Central America has been constructed on the world stage as a geography of insecurity. In particular, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are frequently identified as murder and femicide capitals of the world. Especially haunting is that these statistics reflect realities during a context of “peace,” with no official war currently recognized. The region is also often associated with gangs and civil wars and various forms of military violence that have punctuated its history for centuries2. Violence and insecurity have also propelled large-scale migration from these countries, especially to the United States, where they are legally and socially excluded and often misrepresented and maligned in public and political discourse3. However, Central American migrants and refugees understand that violence is multilayered and not exclusively concentrated in their home countries4. On several occasions, in community forums and other events, we have witnessed recently arrived Central American asylum-applicants in the United States lament that they left their country in search of safety, only to learn that insecurity continues to loom as they transit across borders and when they arrive in the United States.
Mainstream media in the United States has not often portrayed Central Americans holistically; rather, they only paint a violent picture of the region and map onto Central American citizens´ bodies, in particular Central American youth5. In those mainstream narratives about communists in the 1980s and gang members and voiceless victims in the 2010s, it is as if Central Americans embody danger and insecurity—and very little else6. As scholars, however, we continue to build the field of Central American Studies, and in so doing, we are adding various missing pieces of the puzzle to better understand the region, its people, and their living conditions.
In an attempt to center the voices and lived experiences of migrants and refugees and Central American scholars who descend from this history, this article takes the form of an annotated interview between Leisy Abrego and graduate student and filmmaker Jennifer Cárcamo about her film Eternos Indocumentados (2018). We discuss several significant vital themes within the film, including forced displacement, insecurity, neoliberalism, global capitalism, refugee incarceration, resistance, and gendered violence. Together we designed, edited, and annotated this piece based on a conversation we had about the film concerning Central American Studies. Abrego developed the questions in the iterative process, Cárcamo provided narrative answers, Abrego and Cárcamo edited and annotated the discussion to weave in existing scholarly work and citations. Our goal was to model the nuanced, complex, and evolving dialogues and conversations taking place amongst scholars, artists, and organizers who equally privilege their lived and community knowledge as U.S.-based Salvadorans alongside their academic research in Central American Studies7.
Leisy Abrego (LA): I consider your film, Eternos Indocumentados, to be an important contribution to Central American Studies, as it is based on extensive research across three Central American countries and within the United States. It reveals the complex, often oppressive contexts that make up the conditions of insecurity in Central America and the powerful social movements that arise in response. For you, as a U.S.-based Salvadoran, what served as the inspiration to make this film?
Jennifer Cárcamo (JC): The first seed for the film was planted after reading Roque Dalton’s Poema de Amor (1972) during a visit to El Salvador. It is a poem dedicated to the Salvadoran people about what it means to be Salvadoran—the beautiful, the ugly, the humble, the wretched. “Los hácelo todo, los véndelo todo, los cómelo todo… los eternos indocumentados.” (Those who do it all, who sell it all, who eat it all…the eternally undocumented.”). Those words had a deep impact on me, especially as a Salvadoran youth born in the United States to parents who migrated during the 1980s civil war in El Salvador. What did Dalton mean—especially considering that he wrote this poem in 1972, before the large out-migration of Salvadorans to the US? Was he talking about all Salvadorans or just those sin papeles (without papers)? Were we still los eternos indocumentados after the war had ended and the country was at “peace”? Over the years, I kept coming back to this poem and my questions.
Then, in 2014, the “Central American unaccompanied minors” crisis happened. Children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were migrating by themselves and turning themselves in at the U.S.-Mexico border, pleading for asylum. The Obama Administration declared it a “humanitarian crisis” but, instead of granting asylum, responded by fast-tracking their deportations, expanding the previously defunct practice of family detention,8 and increasing US aid through a program called the Alliance for Prosperity, a funding package meant to increase border militarization across Central America to stop migration at the earliest point of departure.9 Outraged by the inhumanity of the Obama Administration’s response to this so-called humanitarian crisis, long-time Salvadoran organizer and activist Esther Portillo called a meeting of Central American organizations, scholars, and community organizers in Los Angeles to respond to these events as diasporic Central Americans. The Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families (HRA) was born in this meeting, and that is where my film, Eternos Indocumentados, officially began.
