxiii
Single-parent families absorb greater personal costs to be supportive relative to dual-parent
and higher-income households.

xxxiv
According to Stanton-Salazar (2011), transitions into adulthood are facilitated when working-
class youth have strong relationships with mentors that bridge multiple social worlds and
encourage “active engagement within each of these worlds” (1069).

xxxv
In Caribbean families, familial ties extend beyond the household to include networks of
exchange and support with fictive kin, friends, and children of kin and friends (Rubenstein 1983).
Fictive kin are also important among the working poor in the US whose kin relationships are often
strained by financial obligation and unreciprocated assistance (Desmond 2016; Mazelis 2017). Kin
networks can be larger among women than men (Menjívar 2000, 2002).

227

xxxvi
Susan Kools (1997) defines foster care as “a residence in a supervised setting outside the
biological family as mandated by the social services or juvenile justice system” (263). A study of
familial relationships of children living in “chaotic homes” due to parents’ alcohol addictions finds
that fictive kin can help young people learn problem solving strategies, positive identify formation,
and emotional security (Hall 2008). Voorpostel (2013) writes, “In the absence of certain primary
family relationships, a non-family relationship may develop into a family-like relationship. Indeed,
fictive kin ties are found to be more common when primary family ties such as adult children or a
partner are lacking, lost, or unavailable” (807).

xxxvii
Portes and Fernandez-Kelly (2008) offer a caveat here, positing that, “neither family
discipline nor the appearance of a significant other is by itself sufficient to produce high
educational attainment, but their combination is decisive” (26).

xxxviii
Landale, Thomas and Van Hook (2011) explore the living arrangements of children of
Mexican, Southeast Asian, and black Caribbean descent in the US and find that relative to
Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian) and black Caribbean origin children,
Mexican-origin children were more likely to live with “no parent” because, as sojourner labor
migrants, foreign-born adolescents are more likely to travel to the US alone. Instead they live with
siblings, cousin, aunts and uncles, or in households that do not include family members, that is,
they are informally fostered by non-parent guardians.

xxxix
The mental health vulnerability of undocumented and unaccompanied youth resonates with
much of the work on native-born foster youth, which finds an array of damaging effects of social
network disruption on youth’s psychological development. Due to the nature of the foster care
system, youth can experience multiple shifts in their family dynamics during adolescence, causing
disruptions in their relationship development with adult caregivers. Migrant youth who leave their
homes at a young age experience rupture of family life as do foster youth transition out of care,
arguably on a more extreme scale.

xl
A mental health study elucidates that unaccompanied youth are at higher risk than accompanied
asylum-seeking children of developing emotional and behavioral problems (Bean et al. 2007). In
this study, unaccompanied youth are contrasted to asylum-seeking youth. Unaccompanied youth
are those without a biological parent in the US and assumed to therefore not have access to asylum-
seeking services, which I refer to in this study as ‘unparented’ while asylum-seeking youth are
those with parents. Again, these findings predicate support with presence of a parent in the US.

xli
In a study of domestic workers in Los Angeles, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) finds that friends and
family within the same occupation may feel competition with others seeking out a limited number
of jobs, leading to the exploitation of vulnerable newcomers.

xlii
According to the Million Dollar Hoods Project led by Kelly Lytle- Hernandez at UCLA, over
$4.2 million are spent on incarceration in the Pico-Union and Westlake/MacArthur Park
neighborhoods which hosts a population of 144,939 residents. Westlake is 61% Latino, 26% Black,
and 71% male. Pico Union is 72% Latino, 20% Black, and 81% male.

228

xliii
Despite lacking the intervention of the social service or juvenile justice systems, undocumented
immigrant youth growing up without a biological parent but with living with a non-parent relative
in this study are de facto foster youth.

xliv
Traditional gender roles have it that women are seen as caring and nurturing when they provide
emotional support, while men are seen as fulfilling their role as caretaker through financial
(Parreñas 2005).

