Results by title
10 books match the query 'Central Americans'
Between the Lines
Letters Between Undocumented Mexican and Latin American Immigrants and Their Families and FriendsLarry Siems
University of Arizona Press, 1992
Central American Counterpoetics
Diaspora and RememoryKarina Alma
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Author Karina Alma offers a systemic method and artistic mode for unpacking social and political memory formation that resists dominant histories. Central American Counterpoetics responds to political repression through acts of creativity that prioritize the well-being of anticolonial communities. Building on Toni Morrison’s theory of rememory, the volume examines the concept as an embodied experience of a sensory place and time lived in the here and now. By employing primary sources of image and word, interviews of creatives, and a critical self-reflection as a Salvadoran immigrant woman in academia, Alma’s research breaks ground in subject matter and methods by considering cultural and historical ties across countries, regions, and traditions. The diverse creatives included explore critical perspectives on topics such as immigration, forced assimilation, maternal love, gender violence, community arts, and decolonization.
Central American Women in Diaspora
Testimonios of the GenerationsEdited by Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández
University of Arizona Press, 2026
This collection centers Central American women’s voices within the growing narrative of the Central American diaspora. It provides a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States.
Through the practice of testimonio, contributors create intergenerational dialogues between mothers and daughters, engage with Indigenous oral traditions, and reflect on the violent histories of war in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The volume is organized around five themes: political histories, migration, gender and sexuality, navigating institutions, and healing. Within each theme contributors tackle a range of issues, including Central American political histories, healing, grief, Indigenous knowledge, memory, trauma, post-traumatic growth, organizing, creativity, and agency.
This anthology spans genres such as poetry, essay, and visual art to present diverse perspectives, including Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, queer, and working-class voices. An intervention that centers gendered experiences and challenges oppressive structures, this volume celebrates the solidarity, cultural memory, and healing found within transnational ties.
Contributors
Leisy J. Abrego
Margoth Abrego
Bella
Juanita Cabrera López
Jennifer A. Cárcamo
Sandra Castro
Karla Cativo
Kency Cornejo
Gabriela Corona Valencia
Carolina Rivera Escamilla
Rafael Escamilla
Mildred Fuentes-Chung
Diana Gamez
Joanna Beltrán Girón
Ruth Girón
Victoria Gonzalez-Rivera
Claudia D. Hernández
Jessica Hernandez
Leticia Hernández-Linares
Leigh-Anna Hidalgo
Andrea Nikté Juarez Mendoza
Amanda Macal
Carla Macal
Patricia Veliz Macal
Kiara Aileen Machado
Beatriz Maldonado
Jacqueline Munguía
Joanna B. Pérez
Rossana Pérez
Katy Pinto
Claudia A. Portillo
Suyapa Portillo Villeda
Nalya Rodriguez
Jessica Saravia
Andrea Zelaya
Constituting Central American–Americans
Transnational Identities and the Politics of DislocationCárdenas, Maritza E
Rutgers University Press, 2018
From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals
US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-BelongingYajaira M. Padilla
University of Texas Press, 2022
The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition.
Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.
Maras
Gang Violence and Security in Central AmericaEdited by Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Elizabeth Skinner
University of Texas Press, 2011
Sensational headlines have publicized the drug trafficking, brutal violence, and other organized crime elements associated with Central America's mara gangs, but there have been few clear-eyed analyses of the history, hierarchies, and future of the mara phenomenon. The first book to look specifically at the Central American gang problem by drawing on the perspectives of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, Maras: Gang Violence and Security in Central America provides much-needed insight.
These essays trace the development of the gangs, from Mara Salvatrucha to the 18th Street Gang, in Los Angeles and their spread to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua as the result of members' deportation to Central America; there, they account for high homicide rates and threaten the democratic stability of the region. With expertise in areas ranging from political science to law enforcement and human rights, the contributors also explore the spread of mara violence in the United States. Their findings comprise a complete documentation that spans sexualized violence, case studies of individual gangs, economic factors, varied responses to gang violence, the use of intelligence gathering, the limits of state power, and the role of policy makers.
Raising crucial questions for a wide readership, these essays are sure to spark productive international dialogues.
Migration and Mortality
Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the AmericasEdited by Jamie Longazel and Miranda Cady Hallett
Temple University Press, 2021
Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully.
