“Para Seguir Adelante: Livelihood Strategies, Transnational Ambitions, and the Agency of Honduran and Salvadoran Migrants in the Pacific Northwest”

• In Event: Cinematic ‘Caravans’: Ethnography and the Filmic Representation of Mexican and Central American Immigration

Abstract

Honduran and Salvadoran migrants continue to realize their transnational dreams amidst intensified forms of xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies in the US, and increased levels of violence and political uncertainty in Central America. Drawing upon collaborative ethnographic research conducted in 2018 in Washington State, this paper approaches the varied lived experiences of transnational migrants from a theoretical perspective that privileges their agency in reading the political landscape and envisioning possibilities in both sending and receiving countries. Most literature on Honduran and Salvadoran migrants in the US focuses on reasons why people leave Central America (citing increased levels of violence and poverty) and why they move to the US (citing perceptions of employment opportunities). Our paper engages such important questions, but also moves beyond causational frameworks about why people migrate to focus on everyday life in the receiving country. We examine both lived experiences in the Pacific Northwest, and migrants’ adept abilities to navigate economic and political processes beyond their individual control, as they strive for justice and inclusion in US society, and develop socially constructed ambitions characterized by ongoing transnational ties to Honduras and El Salvador. Our focus on migrants’ agency in not severing ties and loyalties to their countries of origin moves beyond the assimilationist paradigm, once popular in anthropological studies of immigration. This endeavor also represents a shift away from classic place-bound ethnographies, and instead studies a process – transnational migration – experienced across space.

Authors

• Jordan D Levy, Pacific Lutheran University

• Sandra M Estrada