Work and Survival
This activity is the central organizing force in unaccompanied, undocumented youth migrants' daily lives.
What is work/employment?
What is Maya/an Indigenous language?
These relationships help the young immigrants navigate loneliness and the challenges of adapting to a new environment.
What are friendships and social networks?
This young immigrant watches his father's funeral in Guatemala through Facebook Live.
Who is Gabriel?
This term describes the process of moving between jobs.
What is job jumping?
This is the language many immigrants must learn to navigate daily life in the United States.
What is English?
Diego uses this space to receive support and to learn to play an instrument.
What is Church?
This immigrant began offering a reading group to support Maya literacy.
Who is Zacarías?
Julian demonstrates this strategy by changing jobs to seek better opportunities and improve his circumstances.
What is pursuing economic mobility?
Zacarías participates in this type of community activity to support the preservation and development of a type of literacy.
What is a Maya reading group?
Nicolás and Patrick find social and emotional support through a group with this shared interest.
What is recreational sports?
This young immigrant illustrates how changing jobs can be a strategy for pursuing better employment opportunities.
Who is Julian?
Danilo's decision to accept lower pay in exchange for greater emotional support shows that economic decisions can be influenced by more than this one factor.
What is salary?
This event allowed Indigenous youth to showcase their pride to the author.
What is Thanksgiving?
Gabriel uses this social media platform to watch his father's funeral in Guatemala from a distance.
What is Facebook Live?
This young immigrant accepts lower pay in exchange for greater social fulfillment.
Who is Danilo?
The prioritization of work over education and recreation demonstrates how this larger system can constrain individual opportunities.
What is structural economic inequality?
This strategy is sometimes used by Maya teens when navigating hostility towards them and combatted by ethnolinguistic adaptation.
What is dampening or cloaking their Maya identity.
This term describes friendship that provides family-like support.
What is fictive kinship?
This young immigrant uses friendships to cope with loneliness while adjusting to life in the United States.
Who is Andrés?