xlv
I consider there to be parallels between unparented immigrant youth and foster youth as both
groups grow up without parents and confront the traumas of coming of age in the US without what
are referred to as intimate social ties. Acquiring mentors and peer groups is especially critical for
these groups to feel a sense of place. In the study included here, natural mentors, unlike
government mandated mentors or adult figures, can help to build self-esteem and improves youth’s
behavioral, social, emotional and academic outcomes. Today’s unaccompanied child migrants are
placed with families and formal sponsors through the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

xlvi
This research project began with an informal support group for Guatemalan Maya youth
workers in Pico Union, Los Angeles. Thus, convenient sampling and subsequent snowball
sampling yields the overrepresentation of those who receive support from mentors and peers in
support groups.

xlvii
I began attending church and youth group meetings and witnessed how youths’ critical need
emotional support could in some cases worsen their financial stability.

xlviii
While California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey have long hosted a
majority of immigrants in the US, immigrants have dispersed to non-traditional destinations in
recent decades (Marrow 2005). This is, in part, due to complete economic restructuring of
manufacturing that resulted in various industries relocating to US peripheries, bringing new
immigrants to meat processing, shell fish and chicken farms into rural areas. Additionally, a rapid
increase in border enforcement efforts motivates the dispersal of immigrants away from border
states (Massey, Durand and Pren 2016). A geographic distribution of Central American and
American border crossers out of California and into new destinations occurred during the time of
proposition 182 and other anti-immigrant movements in the state. In particular, the Latino
population in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Oregon, Virginia,
Washington and Massachusetts have swelled in size since the 1990s (Lopez-Sanders 2012; Singer
2004).

xlix
One of the consequences of increased border patrol is that immigrants are forced to cross in
more clandestine fashions and in more dangerous zones to avoid detection. This means immigrants
pay a greater financial and physical cost of migration. Border deaths rose form 72 in 1994 to 482
in 2005. In 2010 the number of deaths declined to 365, but the number of deaths at the border
remains five times greater than those observed in the 1990s when the US government unleased
hyper-enforcement efforts such as Operation Blockade in 1993 and Operations Gatekeeper in 1994
(See Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016 for more on border enforcement).

229

l
Youth require familial and community ties that are what Putnam refers to as “bridging” social
networks. Putnam’s concept of “bridging social capital” suggests that unique forms of capital
become accessible when one establishes bonds of interconnectedness across diverse social groups,
rather than within one’s own homogenous network. Bridging social ties can initially be weak, but
by building on these networks individuals create a “crucial bridge between the two densely knit
clumps of close friends” (Granovetter 1983). Granovetter (1974) writes that weak ties have a
“structural tendency for those to whom one is only weakly tied to have better access to job
information than one does not already have… Those to whom one is closest are likely to have the
greatest overlap in contact with those one already knows, so that the information to which they are
privy is likely to be much the same as that which one already has” (52-53).

li
None of my respondents had a sibling that was deported, though this is a possible reason for
return of an older sibling.

lii
Migration and gender scholar Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo finds in her work (2001) that young
Latina women who had come to the US expected support from a sibling or aunt, not finding it,
and then just pushed into live-in domestic work.

liii
Bring in work of G. Gonzalez-Lopez for analysis of this section—something about incest,
sexual violence, and the looming suspicion of sexual relationship between family members is at
work here. I will return to this.

liv
Migration researchers maintain that the conditions that may initiate a migration flow differ
from those that maintain movement. Sociologist Doug Massey and his colleagues put for the
migrant network theory, which centers the role of social networks in perpetuating migration
across time and space. These migrant networks consist of “sets of interpersonal ties that connect
migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through ties of
kinship, friendship, and shared community origin” (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, et al.
1993: 448). Through migrant networks people share information about employment, housing,
migration routes, and other resources that “reduces the costs and risks of movement” (Massey et
al. ibid. 448).

CHAPTER 4

lv
Milton Gordon (1964) establishes a seven-stage assimilation process that begins with cultural
assimilation (acculturation), wherein the minority group adopts the “cultural patterns” of the host
society. Gordon says that through increased contact, acculturation is inevitable. Acculturation is
followed by structural assimilation, defined as “entrance of the minority group in to the social
cliques, clubs, and institutions of the core society at the primary group level.” Gordon hypothesized
that, “once structural assimilation has occurred… of the other types of assimilation will naturally
follow” (80-81; emphasis in origin). Increased interactions would then lead to intermarriage and
the demise of prejudice in the “core society.” According to Gordon, once structural assimilation
occurs, the other types of assimilation “have all taken place like a row of tenpins bowled over in
rapid succession by a well-placed strike” (81). Theories of assimilation have since then advanced
to include the influence of social positions of race, gender, class, immigrant and legal status, etc.
to account for the diversification of immigrants’ national origins after 1965.
230

lvi
Think about nested contexts of incorporation and make statement about how incorporation is
not a destination or outcome, but a process of ever-expanding spheres in which immigrants are
oriented, become adapted to, and embedded in.