As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to this vibrant anthology, Migration and Mortality, examine restrictive immigration policies and the broader capitalist systems of exploitation and inequality while highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience.
The case studies in this timely collection explore border deaths, detention economies, asylum seeking, as well as the public health and mental health of migrants. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding broader movements for life and justice in the Americas.
U.S. Central Americans
Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of ResistanceEdited by Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernández
University of Arizona Press, 2017
In summer 2014, a surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America to the United States gained mainstream visibility—yet migration from Central America has been happening for decades. U.S. Central Americans explores the shared yet distinctive experiences, histories, and cultures of 1.5-and second-generation Central Americans in the United States.
While much has been written about U.S. and Central American military, economic, and political relations, this is the first book to articulate the rich and dynamic cultures, stories, and historical memories of Central American communities in the United States. Contributors to this anthology—often writing from their own experiences as members of this community—articulate U.S. Central Americans’ unique identities as they also explore the contradictions found within this multivocal group.
Working from within Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Maya communities, contributors to this critical study engage histories and transnational memories of Central Americans in public and intimate spaces through ethnographic, in-depth, semistructured, qualitative interviews, as well as literary and cultural analysis. The volume’s generational, spatial, urban, indigenous, women’s, migrant, and public and cultural memory foci contribute to the development of U.S. Central American thought, theory, and methods. Woven throughout the analysis, migrants’ own oral histories offer witness to the struggles of displacement, travel, navigation, and settlement of new terrain. This timely work addresses demographic changes both at universities and in cities throughout the United States.
U.S. Central Americans draws connections to fields of study such as history, political science, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology, cultural studies, and literature, as well as diaspora and border studies. The volume is also accessible in size, scope, and language to educators and community and service workers wanting to know about their U.S. Central American families, neighbors, friends, students, employees, and clients.
Contributors:
Leisy Abrego
Karina O. Alvarado
Maritza E. Cárdenas
Alicia Ivonne Estrada
Ester E. Hernández
Floridalma Boj Lopez
Steven Osuna
Yajaira Padilla
Ana Patricia Rodríguez
Waiting On Washington
Central American Workers in the Nation's CapitalTerry A. Repak
Temple University Press, 1995
In an analysis of recent immigration patterns in Washington, D.C., Terry A. Repak documents the unusual predominance of women among Central American immigrants. Two thirds of the arriving immigrants in earlier decades have been women, many of them recruited by international diplomats and U.S. government employees to work as housekeepers and nannies. Repak considers the labor force participation patterns for women compared to men, the effect of immigration laws—particularly the IRCA's uneven impact on women versus men—and the profound adjustments in gender roles and identities that accompany migration.
Showing an extraordinary amount of autonomy, most of these immigrant women decided to migrate without consulting either fathers or partners, and they gained even greater independence once settled. Repak plots the career trajectories of numerous Central American immigrant women and men to illustrate the array of the women's responses, gender differences in the migration and assimilation experience, the availability of work, and the possibility for upward mobility and higher wages. Providing social, economic and political context, she looks at the conditions that set the stage for this migration, including the rapid expansion of service jobs in the 1960s and 1970s in Washington, D. C. and the political strife in such Central American countries as war-torn El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
Walking Together
Central Americans and Transit Migration Through MexicoAlejandra Díaz de León
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Migrants in transit form several types of social networks, develop trust, and engage in acts of solidarity. The need to be recognized and grieved, compounded by the practical use of pooling information and resources, leads migrants to form small, strong groups called road families. Through the generalized sharing of information and small items such as food and blankets, migrants also form a transient community that includes everyone on the road at the same time. Sociologist Alejandra Díaz de León shows the trajectories of families that left together, showing, surprisingly, that families might not be the best social arrangement in transit.
Drawing on multisited research, this work contributes to debates on the role of social networks in clandestine migration processes and to discussions on how people create social networks and trust under violent and stressful situations. The detailed ethnographic narratives and accessible writing weave together theory with empirical observations to highlight and humanize the migrant experience.
Sitting at the intersection of border studies, immigration studies, and Latinx studies, this concise volume shows how Central American migrants in transit through Mexico survive the precarious and unpredictable road by forming different types of social ties.