UC Press Blog

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.

Stephanie L. Canizales is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.

Your book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, comes at a crucial time in our country. While much is made of the border and immigration from Central America and the United States, few stories focus on unaccompanied minors crossing the border. What inspired you to tackle this aspect of migration?

Ultimately, the migrant youth at the center of my research inspired me to learn more and write about unaccompanied youth migration, incorporation, and coming of age. 

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles started as a dissertation project. While in undergrad at UCLA, I worked with several immigrant youth-led organizations in Los Angeles, mainly organizing around undocumented students’ rights. I thought this would be the primary focus of my work. However, when I was introduced to a youth group made up of unaccompanied and undocumented teens and young adults who were growing up as low-wage workers in Los Angeles early into my PhD program, I changed course. The young people this group— called Voces de Esperanza in my book—lived lives unlike anyone I’d read about in my undergraduate and graduate courses or met in my organizing work.

I was in my early 20s when I started researching Sin Padres, Ni Papeles—around the same age as the young people I met. I was also in that transition to adulthood. It was my first time living alone and not having a roommate. I bought my first car and had bills in my name. It was stressful to think about my future and whether I’d achieve my goal of eventually getting a tenure-track professor job. 

Would I attain it? I didn’t know. But confidence in taking risks and trying to stand on my own two feet in pursuing those things came from the certainty that I had support. My mom was less than an hour away, my siblings and friends were close, and I had a graduate school committee and peers cheering me on. I also benefited from a broader structural safety net: legal status, a baseline income, health insurance, English-language proficiency, formal education, and a university affiliation that gave my student status credibility. 

The young people whose stories I tell in Sin Padres, Ni Papeles were living a completely different reality in the same city. They had grown up as children in factories, restaurant kitchens, and warehouses; they were nannies and domestic workers, car washers, and construction workers. They weren’t enrolled in K-12 schools or colleges. Some spoke Spanish when they arrived in Los Angeles, but many were Indigenous language speakers and had to learn Spanish to begin participating in the immigrant communities they lived in. They were navigating their households and communities independently and navigating Los Angeles and origin-country relationships simultaneously. I was captivated by the intensity of their everyday lives and their courage, creativity, and collectivism in meeting trials and celebrating triumphs.

I hope readers of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles can imagine the lives of these unaccompanied migrant young people (and many unaccompanied youth continue to live today) through the stories I tell, but, more importantly, I hope they can feel these young people’s humanity.

Much of your book is from firsthand accounts of migrant youth in LA. What was your process and how did you get these young people to open up to you about their experiences?

I spent time—a lot of time. 

The research for Sin Padres started with Voces de Esperanza, the unaccompanied migrant youth workers I mentioned earlier, whom I met in 2012. As I write about in the book’s Methodological Appendix, people didn’t talk to me directly for seven months despite attending the group weekly for two hours per week. I’m an introvert, and I didn’t even speak Spanish all that well when I entered the field. I felt uncomfortable most of the time, but the group’s coordinators kept inviting me back and promised the ice would eventually break. When it finally did, my research took on a new life because I could ask direct questions to group participants, including asking if they’d consider an interview with me. As I built rapport, the young people of Voces began inviting me to other groups, events, and informal meetings after work and on weekends. I only attended events I was asked to. And when I said I was going, I showed up. 

I didn’t approach my time with unaccompanied youth as research hours. The events, meetings, and group hangouts I attended were my participants’ real life. I made them my life, too. My friends, partner, parents, and everyone else in my world knew that the time was non-negotiable. As I saw it, people were inviting me into their continuous lives; my opting in and out would create a sense of disposability. I’m not sure if this approach was healthy for a graduate student, but I think it allowed me to be seen as reliable and genuinely invested in youth’s lives. Ultimately, I gained an understanding of how incorporation and coming-of-age processes are materially and emotionally intertwined, which I theorize in the book. 

Reflecting on this, and now being a professor who supervises students engaged in similar ethnographic and qualitative methods, the TLDR is that this work takes time. Immigration politics and graduate school requirements will try to convince us that there is an urgency to get people’s stories on paper. And, of course, there is. We need solutions to mitigate people’s suffering, and research informs data-driven solutions. Still, our urgency to help people should not come at the cost of rushing the rapport and trust-building process or at the expense of being extractive. No deadline is more important than respecting one another and upholding the dignity of people’s lives as both their lived experiences and the stories they tell about them.

What is the most surprising aspect you learned from your research and process of writing this book?

