To me, leadership means living a life of service and using one’s experiences, knowledge, talents, and gifts to serve others. I see it among older unaccompanied migrant youth who gain insights about navigating life in the US and eagerly share it with more recently arrived young people.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephanie L. Canizales.
Stephanie L. Canizales, PhD, is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Stephanie specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Over the last decade, Stephanie has focused her research on the migration and coming-of-age of unaccompanied children from Central America and Mexico in the US. Stephanie’s first book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, brings together six years of research to tell the stories of unaccompanied migrant youth in Los Angeles, California.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Stephanie is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants whose experiences growing up as unaccompanied youth in LA motivate her commitment to public scholarship. Stephanie’s research has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times, among other public outlets. She aims to impact policy through her work as a Resident Scholar with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a Research Consultant at UNICEF.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I’m the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants who met in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised. I love saying I’m from LA, and even more so that I grew up in the MacArthur Park and Pico Union neighborhoods. These are the neighborhoods that some people might drive through as they get from West or Central LA to Downtown across Wilshire and surrounding parallel streets. Others might stop in for pupusas, platanos fritos, champurrado– only the best.
These Central American neighborhoods are still relatively young in the history of LA. In the late 1970s and 80s, Los Angeles saw a significant rise in Central American migration to the US, but Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan migration specifically, in response to the US-backed civil wars across Central America. My parents individually migrated from El Salvador. They met in Westlake (not Westlake as in Village, but the other one, near MacArthur Park) in the mid-80s. My older sister and I were born soon after. Because my parents fled El Salvador under the conditions that they did and because Los Angeles was still adjusting to the increase in Central American arrivals, which produced hostility against newcomers, my sister and I grew up being instructed to assert a Mexican-descendant identity. I had no idea what that meant in practice other than saying, “Mexico” when people asked, “Where are you from?” This was back when people would respond by saying, “Oh, so you speak Mexican?” Yeah, we’ve come a long way.
Some might hear this and think, “They told you to do what?” So, for historical context, claiming Central Americanness, but Salvadoranness specifically, was a risk for those Civil War era arrivals. President Reagan convinced the US public that Salvadorans abroad were communists as the violence unfolded in El Salvador. This was to justify that in the 12 years of civil war in El Salvador, the US government spent $4.5 billion in militarization and securitization of the country’s interior and repression of civilians protesting the war and everything it represented. Over 70,000 people died during those 12 years. Thousands migrated. Meanwhile, Salvadorans in the US were being cast as criminal threats as we saw the rise of MS-13, a street gang born on the streets of Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s. LA locals might be familiar with MS-13 history and its connection to contemporary discourse around Central American teens and young adults stereotyped as gang-affiliated.
In any case, we didn’t say we were Salvadoran. In fact, I only started to claim my Central American background when I was an undergraduate at UCLA learning about patterns of US intervention in Latin America, reasons for displacement and migration to the US, and the trauma that Central American civil war refugees leave home and arrive in the US with that forces their silence. Laced throughout my complicated Central American identity formation is a beautiful story of finding love, appreciation, and comfort in Los Angeles culture and Los Angeles’ Mexican community, cultural identity, and practices.
All of this has shaped my passion and curiosity for understanding immigrant communities in Los Angeles, adolescent and teen identity formation as they come of age, and how people navigate cultural boundaries as they blur or brighten because of political, economic, and cultural conditions. This is what I do full-time as a researcher and professor.
My background and upbringing have shaped my understanding of the importance of education in identifying ourselves and naming our social worlds. It’s also molded my humanity. I intentionally practice empathy, kindness, and inclusion in the spaces I occupy across LA and wherever else I find myself. I am curious about people’s childhoods and family lives, how they learned who they are, how that sense of self changes over time, and how they understand their role in making and remaking the present and the future. I bring these intentions to my work as an educator and try to create the same space that professors created for me that led me down this path. I am also mindful of the fact that I have resources and opportunities that my parents didn’t and that many people might not ever. I try every day to make the most of that for myself but also find ways to be in service of others.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
I think, like a lot of people, the books that most impacted my sense of the power of books were works I read in high school: The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Grapes of Wrath, among others. The authors’ ability to portray a social world and actors within it and to use that portrayal to comment on and critique our social worlds and dynamics of power and oppression, alongside human resistance and resilience, fascinated me, fiction or not.