lvii
These employment patterns reflect a similar occupational distribution experienced by Central
Americans and Mexicans in the 1980s and 90s, where even highly trained professionals were
relegated to low-skill jobs because of their lack of English-language fluency and US credentials
(Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001). According to Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla’s
(2001) seminal book on Central Americans in Los Angeles, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Mexican
men and women were concentrated in construction, restaurant worker, garment manufacturing,
automobile repair, and domestic service.

lviii
See Sassen (1988) for more on World Systems Theory of Migration; Massey, Durand and
Malone (2002) for more on Mexico; Hamilton and Chinchilla (2001) and Menjívar (2000) for
more on Central America.

lix
Cynthia Feliciano (2005) finds that immigrants, prior to their migration, are selected upon
attributes such as their level of education or low-or high-skilled work. Immigrant selectivity
determines the starting point of incorporation for immigrants and their eventual mobility
trajectories and outcomes.

lx
Per piece sewn

lxi
Garment workers around the globe are paid piecemeal. That is, rather than being paid for the
number of hours worked, workers are paid for the number of completed pieces — 2-cents per
button sewn, 5-cents per sleeve, 11-cents per zipper. In this way, the onus of low payment is placed
on the worker. Since workers do not select their daily assignments, they cannot predict the money
they will earn. They instead work feverishly to make a few hundred dollars by the end of the
month. By foregoing lunch breaks, trips to the restroom, or drinks of water, individuals attempt to
maximize every minute.

lxii
In their work with migrant construction workers, Sociologist Jacqueline Hagan and her
colleagues (2011) find that workers that might traditionally be deemed as unskilled, demonstrate
occupational skill in navigating exploitation and mobility through practices like job jumping.
lxiii
When I left the field in Fall of 2016, these young men had not yet started their rental business
but continued to share this goal. Hagan et al. (2011) write, “Brincando, as immigrant workers
refer to it, is a strategy developed to escape bad jobs or those with limited advancement
opportunities and to demonstrate newly acquired skills to prospective employers, ultimately
improving work conditions and augmenting wages” (3).

lxiv
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, is an administrative executive order signed
by President Barack Obama on June 15, 2012 to temporarily defer deportation from the United
States for eligible undocumented youth and young adults. These young people are also granted a
temporary Social Security number and 2-year work permit. DACA was rescinded by Trump in
231

September 2017. The future of DACA is uncertain under the Donald Trump presidency, and
DACA recipients have been threatened with deportation since the Trump inauguration.

lxv
Those with higher levels of education and greater access to family and community resources
benefitted the most from this policy.

lxvi
A long line of research chronicles the intersection of religion and immigration in the US context
point to the buffering and integrative role of religious organizations in the settlement experience
of newcomer immigrant populations (Hagan and Ebaugh 2003; Handlin 1951; Orsi 2002; Smith
1978). Co-ethnic churches and religious communities represent ‘urban service hubs’ that provide
immigrants with refuge from the hostility and discrimination in the host society (Ley 2008),
opportunities for economic mobility and social recognition (Hirschman 2004), fellowship, social
services, and status for marginalized groups (Min 1992).

CHAPTER 5

lxvii
See Domestica by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo; Legalizing Moves by Jacqueline Hagan;
Waiting on Washington by Terry Repak; Sacrificing Families by Leisy Abrego; and Fragmented
Ties by Cecilia Menjívar on how the occupations women concentrate in, such as domestic and
factory work, can require their spatial confinement.

lxviii
Undocumented immigrant youth are often referred to as “indistinguishable” from their peers
because they speak, dress, and practice US popular culture in the same ways as their US born peers
(Abrego 2011; Chavez 1998; Olivas 1995).