LA: It strikes me that the film’s inspiration is rooted in different historical moments that took place first in Central America and then helped you make sense of the fast-paced and devastating contemporary context across the region. The film captures experiences in different states in the United States and Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Tell me why you decided to include all of these people and places in your film.
JC: All decisions about the film were rooted in the relationships I developed with people through my work as an HRA organizer. They were political and ethical commitments that I made as an organizer, filmmaker, and scholar. My research and film evolved, in this sense, out of my organizing work.
I started production of Eternos Indocumentados on July 7, 2014—the day of the first action organized by HRA in front of the Los Angeles Federal Building, where most refugees attend asylum court hearings. We were there to welcome Central American children. However, as time went on, we learned that the Obama Administration’s inhumane policies also targeted women, the LGBTQ community, Indigenous people, and disabled migrants—the most vulnerable populations of Central America. In Texas, the practice of family detention, targeting refugee women with children, was expanding. Esther – as I mentioned before, one of the founders of HRA – organized delegations of observers to different detention centers to meet with refugee mothers. I participated in one of these delegations in 2015 and visited women detained at Karnes Detention Center. There I met Maria Rosa, a refugee from Honduras, and Blanca, a refugee from El Salvador, who one week later, on Mother’s Day, launched the first of three hunger strikes at the Detention Center. They inspired and guided HRA to organize a fast across the nation—an act of solidarity to raise awareness about the hunger strike they led as incarcerated refugee mothers. During their hunger strike, detained mothers wrote letters to Obama and outlined clear, specific demands calling for their freedom. Their letters and demands informed HRA’s slogan, “Freedom Not Reform.” Their efforts ultimately led to their provisional release from detention.
Figure 1.
On October 7, 2017, the Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families hosted the “Freedom for Adelanto Hunger Strikers Solidarity Concert with Ellen Olera” to raise funds to release refugee Haitian and Central American hunger strikers at Adelanto Detention Center. Eternos Indocumentados (2018).
In December 2015, the Obama administration declared that it would conduct nationwide raids on Christmas Eve—an announcement that struck panic and fear among Central American families whose loved ones had been recently provisionally released. At the time, I was also working as a full-time community organizer with the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) of Los Angeles. I took the lead in organizing a direct action in response to Obama’s announcement and worked in conjunction with other immigrant rights organizations, including the Immigrant Youth Coalition (IYC) and Border Angels, organizations led by queer immigrant youth who sympathized with the struggle of Central American refugees. In one of the organizing meetings for this action, I met Alejandra Stacy, a trans refugee from El Salvador who had been released from the Santa Ana Detention Center one day prior. When asked what she was doing at this meeting having just been released from detention, she responded, “Yo estoy libre, pero todavía tengo amigas allí—por eso estoy aquí, para demandar la libertad de ellas, de todas.” I later discovered that Alejandra Stacy had also been a trans activist with an organization called COMCAVIS Trans, the leading trans-led human rights organization of the LGBTQ community in El Salvador. My experience with Alejandra Stacy moved me to consider how many trans refugees were migrating and under what conditions.
Building from this experience, the following year, HRA collaborated with the May Day Queer Contingent, Familia Trans Queer Liberation Movement (TQLM), and Trans Latin@ Coalition in a coordinated action to demand the closure of the Santa Ana Detention Center and the freedom of all trans refugees. Migrants and refugees of the Latinx LGBTQ community, principally transgender migrants, organized this action where I first met Angela, a trans Maya refugee from an Indigenous community in Guatemala’s highlands. A member of Familia TQLM at the time, Angela shared during her interview for my film that she was not only proud to be trans and Guatemalan, but also Maya, which for her meant wearing her native dress and speaking her native language, Quiché. When asked about her experience growing up in Guatemala, she shared how difficult it was for her to leave her Indigenous pueblo, but that she had experienced intense insecurity due to her family’s transphobic rejection and the extreme poverty and lack of educational opportunities in her community.
