By the time the Trump Administration's family separation policy took effect in 2018, children had been a focus of news coverage of migration across the US border. Yet this journalistic attention has tended to reduce the complex factors behind the shifting demographics of migration, often attributing it to gang violence. Using child-centered narratives from Central American and Mexico, this talk will discuss how changes in labor markets have pushed many workers to new levels of precarity, forcing them to create new relations within the family and altering the structures of migration. These stories reveal the "crises of care" and other forms of "slow violence" manifesting alongside those of politics, economics, and ecology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Dr. Andersson is a recent graduate of U-M who returns to campus to present her work on Central American and Mexican migration as part of LACS' continuing series, Central American Contexts. This event will conclude with a brief message from the Washtenaw Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights (WICIR).