Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence
Susan Bibler Coutin is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States; Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency; and The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement.
Violence and Silence
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Published:May 2016
This chapter analyzes the forms of violence that have produced the temporal, spatial, and biographical disjunctures experienced by 1.5-generation Salvadoran youth. This chapter refuses distinctions between political and other forms of violence (a distinction that has been central to U.S. asylum law) to instead consider the ways in which war, emigration, immigration policies, family separations, silences, and deportation dismember bodies, lives, families, and nations. The chapter treats dis/memberment not only as a form of breaking apart but also as the denial of membership and the erasure of memory. Salvadoran youth are denied membership in El Salvador, in a practical sense,...
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