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was the first book I read that explicitly addressed migration. I was captivated by the story and couldn’t put it down. I don’t think I realized in 10th or 11th grade that it was a migration story, but knowing what I do now and looking back, it makes sense that I had such a strong response to the book.
But beyond any particular book, the power of reading has changed my life. It’s something I vividly remember encountering in second grade. I remember learning to read words but struggling with comprehension as a child. It’s like I could read entire sentences and paragraphs that made up a story, but I couldn’t visualize the story to follow along in my mind. I’m unsure if it was because I was Spanish monolingual in the years leading up to school enrollment, so maybe it was a language comprehension thing or something else. But I didn’t enjoy reading because I didn’t get it.
But then, one day, I got it. I can’t remember exactly what book it was, but I remember it was reading time in my second-grade class. I was sitting at my assigned wooden desk (the one where you could lift the top to keep all your school supplies inside) in my navy blue chair with metal legs, reading a book about a little girl going to school, and slowly, the sentences and paragraphs came to life, creating images in my mind. I was thrilled. I remember looking up at the teacher, almost wanting to know if she saw that I was reading reading, but of course, it was just me in my little second-grade world.
That day and that story about a little girl going to school changed my life because they transformed my relationship with reading. They have also shaped the way I think about storytelling in my writing as a sociologist.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of the greatest mistakes I’ve made in my career is assuming I needed to be perfect and not make mistakes to have a social impact. As most of us are, I am my harshest critic, so no mistake has ever been funny to me. But in the last year or so, I’ve started reconciling with my humanity and that despite my best intentions and time dedicated to my work, there is always room for human error. But making mistakes does not bar us from influencing our social worlds, making an impact, or leaving a legacy.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
My book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States, tells the stories of migrant youth from Central America and Mexico who arrive in Los Angeles, California, and grow up as unaccompanied and undocumented low-wage workers.
I began this research in 2012, which was two years before the start of what we now know as the year of the humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied child migration at the US-southern border in 2014. That year, in 2014, nearly 70,000 unaccompanied Latin American-origin children were apprehended at the southern border, primarily Central American from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Since 2021, an average of 146,000 children have been apprehended each year. It’s evident the crisis not only persists but has magnified.
While there has rightfully been significant attention to these children’s experiences during migration, at the point of apprehension and in federal custody, and in their years of pursuing legal protection once living in the US, we know very little about children who were not apprehended.
These are the stories I tell in Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, where I explore the migration and coming of age stories of young people who are not apprehended upon arrival in the US, who enter cities like Los Angeles and must find work, housing, and learn the everyday landscape to survive.
I aim to make an impact with my book by telling these stories from the youth participants’ perspectives and, in the youth’s own words, arguing that unaccompanied migrant youth are experts in their own experiences and, therefore, hold the solutions to the migrant crisis. I explicate unaccompanied migrant youth’s motivations for taking on the harrowing decision of lone child migration, their everyday experiences as garment factory workers, car washers, nannies and domestic workers, and other dangerously exploitative low-wage jobs. I speak to the hardships they face and the strategies they develop to survive, like forming relationships with other youth workers, enrolling in non-traditional schools to learn the English language, and working strategically to maintain ties to their left-behind parents, siblings, and community members.
As unaccompanied child migration from Latin America to the US persists, I hope Sin Padres, Ni Papeles urges us to consider what previous generations of child migrants can teach us so that we form policies and programs that reflect the history of this crisis, and so that we do not continue making the same mistakes in our reception and treatment of unaccompanied children in the US today.
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
Sin Padres, Ni Papeles tells an interesting story because it’s one we haven’t heard (or read) from the perspective of migrant children and in their words. Sin Padres takes seriously that migrant children have agency and are active decision-makers in their daily lives and the lives of their families and communities. The story is complex in structural and human ways, so the full story is the most interesting.