Most of my academic career and experiences in academia have been a surprise to me. I came to study immigration and Latina/o Sociology because I learned much about myself and my family through undergraduate and graduate-level lectures, seminars, coursework, and conversations. Even so, my graduate school research surprised me in many ways. At first, I was surprised children were growing up in Los Angeles independently (and, honestly, I still am today). I was surprised garment factories and factory owners were willing to exploit non-English speaking, unaccompanied, and undocumented migrant children in the US, but Los Angeles specifically. My confusion about these things and how young people could survive under such conditions expanded my curiosity, motivated my questions, and energized my fieldwork.

Through the research and data collection processes and my ability to articulate young people’s stories to my parents, I learned about my parents’ migration stories from El Salvador to Los Angeles and their teenage years growing up in the Pico-Union and Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhoods where I did this research. Threads of the stories I weave together in Sin Padres, Ni Papeles run through the stories my parents tell.

While writing this book, I learned to have grace with myself. Writing is such a vulnerable process. I am putting myself and how I understand my data and my participants’ worlds on full display. And while the pages are now printed in black and white, my understanding of the phenomenon I study is still evolving. Even when published, this work is never done. I am learning to lean into that reality.

Finally, in the book, I argue that we are far more interconnected in our daily lives than we think and that the experiences of the unaccompanied migrant youth portrayed in Sin Padres are interlinked with the everyday lives of people like me, my parents, and future readers. I am pleasantly surprised that people are taking that message to heart as I share about the book. 

With immigration being a key issue during the 2024 US election and in the wake of much incendiary language around undocumented migration from certain sides, do you have hope for youth that make the risky journey into the US?

In the media, immigrants are villainized as the threat from which ‘Americans’ must be protected, and various actors across the political spectrum rely on the immigrant threat narrative to lift themselves as the protectors. That this language can quickly turn to action at all levels of society (top down and bottom up) is especially frightening.

Since finishing the research for Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, I have started an in-depth study of how service providers committed to supporting the well-being of unaccompanied children and other immigrants living in the US are experiencing their day-to-day work. I refer to these attorneys, social workers, case managers, health practitioners, educators, and advocates as “community helpers” because they are often motivated by their or their family’s migration experiences. They are dedicated to ensuring that today’s immigrant families are not afflicted by the same issues their parents or even they were.  Learning about how these individuals spend their time, expertise, and resources to better the lives of disparaged and targeted groups inspires some hope in me for the future.

What gives me the most hope, however, is how migrant youth take care of each other.

If the last decade of US politics has taught me anything, it’s that no one is coming to save us. We only have each other. For better or worse, the unaccompanied youth portrayed in this book seemed to have picked up on that very early on in their lives. They look to each other, align their goals and intentions, activate their efforts, and protect and love one another (okay, now I’m crying). To scale those efforts out, we need to include unaccompanied youth in conversations about the way forward and out of this crisis. We need to include long-settled youth like those in this book in discussions about how we can support today’s children. 

Being a first-gen scholar yourself, what does supporting first-gen scholars mean to you?

Supporting first-gen scholars means supporting whole and multidimensional persons and creating pipelines of shared wisdom and opportunity alongside them. 

First-gen students often need someone to come alongside them through the challenges. First-gen scholars will be experiencing spaces, places, people, and things that no one in their family has yet and with few people in their immediate networks to rely on for support. Sometimes, my family members, as precious and well-intended as they may be, offer advice that doesn’t work for an academic job market, navigating a faculty meeting interaction, or the book publishing context. Having a knowledgeable and trusted guide through these times makes a difference.

First-gen students might also often need someone to acknowledge the full joy of their achievements. Many students and colleagues have said, “My family doesn’t understand what I do!” Because we are first-gen, it might be hard to communicate the meaningfulness of a journal placement, a fellowship award, or a conference paper acceptance to the people we are most deeply connected with and to and want validation from. I often don’t discuss milestones or accomplishments outside of a social media post shared with colleagues; I move on to the next thing. But a friend tells me to “celebrate early and often.” I think supporting first-gen scholars means doing just that: celebrating them early and often. It means lifting up their work and efforts so they can pause and experience joy among the abovementioned challenges and expectations of what they will do next.

I also suggested earlier that supporting first-gen scholars means creating pipelines of shared wisdom and opportunity alongside them. Including scholars in the conversation, asking, “What are your goals, and how can I support you in achieving them?” is critical for any support effort to be meaningful and effective.