lxix
Research with working class young adults who are unable to make claims to adulthood finds
that, because of their lack of access to jobs and opportunities to achieve markers of adulthood, they
redefine meanings of adulthood and success (Silva 2013). In her book Coming Up Short, Jennifer
Silva (2013) writes that “working-class young men and women inhabit a mood economy in which
legitimacy and self-worth are purchased not with traditional currencies such as work or marriage
or class solidarity but instead through the ability to organize their emotions into a narrative of self-
transformation. Rather than live and work within institutions that call for a stoic, taciturn, deeply
gendered self, this generation is learning that the self—like their jobs and relationships—must be
continually remade” (18). Working class young adults draw on narratives of achieving psychic
and emotional growth as new terms of success despite the delayed achievement of markers of
adulthood such as employment, marriage, and homeownership.

lxx
Mention work of Yen Le Espiritu in Home Bound and moral identities as employed beyond
labor market experiences

lxxi
Sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo (2013) finds that giving back patterns differ among middle-
class Latinos and their elite counterparts. Middle-class Latino entrepreneurs give back through
unstructured philanthropic activities, like volunteering in co-ethnic organizations or mentoring
low-income co-ethnics. Elite Latinos on the other hand create new ethnic social structures such as
banks or charter schools that enhance the business/financial and educational development of
Latinos.
232

lxxii
From the same study by Vallejo and Lee (2009), this finding contrasts with middle-class
Mexican Americans who grow up in middle-class households and adopt an individualistic
orientation. The giving back patterns of middle-class Mexican Americans from middle-class
backgrounds closely align with those of white, middle-class nuclear families.

CHAPTER 6

lxxiii
Giving back practices are shaped by embeddedness resulting from social tie configurations.
Think more about gender, family status, birth order. Make a table here to track who gives back.

lxxiv
The number of youth placed in ORR grew exponentially in recent years. Between 2004 and
2011, about 6800 unaccompanied minors were taken into ORR custody annually. In the fiscal year
following (2012), this number doubled to 13,625, and doubled again in 2013 when the number
reached 24,668 (Zatz and Rodriguez 2015).

lxxv
Obama was labeled “deporter-in-chief” by his critics in the immigrant-rights community as he
implemented programs that would increase the deportation of criminals and recent border crossers.
Under the Obama administration, congressional funding for immigration enforcement reached
nearly $18 billion, which increased the reach of DHS and ICE in the US (Chishti, Pierce, and
Bolter 2017).

lxxvi
A large portion of the existing borer fence was constructed under Bush and Obama starting in
2006 with the passage of the Secure Fence Act. A report by the Government Accountability Office
in 2017 found that $2.3 billion was spent on fencing along the border between 2007 and 2015. The
wall construction under Trump is estimated to cost as much as $21.6 billion. On September 1
st
,
2016 Trump tweeted, “Mexico will pay for the wall.”

lxxvii
This program was outlined in IIRIRA and named after 287(g) of the Immigration and
Nationality Act. Along with interior enforcement, this EO expands the use of expedited removals
in the border region and calls for an additional 5000 Border Patrol agents, mandates the detention
of immigrants apprehended for unlawful entry, and prioritizes criminal prosecutions for
immigration offenses committed at the border (Abrego, Coleman, Martinez, et al. 2017).
lxxviii
ICE reports that it has made 478 arrests and prosecuted 38 sponsors of unaccompanied
children in the Unites States (Reuters 2018).

lxxix
This program was started by the Obama administration at the end of 2014 in response to the
increase in unaccompanied minors received at that time.

lxxx
Recipients who would lose their DACA status before March 5, 2018 were given 30-days to
reapply for the program, an arduous and costly task. Approximately 120 people would lose their
DACA status from the time of the announcement to the proposed termination date—about 850
people each week. It is estimated that 22,000 DACA holders lost their protected status between
September 2017 and March 2018 (Jawetz and Svajlenka 2017).

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Asset Metadata

Creator Canizales, Stephanie L. (author)

Core Title Finding home: the migration and incorporation of undocumented, unparented Latino youth in the US

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 08/06/2020

Defense Date 04/23/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag belonging,Central America,Citizenship,immigrant incorporation,international migration,Latin America,OAI-PMH Harvest,unaccompanied minors,undocumented youth

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Agius Vallejo, Jody (committee chair), Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee chair), Pastor, Manuel (committee member), Sanchez, George (committee member)

Creator Email canizales@tamu.edu,stephanie.canizales@gmail.com

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