Exiled Home

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.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Violence and Silence  212. Living in the Gap  553. Dreams  954. Exiled Home through Deportation  1295. Biographies and Nations  165Conclusion. Re/membering Exiled Homes  205Appendix  227Notes  231References  241Index  265

"Exiled Home constitutes a timely and sophisticated scholarly piece that entails a thorough methodological discussion and makes for fascinating reading. By placing deportation within an institutional and policy context and considering the experiences of undocumented immigrants raised in or deported from the host country, the book complements an existing literature that is largely concerned with the reasons for migration, the situation of adult immigrants, and the impact of remittances. The work makes an impassioned plea to legalize youths who are US citizens in all but immigration status and should prove of interest in both academic and policy circles." - Sonja Wolf (International Migration Review) "At a time when more people than ever are being displaced from their homelands, Coutin’s vivid, youth-centered analysis offers a potent and instructive understanding both of those who migrate and of those who are exiled home." - Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz (American Anthropologist) "An illuminating example of how to effectively and creatively mesh theory with qualitative data. . . . A carefully crafted, humane portrayal of the broad-ranging and common experiences of Salvadoran migrant children living in the United States and those violently reinserted in El Salvador." - Shirley A. Heying (Journal of Anthropological Research) "Exiled Home is a testament to many things-the importance of fieldwork, the significance of critical thought, the power of political participation-but the book also evidences the gift of longstanding ethnographic engagements." - Kevin Lewis O'Neill (Anthropological Quarterly) "For anyone wishing to understand what is at stake with the cancelation of TPS and DACA, the proposed changes to make asylum even harder to get, or the waves of caravans coming out of Central America, [Exiled Home] is essential. It will be useful and timely for courses from any discipline on immigration as well as political and legal anthropology." - Amelia Frank-Vitale (Border Criminologies) "Focusing on Salvadoran migration, the book not only shows that Central American migration to the US is not new, but also that Salvadorans’ migratory experience is characterized by different forms of violence and uncertainty that are not bounded to national territories or categories. Exiled Home contributes to understanding how Salvadoran youth migrants expand what it means to be Salvadoran and American." - Lurio Gutiérrez Rivera (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) “Exiled Home is an invaluable text, in which Susan Bibler Coutin builds upon her decades of critical ethnographic engagement with the Salvadoran diaspora to produce a theoretically rich and textured analysis of the children and youth who migrated with their families to the United States during the Salvadoran civil war (1980-92).” - Irina Carlota Silber (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)