The book begins at the point of the youth’s departure from their origin countries. It describes how they set individual and collective migration goals rooted in advancing their own and their family’s futures. Many arrive in the US to find that long-settled relatives who are constrained by their own legal and socioeconomic status are unable to offer youth material and emotional support. Young people feel disoriented as they are thrust into material and emotional independence, and their role as low-wage workers in the US.
Over time, they experience orientation to life as unaccompanied and undocumented immigrant youth workers. Some establish meaningful social ties with individuals and organizations that also facilitate their emotional orientation as young people who are unaccompanied but not alone. These young people move into a phase of adaptation to life in the US as they learn to navigate the structure of opportunities before them. Those who do not establish meaningful social ties remain emotionally disoriented and experience what participants referred to as perdition, a state of being where emotional despair prompts them to take up behaviors that risk their material stability and lives.
As youth move through disorientation to orientation, adaptation or perdition, they make meanings of well-being and success in ways that reflect the conditions of their lives as unaccompanied and undocumented youth workers. They don’t point to the typical socioeconomic markers like diplomas or wealth. Still, the ability to care for themselves and their left-behind families and support other similarly situated peers matters most.
This isn’t typically how we think about immigrant incorporation and coming of age, so I find it all very interesting. I hope others do, too.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
The humanitarian crisis of unaccompanied child migration of 2014, which I described earlier, was a sort of “aha moment” for me. As academic researchers, we are taught to speak to our peers in theoretical and empirical terms. But when the 2014 crisis hit, I knew I had to speak to public and policy audiences about why children were migrating, the experiences of migrant children in transit and upon arrival, and what it means for children when they not only migrate unaccompanied but stay unaccompanied in the transition to adulthood.
To this end, I’ve been involved in writing opinion editorials, policy briefs, and reports for several outlets over the last decade. I’ve contributed to stories written by investigative reporters for the Atlantic, the New York Times, CNN, and La Opinion. I’ve also written my pieces for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Conversation, among several other outlets.
There are many people invested in shedding light on the experiences of unaccompanied Central American and Mexican youth in the United States. Still, few people are taking youth-centered approaches to this. For the most part, investigative reports and policy discussions give preference to the US immigration system or child welfare system; they give preference to notions of normative childhood and middle-class expectations on the behaviors and coming of age of children. From these perspectives, children’s unaccompanied migration is pathologized and framed as deviant. Parents of unaccompanied children are framed as negligent or abusive. The story my work brings into the world highlights that children migrate to and live in the US as unaccompanied and undocumented workers because US intervention in their origin countries necessitates these things for children to survive. Beyond this, however, children are also invested in providing care through material and emotional contributions to their left-behind families and communities.
We have missed this part of the story in the broader public discussions and policy debates about the arrival of large numbers of unaccompanied children to the US and what we will do next. I hope my work closes that gap.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
My research expertise in Latin American-origin migration has equipped me to provide direct support to immigrants seeking asylum and other forms of protection against deportation and removal from the United States. As a researcher of Central American and Mexican migration, and because of the authority my credentials as a PhD grant me, I have been able to work on expert country condition reports to support asylum-seeking children from Central America who are fleeing persecution from violence after refusing to join a gang, children who have experienced severe domestic abuse or anti-Indigenous racism and therefore fear for their lives in their origin countries.
Country condition declarations are reports (sometimes 10–15 pages) explaining the historical and contemporary structures and circumstances that forge the conditions from which children are fleeing. Suppose a child is claiming that members of a gang persecuted them. In that case, it is my job as the country conditions expert to explain the origins and history of gang violence, rates of violence against children, and how states have intervened or failed to intervene in the conditions that have displaced that one child and others like them. A child tells their testimony to the judge, and the expert tells the judge how that one story is situated in a larger world to help the judge better understand why that child should be protected via asylum.
I write about 4 or 5 declarations per year, and I’ve been doing this work pro-bono since about 2017.
