and foster parents embroiled in the child welfare system while performing the everyday tasks of caring for and about their children. This chapter emphasizes the fragility of parent-child relationships in the face of state intervention, and explores the ways biological and foster parents defer to, resist, and navigate social worker authority as they struggle to maintain connections with their children. The conclusion draws these themes together and asks how an examination of the experiences of Latina/o families in foster care might illuminate quotidian processes and intimate relations through which the boundaries of belonging, worthiness, citizenship, race, and nation are produced and remade.
CHAPTER 1
“Worthy” Migrants
I first met Alba in 2008 as she ran into the living room of her parents’ home, followed by her father, who was waving a hairbrush playfully at her head of tangled curls. The social worker I was accompanying had explained to me on our drive over that Alba’s foster parents were technically Alba’s cousins. They were in the process of adopting Alba, a process slowed by her status as a non-U.S. citizen. Alba was born in Tijuana to two parents who were both heavily addicted to methamphetamines. Her mother disappeared shortly after Alba’s birth. Alba was a little over a year old when her father, purportedly for drug money, agreed to sell her to Esther, a Guatemalan woman with U.S. citizenship, for $400. Esther then brought Alba into the United States using her own biological daughter’s birth certificate. Alba’s extended family, aghast at these events, managed to locate Esther, who was living in San Diego. Tatianna, Alba’s cousin, who also lived in San Diego, went to find Alba, and eventually was able to initiate the process of adopting her through the child welfare system.
As I learned more about Alba’s case over the next three years, it became clear that she was a child about whom many stories could be told. She was at once an adopted child and an abandoned child, a smuggled child, a trafficked child, a stateless child, and a migrant child.1 As Boehm (2008) notes, the legal categories that define an individual’s status in the United States serve as a central node for the assertion of state power that shapes migrant families in profound ways. As such, Alba was poised at the brink of multiple possible futures. The path eventually chosen for her, as I discuss below, both shaped her future and reworked her past.
In this chapter, I consider the force of these narrative frames, and the ways they shape differential outcomes for children in seemingly similar circumstances. Outcomes are affected not only by the stories that are told but also by the positionality of the (adult) advocate who tells the story and successfully reframes the child. The frameworks available and the impact they have on a child’s trajectory are, of course, historically contingent. They are shaped by economic conditions, geopolitical relations, and the political moments in which they emerge. As Kelly (2004:97) notes, government efforts to keep people “in place” are central to state-making processes. Demarcations about which children are eligible to cross into the United States and eventually pursue a path to citizenship are shifting and unstable, changing in response to economic and political circumstances. Yet these boundaries are central to the production of the nation, and the limits of U.S. citizenship.
As such, the categories that confront a child like Alba become key sites for situating citizens and noncitizens, for making and unmaking racially marginalized families, and for policing the fragile boundary between deserving children in need of protection and threatening young criminals who do not merit the state’s care.2 And although the granting or denial of citizenship is experienced as a profound and permanent response, the production of these boundaries is tentative, fragile, and always in process, as policy and judicial rulings shift the landscape. I juxtapose divergent framings of child migrants to examine the strategies through which some children are categorized as worthy of protection and citizenship, while others are not. I consider the way the extension of humanitarian intervention, through the provision of citizenship for particular children, is enacted not in relation to the specific suffering of an individual child. Rather, pathways to citizenship are mobilized through the advocacy work of well-positioned adults who draw on powerful narratives to frame children as worthy of humanitarian protection.
The cases I describe in this chapter involve children caught up in overlapping institutions and geopolitical relations that shape ongoing interactions between the United States and Mexico. These relationships delimit the terrain on which claims to protection and to citizenship can be made. Mexican minors who migrate to the United States are typically seen as children who are not qualified for refugee status and are assumed to be primarily “economic” migrants. The category “economic” is used in the contemporary moment to delineate “deserving” migrants from “undeserving” migrants.3 In the contemporary United States, framing migrants as an expense and a burden on the mythical “tax payer” is a key political strategy for facilitating an avoidance of the complex conditions that promote migration. Thus, legal immigration agreements between the two nations allow U.S. immigration officials to return Mexican citizens to Mexico through expedited procedures, denying them many of the legal protections available to other immigrants who are believed to have potentially valid claims for remaining in the United States.
These issues could not be illuminated more clearly than by the influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America across the Texas-Mexico border in 2014, ongoing at the time of this writing.4 In response to an over-whelming number of young children arriving in Texas from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, lawmakers’ concerns focused on the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 7311), a provision that “gave substantial new protections to children entering the country alone who were not from Mexico or Canada by prohibiting them from being quickly sent back to their country of origin” (Hulse 2014). In other words, the perceived “crisis” of a surge of unaccompanied minors in the United States highlighted that children escaping dangerous situations in Central American countries could not be summarily deported as their Mexican counterparts could be, because of the potential that they might possess “valid” claims to protection, such as claims to political asylum (Rodriguez and Menjívar 2014).
Congressional reactions to these circumstances demonstrated that concerns about taxation and government spending were sufficient to override broad concerns about Central American children fleeing circumstances of poverty and violence. Claims to political asylum are based on the presence of a well-founded fear of persecution in relation to particular protected categories, such as religious or political affiliations. Notably, asylum claims rule out victims of structural violence, such as those facing widespread conditions of poverty or violence that cannot be said to target a specific individual, including, for example, the generalized violence that accompanies gang activity and drug trafficking. This specificity of victimhood is necessary to make an individual migrant legible as deserving of citizenship. It is on these grounds that legislators lobbied for the return of these minor migrants, without concern for the specifics of their individual circumstances. As I discuss below, the particularities of each child’s experience and specific needs become subsumed into state-based categories; Mexican or Honduran affiliation determines a child’s reception at the border, rather than do the specifics of their potential claims to immigration relief.5 It is the translation of an individual’s story into broad categories of “worthy victim” or “economic migrant” within a legal state framework that drives the extension or denial of citizenship on humanitarian grounds.
In my analysis, I focus on what I call “narratives of worthiness,” the stories told about Latina/o children on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that have the potential to position them as eligible for legal protection and U.S. citizenship. These narratives bring together conceptions of humanitarianism, tropes of children as innocent victims, and racialized visions of immigrants and their sending countries. These narratives contain elements of what Natalia Molina (2014) refers to as “racial scripts,” the stories we tell to situate various racialized groups across time and space. Such scripts work to situate racialized groups in relation to others, in ways that shape their experiences, rights, and access to resources and to citizenship status. These scripts are imbued with a force that helps to locate particular subjects in a broader racialized milieu. The stories