The following year, I met with a group of Guatemalan youth who were former residents of Casa Libre, a refugee shelter for immigrant boys. I had met the main organizer of Casa Libre at the time, Federico Bustamente, at several actions demanding the release of refugee children from detention and reached out to him to ask if any youth at the shelter would be interested in speaking about their experience as child refugees. Federico put me in contact with three Guatemalan youth, all of whom are Maya. Our conversations revealed the specific and egregious ways that Maya Guatemalan refugees experienced insecurity before, during, and after migration. For example, before migrating to the U.S., Gaspar had migrated to Guatemala City at ten years old, where he first learned to speak Spanish. Similarly, for Manuel, who migrated to the US when he was thirteen, one of the greatest challenges he faced was not being able to communicate with other refugee children in detention because they only spoke Spanish. Both struggled to learn English as a third language once they arrived in Los Angeles. Given the history and structural reality of settler-colonialism throughout the Americas (Boj Lopez 2017b; Speed 2017), it was important for me to amplify their stories in the film.
Another group of refugees that experience unique forms of insecurity are the disabled, or physically impaired. During my initial visit to Texas in 2015, I also participated in an action demanding the Dilley Detention Center’s closure—the largest family detention facility in recent history. At this action, a young Honduran refugee missing an arm and a leg that he lost in an accident while transiting through Mexico spoke of the horrific treatment he received while detained at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California. José Luis had been released two weeks earlier and was already out on the streets protesting. Months later, I ran into him again during a meeting at CARECEN. He came seeking support for a campaign led by the Asociación de Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidades (AMIREDIS), an organization that he co-founded with other physically impaired migrants who lost limbs during their migration journeys. After winning his asylum case, he has continued to organize disabled migrants and demand justice for all refugees in detention.
Framed by all of these encounters, the research for the film happened almost entirely through the process of organizing and learning directly from refugees. They helped me determine who and what topics would appear in my film.
LA: One of the things I’ve deeply appreciated about the Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families (HRA) work is their unapologetic insistence that Central Americans are refugees. Can you tell me about your decision to portray Central Americans as refugees in your film?
JC: Initially, my goal was to convey that incarcerated children were systematically denied asylum and deported back to their home countries without due process. Within HRA, we discussed the importance of highlighting that these children were, in fact, refugees and not simply “child migrants” or “unaccompanied minors” as mainstream media insisted on labeling them. We understood the history of Central American asylum seekers in the US, who have historically been denied asylum since the late twentieth century when the first big exodus began. Although Central Americans were fleeing U.S.-sponsored civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the US government refused to recognize Central Americans as legitimate refugees. Instead, the courts denied asylum at a rate of 98 percent—the highest denial rate of any asylum-seeking group in the US. This created a thick and consequential layer of insecurity for Central Americans.10 Thus, it was an intentional political act to name them refugees and assert that all Central American asylum seekers should be recognized as legitimate refugees.
Figure 2.
Geyso (mother) and Anderson (son), Salvadoran refugees, on their way to Washington DC to speak on their experience with family separation and lobby the Obama Administration to stop separating families.
LA: I love to show your film in my classes for various reasons, but one of the main ones is that you do an excellent job of featuring Central Americans not just as refugees but also as organizers and strategists. Was this always part of your plan?
JC: Yes—although I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of refugee resistance, specifically, until I joined HRA. By the end of the filming process, it was clear to me that I wanted to convey what impacted me the most about what I learned from these communities: that these refugees were actively organizing for their freedom. This reality clashed directly with the narrative produced by mainstream media that insisted on portraying refugees as either criminals or passive victims of inexplicable violence who were helplessly seeking refuge in the United States. Through organizing alongside these refugees, I learned that they were far from passive victims—instead, they were active political agents in their own right, demanding freedom and liberation on their own terms. I witnessed that the most vulnerable, the most oppressed, los eternos indocumentados, were the ones at the forefront of it all. It was essential to convey this history of refugee resistance in my film by centering their stories, struggles, and experiences as Central American refugees.
LA: It seems that the same was true among your interviewees in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Why did you choose to include them, and what did you learn from people who did not migrate?
JC: During short vacations from my full-time job, I would go to Central America and connect with folks whom I had worked with in the past, mainly through USEU (Unión Salvadoreña de Estudiantes Universitarios), and they connected me with other folks and movement organizers. The fact that I am Salvadoran and an organizer was enough for many of them to open up to me in ways that they might not have for others. They saw me as a compañera, not just an extranjera.