When I think back to the impact of my career, I could talk about my contributions to sociology and the study of immigrants or the stories students have shared with me about the influence I’ve had on their education and/or transitions into work. I think these are all essential contributions to the world. However, the most critical impact I’ve made through my work has been through country condition reports and declarations.
These written works are only one part of the total immigration defense file that is put together by an asylum seeker and their attorney with painstaking detail and care. But I am honored to be able to share my expertise and knowledge in this very practical way.
In the first half of 2024, I heard back from two attorneys whose clients were granted asylum. They each shared that the declaration I provided supported the case positively. I am grateful for the opportunity to be involved in young people’s lives in such meaningful ways.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
The issues I am most dedicated to exploring sociologically are the migration and coming-of-age experiences of children of Latin American origin growing up in the US. I have spent a lot of time thinking about and through the issues of unaccompanied child migrant labor in the US, which I previously explained. I argue that “solving” these issues requires a holistic and child-centered approach that holds us accountable instead of shifting the blame onto impacted people for simply trying to survive their life circumstances. To that end, three things I suggest are:
- Listen to children and youth. We have convinced ourselves that young people only have sound opinions and perspectives at or after age 18. Still, sociologists and other social scientists have consistently shown that children are experts in their worlds and can tell us a lot about what can be done to make them feel safe, seen, and cared for.
- Look at the root causes of the problem. The US is active and complicit in the displacement of children and their families, which I elaborate on in great detail in Sin Padres; yet we refuse to acknowledge this.
- Acknowledge our role as a nation and a people in the displacement of generations of Latin American immigrants, even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s the only way to develop a holistic and enduring solution. My book sheds light on what that means and how we can intervene.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
To me, leadership means living a life of service and using one’s experiences, knowledge, talents, and gifts to serve others. I see it among older unaccompanied migrant youth who gain insights about navigating life in the US and eagerly share it with more recently arrived young people.
I write about this quite a bit in Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.
I observed that when young people feel that they’ve learned how to navigate the US sistema, or system, they turn to offer support to other immigrants, sometimes recently-arrived children but also long-settled immigrants they recognize as continuing to face disorientation or a sense of despair. Taking that posture of offering guidance and companionship to others, even as one continues to occupy a position of disadvantage, is leadership. We shouldn’t wait until we’ve achieved it all (whatever that means) to support others and build community; we can do it daily with whatever we have. The youth I portray in Sin Padres, Ni Papeles taught me that type of leadership.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
- You don’t have to know what the full path will look like to take the next step.
- Meaningful work takes time.
- Not everyone will agree with your ideas, and that’s okay.
- Collaboration is better than competition.
- It’s okay to say “no.”
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
A mantra that resonates with me is “progress, not perfection.” I think when you see big social problems that cause human or environmental suffering that you want to solve or develop solutions for because there is a sense of urgency in ending that suffering, it can be hard to be patient. I can get impatient with myself for not being able to do more or push harder. As I mentioned earlier, I can also be hard on myself when I make mistakes because I feel like there is so much on the line, and I want to do justice to my work and the people I aim to represent and impact through it.
But I heard “progress, not perfection” for the first time in 2020 when the world was shut down, and it had to be enough to be physically, emotionally, and mentally present. I don’t think I’ll ever stop expecting the most of myself and pushing myself to do what I can each day to move our world closer to equity and justice and to move us closer to treating each other with kindness and empathy. But rather than expecting it all, rather than judging my impact by achieving perfection, I try to look for progress.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would invite the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Xavier Becerra, to hang out if I had the chance. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement,
which administers the Unaccompanied Children’s program in the US. Secretary Becerra is the first Latino to hold this appointed position, which is incredibly meaningful. Secretary Becerra is also held to account for the fates of unaccompanied children in the US. If I had the chance, I’d want to talk with him about my work, share a copy of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, and think through what it truly means to support unaccompanied children in the US today.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I can be found at www.stephaniecanizales.com or www.sinpadresnipapeles.com
I am also on instagram at @booksbydr.steph
This was great, thank you so much for sharing your story and doing this with us. We wish you continued success!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Stephanie L Canizales Is Helping to Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.