Transborder and Imaginary Homes: The Borderlands, Belonging, and the Stories We Tell

• In Event: Unpacking “Home”: Confronting Racism and Other Oppressions in Early Childhood Contexts

Abstract

What does it mean to call a place home? What does it mean to belong? Immigrant families and youth in the United States exist in a precarious zone of indistinction, in an imaginary space, sin tierra en cuál sembrar nuestras raíces. This is what living in the borderlands feels like. It is like living in a house without foundation. Confined by shifting walls and borders, immigrant families exist and live in a mythological land of the here and there. Como dice la India Maria, somos ni de aqui ni de alla. This is our home, and it has been fabricated for us. It is a wavering zone that has been intentionally constructed to make the “other'' feel unwelcomed.
In this paper we focus our discussion on the ways in which immigrant youth and their families experience and imagine home and interrogate how and why certain home realities are neglected, unrecognized, or silenced. Drawing from autoethnography, conversational interviews with immigrant children and their parents, and Border Crit Theory (Maldonado, 2013), we question fixed notions of home and advocate for the creation of more fluid, transformative, and inclusive spaces of belonging.
Immigrant families are vulnerable to discrimination, racial profiling, and the systemic violation of their civil and human rights. In the name of public safety children as young as newborns have been separated from their mothers. In the name of national security, immigrant children fleeing violent and life threatening conditions are encaged. In the name of education, immigrant children are robbed of their history and self confidence as they enter an education system intentionally blind to their lived realities. In the name of being one nation under god, American children in Arizona are forced to take a moment of silence after the reciting of the pledge of allegiance. All of these commitments to a narrative full of insincerity and contradictory messages exist unconfronted.
As we return to our initial query, what does it mean to call a place home?, the experiences of migrant families and young immigrant children raise issues and contradictions to common sense understandings of home. When home is dangerous, denied, or multi-sited as with transborder communities, where is home? Who defines home? How do families create the experience of home? What meanings does “homeland” and homeland security have for immigrant and asylum seeking families? We find hope in deconstructing not only the physical borders that geographically separate us but those that metaphorically continue to otherize and dehumanize those sitting on the other side.

Authors

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University

• Angeles Judith Maldonado, The Institute for Border Crit Theory / Ybarra Maldonado Law Group