I went to all three countries because I’ve learned from organizing in both USEU and HRA that if we are truly committed to liberation, to freedom from global capitalism and all the facets of oppression that it produces, then we cannot just focus on organizing here in the US Diasporic Central Americans must also organize in tandem with regional social movements. Central Americans are not just passive victims of the systems of oppression and insecurity that have taken hold of the isthmus. Many have chosen to stay in Central America and fight against insecurity at home—and they are risking their lives to do so.11
I am greatly indebted to these movements not just for agreeing to appear in my film but for doing the work to transform the conditions that are forcing Central Americans to migrate. These are the voices and people we should be listening to when seeking solutions to end forced migration from Central America.
LA: Tell me about the organizations represented in your film and your research. How does each of them understand insecurity in the region?
JC: In the four years I spent producing my film, I made multiple trips to Central America. In El Salvador, I met with members of the Fuerza Estudiantil Salvadoreña, COMCAVIS Trans, Kolectivo San Jacinto, and ProVida El Salvador. The Fuerza Estudiantil Salvadoreña organizes students at the Universidad Nacional de El Salvador, the only public university in the country, to challenge ongoing efforts to privatize the university. Lack of access to higher education is one way to produce greater insecurity for the working class. COMCAVIS Trans is one of the leading LGBT trans-led organizations in the country fighting for the dignity and respect of all trans and LGBT people. The Kolectivo San Jacinto is a youth collective that participates in various community projects through ongoing media campaigns. One of the most impressive campaigns they were working on at the time was for a group called Los siempre sospechosos de todo (which is also a line from Dalton’s “Poema de Amor”), an intergenerational movement dedicated to defending criminalized youth illegally detained by the state military and police. ProVida El Salvador is a community coalition dedicated to preventing the privatization of water in El Salvador, a struggle for rural communities that goes back to the 1920s. The work of these organizations highlights insecurity as that which is produced when society and governments do not protect the dignity of human life, when they rely on military and police-based “justice,” and when they privatize public and natural goods.
Figure 3.
On March 14, 2016, Alejandra Stacey, a trans refugee from El Salvador and former organizer with COMCAVIS Trans, in an action at Senator Feinstein’s office to demand that the Obama administration provide Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Central American refugees. Eternos Indocumentados (2018).
The same occurred when I traveled to Guatemala and Honduras. In Guatemala, I had the privilege of meeting members of the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas, a Maya women-led organization fighting gendered violence, as well as OTRANS Reinas de la Noche, an organization supporting transwomen throughout Central America. As I was waiting for my interview with the Executive Director of OTRANS, I started chatting with a transwoman in their community space who was Salvadoran, too. Though she missed El Salvador, her life was in danger there, and she could not go back. Thankfully, she had found community and a new chosen family with OTRANS, who helped her win asylum, allowing her to stay in Guatemala. In the face of multiple sources of insecurity, it was beautiful to witness this act of solidarity by and for Central American transwomen. These organizations are responding to insecurities that have intensified for Mayas in a country that experienced genocide just a few decades ago and for transgender people in a transphobic context.
In Honduras, I met organizers from the Grupo Estudiantil La Raiz, El Centro de Derechos de Mujeres Somos Muchas, and the Frente de Resistencia de Honduras. La Raiz is a student group formed immediately following the 2009 coup that ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya.12 Christian, the student organizer I interviewed, talked about the Honduran student movement as a reawakening within the collective consciousness of Honduran youth to rise and speak out against the military state. In his own words, “nosotros y nosotras nos autodenominamos los hijos y las hijas del golpe de estado.” La Raiz was also born from the Frente de Resistencia de Honduras, which encompasses many different sectors of Honduras’s working-class resistance movement. These groups taught me about the different ways the coup has exacerbated insecurity not just for youth but also for the country as a whole under what is now arguably a military dictatorship.
LA: Your approach of working in tandem with social movements in Central America makes visible a complex reality that is entirely absent from mainstream US conversations about insecurity in Central America. As Steven Osuna argues, gangs (and MS-13 in particular) have come to represent the main and only source of insecurity in the region, but gangs are really only a symptom of the larger root cause that is global capitalism.13 Can you say a bit more about those various insecurities within and beyond Central America as experienced unevenly by members of different communities?
