Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States by Stephanie L. Canizales

University of California Press

Review by Brian Tanguay

Imagine for a moment that you’re a fourteen-year-old boy living in El Salvador with your family — mother, father, and multiple younger siblings — in a poor rural area where opportunity is scarce. Even worse, local gang members are pressuring you to join them by threatening your mother, which you know isn’t an idle threat. Your eldest brother lives in Los Angeles and has offered you a place to land — if you can somehow make it to the US border and cross without being apprehended. The last thing you want is to leave your family and the life you’ve known, but what choice do you have? Leaving is the best option you have to help them, and perhaps to make a life for yourself.  

Your family begs, borrows and scrapes together enough money to pay a coyote to guide you on the journey north. They hope and pray that the coyote doesn’t take their money and abandon you along the way. Fortunately, and fortuitously, you make it to Los Angeles and reunite with your brother. But that’s not the end of your journey, it’s the beginning.

What happens to young migrants that make it to Los Angeles is the subject of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles (without parents nor papers) by Stephanie L. Canizales, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is based on her fieldwork with a group of undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America, young men and women, who arrived unaccompanied and with widely varying support systems available to them. Canizales studied this group for six years, from 2012 to 2018. Most participants were male. The median age at the time of migration was sixteen, though one migrant was only eleven. On average, members of the group had lived in the US for around eight years. 

While this is an academic book written in scholarly vernacular, I was keen to read it because it lands at a moment when the  immigration debate in this country — if it can be called that — is dominated by strident voices, fear-mongering, and apocalyptic rhetoric that both obscures the issue’s root causes and ignores the lived experience of migrants. We should be asking why so many people feel compelled to leave their home countries. What conditions are they fleeing? What forces and actors caused those conditions to deteriorate to the point where a young person feels he or she has no choice but to walk into the unknown, armed with little more than hope? We should question the false notion that every migrant from Mexico or Guatemala is a criminal intent on causing mayhem.  

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles makes this very clear: arriving in a sprawling city like Los Angeles is a daunting experience made even more precarious when a migrant is coming-of-age at the same time. Even with a supportive receiving network, the transition is disorienting. Some of the young people in the study group weren’t even fluent in English or Spanish at their time of arrival. 

The difficulty faced by an unaccompanied minor without family, community ties or access to the education system is staggering. Many undocumented migrants cannot, or choose not to, avail themselves of the socializing experience of K-12 schooling and instead learn the skills they need to survive in Los Angeles on garment factory floors or construction sites, in restaurant kitchens or other unglamorous and often exploitative employment. A common refrain noted by Canizales is the difference between expectations and reality; for most migrant youth, daily life is many times more difficult than they imagined it would be, far lonelier, isolating, and expensive. As Canizales observes, “despite their hopefulness about life in the US, they experienced intense material and emotional disorientation upon arrival and in the initial years following migration.”

Even for well-situated American-born teens, adolescence is a challenging and turbulent time, and coming of age on the margins of society is much harder. Some migrant youth patch together support structures by enrolling in English language classes or through involvement with church groups, though crushing work schedules, lack of transportation, or apprehension hinders others from forming such connections. 

What Canizales illustrates through her fieldwork is the gauntlet of everyday difficulties faced by undocumented youth, first and foremost their precarious status, which complicates their search for work, stable housing and safe navigation of the city. Gender is a factor in this context. Cultural expectations are different for males and females, and Canizales deserves credit for examining the unique obstacles faced by female migrants. 

For all the media attention, extreme rhetoric, and hand-wringing over immigration, it’s worth noting that Congress hasn’t passed any significant comprehensive immigration policy since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, when Ronald Reagan was president. Political leaders may claim that the US faces no more serious social problem, but when it comes to concrete solutions, little is actually done. The issue is simply too valuable as an electoral wedge for some; for others it’s too complicated and intimidating; and in certain sectors of our economy, disrupting the status quo might reduce the supply of exploitable labor. 

The most remarkable aspect of this book are the personal histories of the group members, most of whom talked about the heavy responsibility they felt to their families back home. Their sense of obligation to help those they left behind was palpable, regardless of their country of origin or the reasons they came to Los Angeles. Despite the hardships and deprivation, they arrived with dreams, goals, and aspirations, and understood that all they could depend on was their own initiative, hard work and perseverance. They expected no welcome mat, no handouts, no streets paved with gold. What they hoped to fashion for themselves was a pathway to a decent and dignified life.