In recent years, mainstream media has fed off the trauma of child migrants – images of children in cages, children separated from their parents, children in squalid camps – yet the coverage ends here. Through a study of literature by writers who migrated to the US as children, this panel centers their experiences – not as another form of “trauma porn – but as a critical lens through which to explore themes including belonging, human rights, solidarity, and citizenship. In addition to the experiences of child migration, we also highlight the writers’ aesthetic and rhetorical choices that contribute to US literature.

We will approach this topic in various ways. Dr. Castillo Planas will focus on the issue of mental health, an area vastly understudied in immigration studies. Through an interdisciplinary methodology including historical context, policy analysis, interviews with experts and members of directly impacted populations, and literary analysis of works written by former child migration, this project offer a new perspective on immigration scholarship as well as Latinx literary studies. In centering not only undocumented voices but also the experiences of children, this paper will offer a new approach to thinking about immigration policy past and present.

Dr. Gretchen Selke will focus on the theme of belonging. In Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2015), Dan-el Padilla Peralta famously chronicles his decision to reveal his citizenship status on the cusp of his graduation from Princeton University. Despite being “sin papeles,” Padilla Peralta defies all odds as a wildly successful graduate of an elite institution and present-day tenured member of Princeton University’s faculty. In The Distance Between Us (2012), Reyna Grande depicts her move to “El Otro Lado” at nine years old and how her longed-for “American Dream” is not reflected in the reality of life with her father in the United States. Grande goes on to earn her MFA and is an award-winning writer, experiencing the kind of success that many writers can only imagine. Both writers arrive in the US mainland as “undocumented” children whose border crossing stories reflect the trauma of a broken immigration system. Now, almost a decade after both works were published, these two memoirs offer a chance to reframe how child migrant experiences have changed in the shadow of increased militarization and detentions at the Southern Border. She argues that these memoirs offer a means to contest the othering that being undocumented has come to represent. Instead, she suggests that these writers insist upon their own “Americanness” in order to assert a sense of belonging that contradicts the extant narratives about child migration.

Next, Lucas Iberico Lozada will approach the topic through an analysis of aesthetic and rhetorical strategies in the works of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Javier Zamora, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. As Lozada points out Far too often, undocumented and formerly undocumented nonfiction writers are called upon to serve as a kind of a "voice for the voiceless," as spokespeople for a large and perennially underrepresented social group within the United States—and not, crucially, as artists making particular aesthetic choices. As Karla Cornejo Villavicencio noted in an interview I did with her for Guernica, "people don’t often ask me about my influences or whether I have any training in writing or who I studied under or things like that. People just ask me about my parents leaving me in Ecuador, or what I do for self-care, things like that. It’s very clear that I’m being seen through a sociological lens." I will use the space of this paper to perform a reading that takes the opposite tack, paying careful attention to the rhetorical strategies taken up in four works of contemporary Latinx nonfiction writing that represent undocumented children.

Lastly, Dr. Natalia Villanueva-Nieves will explore Javier Zamora’s memoir, Solito (2022), as an example of how storytelling by immigrant authors disrupts trauma porn. She argues that Zamora uses writing to reconnect with his inner child, the 9-year-old boy from El Salvador who arrived in the U.S. after a two-month journey. Such reconnection consists of a symbiosis between memories and the emotional and sensory dimensions of the body. Zamora, therefore, tells his journey as an immigrant child from an affective perspective that places human connections and solidarity at the core of immigration experiences. By centering friendship and collaboration, Zamora does not deny the hardships and human rights violations that immigrants endured in their journeys but displaces violence and trauma as an unbreakable cycle, opening emotional routes towards healing.