JC: Mainstream media suggests that gang violence alone creates a constant state of precarity and perpetual insecurity that forces people to flee. The issue with this narrative is that it scapegoats gangs as the only problem without acknowledging the deeper structural problems resulting from a long legacy of US imperialism, global capitalism, and neoliberalism in the region. Moreover, the Trump administration has simultaneously used this narrative to portray all Central Americans as criminals to support his anti-immigrant policies.14
Osuna’s work explains how the media has created a “transnational moral panic” around gangs that displaces global capitalism as the main problem. He argues that the simultaneous neoliberal restructuring between 1989 and 2009 in both El Salvador and the United States exacerbated the material conditions that forced deported and marginalized youth to engage in illicit means of survival. Gangs, therefore, are a product of the development of the Salvadoran neoliberal state, which began during the Salvadoran revolutionary war (1980-1992). They embody what Osuna calls a “transnational relative surplus population”—the product of the accumulation of misery (or immiseration) resulting from the rise of global capitalism and neoliberalism in El Salvador and Central America more broadly. “The marginalized youth who join gangs, like the indigenous people who were displaced from their lands in the late nineteenth century, and the guerrilla insurgency during the civil war, have become a potential threat to capital accumulation. The threat is their ability to reveal the primary contradiction of capital: the accumulation of wealth of one class requires the complete deprivation and misery of another”.15
The organizers I interviewed for the film shared similar analyses. Gangs are the most visible source of insecurity and violence in Central America, but we need to engage more critically with the way neoliberalism, in particular, perpetuates precarity and insecurity for the masses. For example, when I first interviewed Olivia, a refugee mother from El Salvador, she stated that the direct reason she fled was that a local gang was extorting her, and she could no longer afford to pay them “rent.” Upon further inquiry, she explained how security in El Salvador essentially functions as a business. If you can afford to pay for private security to protect your home or small business, you can protect yourself from extortionist groups. However, if you cannot afford this type of security—which is the case for most working-class Salvadorans—the chances of being extorted are very high. Far from being exclusively a gang problem, what made Olivia more vulnerable was her inability to afford private security. Although I didn’t get to include this in the film, according to Olivia, security is only available to people with money, meaning that security has become a for-profit neoliberal institution for the privileged and wealthy. Indeed, Osuna finds that “to respond to crime emerging from this immiseration, the Salvadoran government under ARENA passed the Private Security Services Law in 2014 that proliferated an industry of private security whose profits in 2003 reached an estimated $82.9 million and soared to $319 million in 2005”.16
Unsurprisingly, the profits generated from insecurity provide little incentive for the capitalist elite to invest in improving material conditions since they are, in fact, generating wealth from those very conditions. This, in turn, leaves the marginalized and working-class poor in a perpetual state of insecurity and accumulated misery with only two alternatives: struggle to change the conditions, or migrate.
LA: Besides the ever-expanding for-profit, private “security” forces, the police and the military are also well-known sources of insecurity in the region. How did the interviewees for your film experience interactions with the police and the military?
JC: This analysis of the Salvadoran neoliberal capitalist state is also closely tied to the expansion of militarization and policing practices in El Salvador, which Osuna argues are a US export to regulate and control the country’s transnational relative surplus population (2020: 4-5). He traces the origins of policies like mano dura, which enforce zero-tolerance and racial profiling, to “the neoliberal restructuring of Los Angeles and the racist policing of the Los Angeles Police Department”.17
This argument concurs with my interview with Salvadoran refugee and long-time community organizer Alex Sanchez, co-founder and Executive Director of Homies Unidos, a nonprofit organization dedicated to gang prevention and rehabilitation work. In the interview, Alex talked about his experience as a former gang member who was constantly harassed and discriminated against by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a Salvadoran refugee youth. He was deported back to El Salvador, where he faced continued criminalization and harassment at the hands of the Salvadoran police, the Policia Nacional Civil (PNC).
Despite being a rehabilitated former gang member and investing his time and energy into starting Homies Unidos to support other marginalized and deported youth, both the LAPD and PNC continued to target him as a “terrorist” for his previous affiliations with the MS-13. The harassment was so deep and violent (three of the organization’s executive directors were murdered) that Homies Unidos was forced to close its offices in San Salvador. Rather than support genuine efforts for gang prevention and rehabilitation, the Salvadoran state military and police apparatus are more invested in criminalizing marginalized and deported youth. According to Osuna, “many PNC officers refuse to see themselves as working with the community, or with criminalized youth for that matter. A former PNC officer further noted that police were not meant to do community work—they were there to enforce the law, and that means repression of urban areas”.18 In these ways, the police and the military produce insecurity in the region.
