Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Political geography III: International migration and geopolitics

“…The geopolitical trauma of migrants is further examined through the experiences of unaccompanied children at the U.S./Mexico border. This analysis demonstrates how the mechanism of state care for migrant children, creates new situations of fear and increased risk of violence and vulnerability (Torres et al, 2022). The questioning of refugees and other migrants at border crossings, or detention and processing centers illustrates inherent assumptions about migrant populations that fuel distrust and doubt.…”

Children’s geographies I: Decoloniality

“…As De Leeuw and Greenwood (2016) point out, the contemporary racial marginalisation of Indigenous children goes hand in hand with health and poverty discrimination, social isolation, educational disadvantage, and political persecution. However, as other geographers have shown, children racialised as non-White and Indigenous are active agents of resistance and reworking of place relationalities in contexts as wide as school and education (Hanna, 2023; Maithreyi et al, 2022), care relations and migration journeys (Rajan, 2022; Torres et al, 2022), urban planning and policies (Diaz-Diaz, 2022; Andal, 2023b), and land extractivism (Nxumalo, 2017). It is also possible for individuals and groups to assume the positionalities of both the colonised subjects and colonisers (Pulido, 2018), as examples from children’s geographies show, ranging from Cheung Judge's (2023) account of disadvantaged Black UK youth participating in volunteering schemes in sub-Saharan Africa to the systemic exclusion of Roma representations in school texts in Poland (Świętek et al, 2019).…”