Immigrants from Mexico and Central America

Immigrants from Mexico and Central America
Author: Emma Bernay
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2018-08
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1543556264

In today's uncertain world, many families are leaving their home countries and seeking a better life in the United States. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America explores the stories of two boys who left their home countries to find a better life in the United States. Follow their journeys to find out why they left their homelands and understand the challenges they faced in moving to a new country.

Central American Immigrants

Central American Immigrants
Author: Frank DePietro
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 64
Release: 2014-09-29
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1422293211

In the United States today, Hispanics make up the largest minority group. "Hispanic," however, is a broad term that covers many different backgrounds. Within this large term, people from Central America are the fastest-growing group. Many Central Americans came to America seeking safety from violence and war. Find out more about these immigrants—the turmoil that drove them to the United States, and the struggles they faced upon arrival. Learn what Central Americans are doing to better their home countries, the United States, and the world.

U.S. Central Americans

U.S. Central Americans
Author: Karina Oliva Alvarado
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816536228

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

The Other Side

The Other Side
Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0374305749

Award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos explores illegal immigration with this emotionally raw and timely nonfiction book about ten Central American teens and their journeys to the United States. You can't really tell what time it is when you're in the freezer. Every year, thousands of migrant children and teens cross the U.S.-Mexico border. The journey is treacherous and sometimes deadly, but worth the risk for migrants who are escaping gang violence and poverty in their home countries. And for those refugees who do succeed? They face an immigration process that is as winding and multi-tiered as the journey that brought them here. In this book, award-winning Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos strings together the diverse experiences of eleven real migrant teenagers, offering readers a beginning road map to issues facing the region. These timely accounts of courage, sacrifice, and survival—including two fourteen-year-old girls forming a tenuous friendship as they wait in a frigid holding cell, a boy in Chicago beginning to craft his future while piecing together his past in El Salvador, and cousins learning to lift each other up through angry waters—offer a rare and invaluable window into the U.S.–Central American refugee crisis. In turns optimistic and heartbreaking, The Other Side balances the boundless hope at the center of immigration with the weight of its risks and repercussions. Here is a necessary read for young people on both sides of the issue.

Migration and remittances in Central America: New evidence and pathways for future research

Migration and remittances in Central America: New evidence and pathways for future research
Author: Kate Ambler
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Emigration from the countries of Central America has evolved since the 1960s from small numbers of largely intra-regional emigrants to substantial numbers of people, emigrating in large part to the United States. For example, in 1960, 69 percent of emigrants from El Salvador resided in Honduras and only 12 percent lived in the United States. By 2000, 88 percent of Salvadoran emigrants in the world lived in the United States.

Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South

Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South
Author: Mary E. Odem
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820329681

The Latino population in the South has more than doubled over the past decade. The mass migration of Latin Americans to the U.S. South has led to profound changes in the social, economic, and cultural life of the region and inaugurated a new era in southern history. This multidisciplinary collection of essays, written by U.S. and Mexican scholars, explores these transformations in rural, urban, and suburban areas of the South. Using a range of different methodologies and approaches, the contributors present in-depth analyses of how immigration from Mexico and Central and South America is changing the South and how immigrants are adapting to the southern context. Among the book’s central themes are the social and economic impact of immigration, the resulting shifts in regional culture, new racial dynamics, immigrant incorporation and place-making, and diverse southern responses to Latino newcomers. Various chapters explore ethnic and racial tensions among poultry workers in rural Mississippi and forestry workers in Alabama; the “Mexicanization” of the urban landscape in Dalton, Georgia; the costs and benefits of Latino labor in North Carolina; the challenges of living in transnational families; immigrant religious practice and community building in metropolitan Atlanta; and the creation of Latino spaces in rural and urban South Carolina and Georgia.

Central America's Forgotten History

Central America's Forgotten History
Author: Aviva Chomsky
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807056480

Restores the region’s fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States’ interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today. At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and Indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies that promote cultures of violence and forgetting without any accountability or restorative reparations. Focusing on the valiant struggles for social and economic justice in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, Chomsky restores these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. Tracing the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and bringing us to the present day, she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s that set the stage for neoliberalism in Central America. Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States’ enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, mining, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.

Solito, Solita

Solito, Solita
Author: Steven Mayers
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1608466205

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone) is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells—in their own words—the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of migrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s narrators bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border. This collection includes the story of Adrián, from Guatemala City, whose mother was shot to death before his eyes. He refused to join a gang, rode across Mexico atop cargo trains, crossed the US border as a minor, and was handcuffed and thrown into ICE detention on his eighteenth birthday. We hear the story of Rosa, a Salvadoran mother fighting to save her life as well as her daughter’s after death squads threatened her family. Together they trekked through the jungles on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, where masked men assaulted them. We also meet Gabriel, who after surviving sexual abuse starting at the age of eight fled to the United States, and through study, legal support and work, is now attending UC Berkeley.