Delia’s Return: Multimodal research with deported migrant youths as method and reflective practice

Keywords: Multimodality, Unaccompanied migrant children, Indigenous youth, Participatory methods
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

In the United States, media and policy discourses often reduce migrant youth to various abbreviated tropes: the victim, the threat, the economic migrant, the model minority. These static depictions of young migrants are commodified for the sake of political agendas, altruistic causes, or media clickbait. This presentation not only critiques these reductive tropes but also creates counternarratives that center the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous migrant youths from Guatemala. Drawing from longitudinal, mixed methods research with unaccompanied migrant youth in zones of transit in Mexico, detention centers for children in the U.S., government facilities receiving returned children in Guatemala, and communities of origin, we present a collaboratively-written multimodal narrative that traces the experiences of Delia, a Maya-Mam youth as she is deported from the U.S. to Guatemala. The narrative is illustrated by the fourteen-year-old Gabriela Afable, who accompanied her mother (Heidbrink) in fieldwork. This public-facing narrative reveals how Indigenous migrant youth negotiate everyday violence and discrimination, how they and their families prioritize limited resources and make difficult decisions, and how they develop and sustain relationships over time and space. By shifting methodological practice and the relationships between researcher, illustrator, and interlocutor, this collaborative process acknowledges and values Delia’s expertise and Gabriela’s artistic insights by engaging young people as partners in the coproduction of knowledge. Enlisting multimodality as both method and reflective practice allows for a critical engagement with the politics of invention, opening pathways to different ways of knowing and learning, while offering the possibility of surprising discoveries.