A Brief History of Central America

The history of Central America directly impacts current events, and exploring the social, political, and economic reasons why Guatemalans and other Central Americans emigrate to the United States deepens our connections to family stories and legacies. This chapter offers a brief overview of the region....

Gifts, Weapons, and Values

Central Americans from a variety of religious traditions and social classes speak freely of lo espiritual, or “that which is spiritual,” but they do so in widely diverging ways. This chapter attempts to make sense of the vast and varied ways in which Central Americans reference spirituality by describing four common threads of usage. Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors sometimes frame social problems like gang violence as having both spiritual causes and spiritual solutions. Other Central Americans use the term “spiritual” to describe supernatural entities with a strong bearing on political structures. Meanwhile, some Central Americans have come to use the term “spirituality” to refer to beliefs and practices with roots in precolonial Mayan narratives. A fourth means of utilizing the language of spirituality is as a catch-all term for quasi-religious meditative practices and prosocial values formation. In conclusion, religious background and social class influence how people define and conceive of “the spiritual.”

No “Little Saigon” in L.A.

Starting in 1975, Los Angeles attracted what would become, within a decade, the largest concentration of resettled Vietnamese refugees in the United States. A combination of legacies led to the concentration of Vietnamese in Los Angeles: decades of U.S. involvement in Vietnam; Cold War foreign policy; domestic urban planning; and public housing policies born of the city’s history of racial segregation. These structural forces also drew many other immigrant groups to Los Angeles during the same period, as Koreans, Thais, Mexicans, and Central Americans likewise concentrated in L.A., each developing their own distinctive enclaves in the same districts and neighborhoods as the Vietnamese refugees. Refugee resettlement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s meant that the Vietnamese benefited from services and institutions established earlier for prior immigrant and refugee groups who had made their way to L.A., but also competition and conflict over space, markets, services, and resources, as well as cross-cultural cooperation and convergence. However, unlike some other newcomer groups, Vietnamese refugees had access to specific government-funded resources and opportunities, in addition to personal, professional, and military-related connections, that stemmed from the United States’ decades-long imperialist project in Vietnam. This article examines the settlement and placemaking experiences of Vietnamese refugees among other immigrant groups—overlap, similarities, and differences—in Los Angeles in this era.

No Refuge

This book confronts the ethical dimension of the global refugee crisis. When most people think of the global refugee crisis, they think of Syrians crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy boats into Europe or caravans of Central Americans arriving at the US border. Yet behind these images there is a second crisis: refuge itself has all but evaporated for millions of people fleeing persecution and violence. Refugees have only three real options—squalid refugee camps, urban slums, or dangerous journeys to seek asylum—and none of these provide access to the minimum conditions of human dignity. No Refuge makes visible to readers the crisis that refugees experience in the twenty-first century: for refugees, there is no refugee. The author argues we must adopt a moral framework that incorporates the harms refugees experience both as they flee their home countries and as they seek refuge elsewhere. It’s crucial, she thinks, that citizens understand the crisis for refugees as they seek refuge and the role our states have played in this crisis in order to develop more just responses in the future. Both drawing from and transcending other philosophers’ approaches to the morality of refugee policy, the book demonstrates that countries have a moral obligation to address the political structures that prevent refugees from accessing to the minimum conditions of human dignity. An adequate response to the crisis must include ensuring the rights and dignity of refugees wherever they are.

Central America and the United States

Central America has endured more US interventions than any other region in the world. This history reflects the long-standing belief of US officials that their country’s global aspirations hinged on its control of an interoceanic canal cutting across the isthmus. Yet geography alone does not explain the fixation with Central America. Ever since Manifest Destiny expansion of the mid-nineteenth century, the region has also served as a proving ground for new forms of US power such as overseas settler colonialism, dollar diplomacy, and counterinsurgency strategies. Central America’s lengthy encounter with the United States has generally been viewed by scholars in dichotomous terms: Central Americans either abetted US impositions or bravely rejected them. These Manichean images of accommodation and resistance have also served as political weapons for Central Americans and foreigners alike. In reality, such images obscure the ambiguities that not only define the region’s history with the northern “colossus” but also best capture the limits of US power.

The Sanctuary Movement

In the spring of 1982, six faith communities in Arizona and California declared themselves places of safe harbor for the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans that had been denied legal proceedings for political asylum in the United States. Alleging that immigration officials had intentionally miscategorized Central Americans as “economic migrants” in order to accelerate their deportation, humanitarian organizations, legal advocates, and religious bodies sought alternatives for aid within their faiths’ scriptural teachings and the juridical parameters offered by international and national human rights and refugee law. Known as the sanctuary movement, this decade-long interfaith mobilization of lay and clerical activists indicted the US detention and deportation system and the country’s foreign policy initiatives in Latin America as morally bankrupt while arguing that human lives, regardless of documentation status, were sacred. In accusing the United States of being a violator of both domestic and international refugee legislation, subsequently exposing hundreds of thousands of people to persecution, torture, and death, the movement tested the idea that the country had always extended welcome to victims of persecution. Along with a broad network of anti-interventionist and humanitarian aid organizations, sanctuary galvanized more than 60,000 participants in 500 faith communities across the nation. By the 1990s, the movement had spurred congressional action in support of Central American asylees and served as the model for a renewed movement for sanctuary in support of undocumented Americans in the 21st century.

The Deportation Machine

Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. This book traces the long and troubling history of the U.S. government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. The book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. It examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. It reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. The book uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms—formal deportations, “voluntary” departures, and self-deportations—and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, the book introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion. It chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship.

Dirty Work, Dangerous Others

While Mexico has been openly critical of US immigration enforcement policies, it has also served as a strategic partner in US efforts to externalize its immigration enforcement strategy. In 2016, Mexico returned twice as many Central Americans as did the United States, calling many to criticize Mexico for doing the United States’ “dirty work.” Based on ethnographic research and discourse analysis, this article unpacks and complicates the idea that Mexico is simply doing the “dirty work” of the United States. It examines how, through the construction of “dirty others”—as vectors of disease, criminals, smugglers, and workers—Central Americans come to embody “matter out of place,” thus threatening order, security, and the nation itself. Dirt and dirtiness, in both symbolic and material forms, emerge as crucial organizing factors in the politics of Central American transit migration, providing an important case study in the dynamics between transit and destination states.