Figure 4.
Alex Sanchez (second from the right), Director of Homies Unidos in Los Angeles, attends an action with Central American youth demanding freedom for all migrants and refugees. Eternos Indocumentados (2018).
My film also demonstrates that the insecurity and violence haunting Central America is, in fact, the product of the emergence of a repressive capitalist neoliberal state. Based on this critique, we see that the real victims of state-sponsored violence are the most vulnerable, working-class communities of Central America, including those on the frontlines of its social movements. A clear example of this from my film is the story of Alejandra Stacy, a trans refugee from El Salvador who migrated to the US after being raped by a police officer. What made Alejandra Stacy’s testimony unique is that she shared that she had experienced gendered violence and discrimination from both gangs and police—however, it wasn’t until the police physically threatened her that she felt her life was in serious danger. “La policía es la encargada de velar por mi seguridad—y que un mismo policía me esté violando a mi? No, yo fui a poner la denuncia. Sin embargo, días después de que yo puse la denuncia, ya habían llegado a mi casa para matarme. Y es así como mi mamá me dijo: te me vas de aquí porque te prefiero lejos y no muerta.” Alejandra Stacy went on to share how—being a trans activist and organizer in El Salvador with COMCAVIS Trans—she had worked on multiple reports and campaigns to bring justice to other trans women whom the police had murdered. She had witnessed the level of impunity by which these cases were met. Thus, despite being well educated on her rights as a trans woman in El Salvador, her research and activism within the trans community taught her that the state was not a force to be reckoned with because, for her, it could mean almost certain death.
LA: I appreciate knowing about the greater complexity in how we should be thinking about insecurity in Central America. Often, individual countries are portrayed as though they stand alone in their levels of insecurity, but we know from migrants that they do not fully escape insecurities when they step outside of their country. Can you tell me about insecurities during transit within Central America?
JC: Of course, experiences with insecurity resulting from neoliberalism go beyond individuals’ home countries—they follow refugees in their journey through the isthmus, into Mexico, and in the United States. Many scholars write about this, including your work with Dr. Cecilia Menjívar on legal violence,19 which, in the process of making my film, helped me conceptualize and understand the ways legal systems in the US perpetuate violence against migrants and refugees across borders and throughout the region.
In Central America, this increased presence of military and police is the product of US foreign policy. In 2014, when the “unaccompanied minors crisis” began, one of the first things Obama did was approve the “Alliance for Prosperity”—which I have already mentioned above—a funding package engineered by then Vice President Joe Biden to increase military aid to Central America to stop migration at the earliest point of departure.20 I cover the consequences of this in the section of the film: “The Journey.” It focuses on the challenges faced by refugees during their migration journey North. Many of them discussed the deep fear they had of facing la migra not just in the United States but also in neighboring Central American countries and Mexico. They spoke of having to contribute money to a colecta to cover police officers’ bribes to let them pass. There are corrupt and extremely arbitrary processes that set up checkpoints and other forms of restriction to prevent free movement across borders. I witnessed this myself when I traveled through the isthmus and saw increased police and military presence at the Salvadoran-Guatemalan border. My US passport allowed me to evade police and military questioning, but others were harassed. At random checkpoints, I saw police make people step out of buses and prevent passengers from re-boarding to continue their journey.
LA: How did insecurity play out in Mexico?
JC: The Obama administration also used that moment in 2014 to extend Plan Frontera Sur in Mexico to provide increased military spending to detain, incarcerate, and deport Central American migrants on Mexican territory before arriving in the United States.21 This turned Mexico into the number one deporter of Central American refugees and migrants after 2014. The result has been that hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees have suffered from state-sponsored legal violence while in transit through Mexico—an unfortunate reality that did not escape the refugees I interviewed in my film. At least half of them—including children—had been extorted by the Mexican police, and several had been deported at least once by Mexican immigration before finally arriving in the United States. This, of course, leaves Central American refugees in transit under extremely vulnerable and precarious conditions throughout their journey, which serves as yet another example of how they live in a perpetual state of insecurity even outside of Central America.
LA: And how does insecurity play out in the United States?
