UC San Diego

“Somos Locos Respetosos”: A Bidirectional Ethnographic Project of Reclaimed Childhoods at Casa Asilio*, A Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors in Tijuana (2018-19) provides a space within Latin American studies to orally illuminate the experiences of unaccompanied minors in transit amid globalized ways of life and massive displacement. I theorize the process by which youth develop kin-ship ties, and by extension—their identities, to humanize themselves within the greater mechanism of the Caravan movement. I reconfigure the massiveness directed at the Caravan movement (and those who comprise it) by the Western media. In this work, I collect stories of survival from unaccompanied minors who travel from Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala to the Tijuana-San Diego border as well as the staff at Casa Asilio1. I freeze-frame the Caravan’s unaccompanied youth under the scope of Global political-economic forces that create social conditions in which violence, namely familial disintegration, is rendered natural. Upon their arrival at Casa Asilio, a shelter for unaccompanied minors in transit, I observe the construction of surrogate families, or kinship ties. Through the testimonies of the teens’ experiences, I empower their memories of each other as they actively create meaning within undesired circumstances. To safeguard their stories, all identifiable information (such as names of those involved in this study and the geographic setting of the interviews) has been given a pseudonym.