JC: The conditions in the United States, unfortunately, are not much better. This is one of the main things I tried to illustrate in my film in the section “Arrival to the United States.” For me, it was particularly important to highlight the human rights violations resulting from the massive expansion of migrant detention centers,22 which are racist neoliberal institutions intentionally built into the US prison industrial complex that is profiting off of refugee incarceration. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez argues that the human caging of Black and Brown bodies began to specifically target Central Americans in the 1990s, thus paving the way for the US to build “the largest immigrant detention system on earth”.23
Figure 5.
Refugees from the 2018 Central American caravan/exodus protest on the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Las Playas, Tijuana, Mexico. Eternos Indocumentados (2018).
Since 2014, the expansion of family detention centers—what people are now calling modern-day concentration camps—means that incarceration rates of refugee women, children, and youth have increased exponentially, leaving them in extremely vulnerable conditions even within US territory. The human rights violations taking place in these centers alone are a cause for concern.24 In my film, I interviewed several refugees who described these conditions in vivid detail.
Importantly, these centers are also part of a larger for-profit prison system. Geo Group and CCA—two of the largest and most lucrative private and public prison companies in the United States—profit from the prolonged illegal incarceration of refugee women and children in cages. These companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby congress and promote anti-immigrant policies enabling them to contract with the federal government to pack their immigrant prisons. These companies charge up to $775 per day for each child detained in their facilities.25 Not only is this a gross misuse of US tax dollars, but it further enables the expansion of a neoliberal prison industrial complex that continues to profit off of the human caging of Black and Brown bodies, in this case, Central American refugees. As if that were not enough, the services provided within these facilities are also lucrative; incarcerated refugees must pay exorbitant fees for basic services like using the phone to talk to their attorneys and loved ones. Bail bond costs are also excessive.
LA: And what about outside of detention centers? Do refugees continue to experience insecurity once they start their new lives in the United States?
JC: Yes, the US immigration regime continues to profit from migrants and refugees after releasing them from detention. Many of the refugees I interviewed, including children, were required to pay unreasonable fees and fines to companies contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These companies were monitoring their every move via an expansive immigrant surveillance system that the US federal government has also grossly invested in.26 For example, about half of the refugees we worked with were required to wear ankle monitors after they were released while they awaited the outcome of their asylum case. Each person had to pay despite not being allowed to legally work in the US. HRA started hosting fundraisers to help refugees pay the monthly ankle monitor fees, which sometimes go as high as $300 per month. On top of having to pay rent, food, attorney fees, and other basic expenses, this puts refugees in extremely vulnerable and precarious conditions even after their release from detention. More recently, we have witnessed how the COVID-19 global pandemic has further exacerbated these conditions as refugees lack access to the benefits and protections granted to US citizens and residents. The Trump administration’s rapidly changing immigrant policies also complicated refugees’ access to social and health services. Without healthcare, unemployment benefits, housing security, childcare, or access to temporary relief programs, these families and individuals live under dire stress levels due to insecurity, even while seeking asylum in the United States.
CONCLUSION: ETERNOS INDOCUMENTADOS AND CENTRAL AMERICAN STUDIES
As Eternos Indocumentados reveals, there is an urgency for Central American Studies to counter the misinformation and injustice of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran experiences of insecurity in the isthmus, in transit, and the United States. Indeed, there has been a significant rise in scholarship on Central America being led by a growing generation of Central American scholars in the United States, many of whom are committed to mentoring younger generations. The film builds on early intellectual contributions by Cecilia Menjívar (2000), Ana Patricia Rodriguez (2009), and Ester Hernandez (2006). It is inspired by the creative work of EpiCentro, a Central American writing and poetry collective based in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, and a new wave of academic researchers. This includes Mario Escobar (2005), Maya Chinchilla (2014), Karina Alma (2013), Leticia Hernández-Linares (2015), Javier Zamora (2017), and Janel Pineda (2021) as well as Arely Zimmerman (2015), Alicia Estrada (2017), Yajaira Padilla (2012), Maritza Cárdenas (2018), and Leisy Abrego (2014), among others who capture the multi-sited experiences of precarity, insecurity, agency, and resilience. Building upon these foundations, Eternos Indocumentados is another example of cultural production and research by, for, and about Central Americans.
Radical thinkers and scholar-organizers, including Suyapa Portillo (2012), Steven Osuna (2017), Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj (2005; 2011; 2017), and William Robinson (2003; 2014), also fuel this growing field. Their work theorizes and contests US imperialism, global capitalism, neoliberalism, structural racism, and patriarchy in Central America, and they are present as mentors of Central American college students. In 2013, for example, Portillo gave the keynote address at USEU’s statewide retreat at UC Riverside and passionately talked about the need for transnational organizing and Central American solidarity, especially in light of the aftermath of the military coup in Honduras. Cárcamo began following Portillo’s work and was deeply moved by her commitment to uplift the narratives of queer communities in Central America, and she often refers to her scholarship on LGBTQ migration since the 2009 coup (Portillo 2015). In 2010, William Robinson also gave a keynote at USEU’s statewide conference at UCSB and talked about the crisis of global capitalism and the impending rise of neoliberalism in Central America.
The film also builds from the work of Velásquez Nimatuj, whom Cárcamo met when she visited the US to give guest talks on her appearance in the film 500 Years (Yates 2017), a phenomenal documentary about the trial of Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide against the country’s Maya Indigenous communities. The first time was through a community screening organized by La Comunidad Ixim where Velásquez Nimatuj did a Q&A with Floridalma Boj-Lopez (2017a), and the second time was at a screening at UCLA organized by Patricia Arroyo Calderón (2002), both of whom are also exceptional scholars who contributed to the film by providing a deeper understanding of Guatemalan migration and history. In Transnationalism and Maya Dress (2011), Velásquez Nimatuj argues that the “transnationalization of capital” resulting from neoliberal policies in Guatemala, supported by the US, also deepened racism, especially towards Maya women. She demonstrates that neoliberalism and transnational capital directly impact Indigenous peoples, an often-overlooked sector of the Central American population, even within Central American Studies. She says, “Whenever we [Maya women] are seen in regional traje, the ruling classes are reminded of the failure of their efforts to make us disappear, which have ranged from genocide to ideological coercion. Five centuries of humiliation have not succeeded in bringing the Maya people to their knees”.27 Velásquez Nimatuj invites us to challenge neoliberal policies, which are global capitalism’s products and contribute to structural racism and patriarchy, in our work, which is taken very seriously in the film.
Lastly, Eternos Indocumentados also draws from the contributions of US-based Central American organizers and political strategists, such as Esther Portillo. In Moving Beyond Immigration Reform (2015), Portillo critiques the Obama administration’s failed immigration reform by highlighting the mass deportations under his presidency. Today, Obama’s devastating enforcement practices often get overshadowed by the Trump administration’s explicitly racist policies. As Portillo argues, “Immigration reform, as both US political parties have advanced it, will not address the root causes of migration. It is time, therefore, for Latinos and their allies to rethink and move beyond discussions of immigration reform for the more than 24 million noncitizens in the US and demand full social inclusion and respect for their human rights while also directly addressing the root causes of migration: US foreign policy, military aid to corrupt government forces, and neoliberal policies”.28 Based in the United States, Portillo recognizes that all noncitizens and even some who have naturalized still live in contexts of insecurity. Working to provide true economic, political, and legal security requires us to consider both domestic immigration issues and US foreign policy.
In her talk titled Truth, Trials, and Memories at the University of Minnesota, Velásquez Nimatuj said: “No llegué por casualidad a las ciencias sociales. Llegué porque sabía que mi país necesitaba investigaciones desde los propios hombres y mujeres indígenas y es así como yo veo las ciencias sociales: como un instrumento de lucha, no como un medio o un objetivo final que nos permita dar una carrera académica o un prestigio. Más de eso, yo creo que las ciencias sociales deben ayudar a transformar el mundo en que vivimos”.29 (“I did not arrive casually to the social sciences. I arrived because I knew that my country needed research conducted by Indigenous men and women, and that is how I see the social sciences: as an instrument of struggle, not as a pathway to an academic career or for prestige. Beyond that, I believe the social sciences must help us transform the world we live in.”) Like Velásquez Nimatuj, we too pursued academia because we believe scholarship for, about, and by Central Americans can serve as a necessary tool to transform our communities, to challenge discourses and historical narratives that have intentionally marginalized, subjugated, victimized, misrepresented, and invisibilized Central Americans. We need to learn from our communities, build with our communities, and demand justice for our communities in order to rise above and beyond the mispresented insecurities that surround us.