The vast majority of my students at the University of California, Los Angeles are privileged young people from affluent areas of Los Angeles and similar regions in California, among other places. They have grown up comfortably and have little, if any, contact with the thousands of undocumented people their age or younger who live in the shadows of their attractive campus. They may see these peers working at nearby construction sites, restaurants, or occasionally in downtown hotels when they attend weddings or similar events. But to my students, their friends and parents, and the residents of their middle and upper middle class neighborhoods—most of whom remain blissfully unaware of and even entirely indifferent to the circumstances facing undocumented immigrants in this country—they are invisible.
For far too many others in our increasingly xenophobic society, these undocumented adolescents and young adults are merely “illegal aliens” who don’t belong here and should be deported—people who are undeserving of public services, personal empathy, and human dignity. But Stephanie Canizales, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has handed the microphone over to these young immigrants, and in so doing produced one of the most exciting and meticulous qualitative research projects I’ve read in many years.
Her new book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles (“without parents or papers”) tells the story of the thousands of young people who have arrived unaccompanied in the U.S. without any documentation and have settled in Los Angeles among immigrant communities, frequently with poverty-stricken relatives who cannot really support them. They try, with enormous hardship and marginal success, to survive in a strange and often hostile land.
Sin Padres, Ni Papeles
By Stephanie L. Canizales
University of California Press, 338 pages
Release date: August 6, 2024
Canizales’s subjects hail mostly from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. They flee grinding poverty, civil strife, threats of terror, and worse. Many are primarily conversant in Indigenous languages and are not Spanish or English speakers. When they finally arrive in Los Angeles, they must live in crowded conditions in severely overpriced and dangerous tenement apartments; begin learning Spanish and English; and figure out how to navigate the streets of South Los Angeles, all while combating loneliness and alienation in the aftermath of escaping unbearable circumstances. How many adults could manage all of this? I doubt that more than a handful of my students could––or that they could even imagine facing any of these problems.
Canizales provides a heartbreakingly detailed account of one of the hardest challenges undocumented young people face: finding employment. Many of Canizales’s subjects must earn money to support family members in addition to themselves, and for most, this means performing menial labor under wretched conditions. They frequently work in child care, hospitality, kitchens, factories, car washes, and construction sites, doing the jobs that privileged citizens largely eschew. They are the most vulnerable segment of the entire American labor force. Being both young and undocumented, they have little recourse for workplace abuse.
Canizales recounts incidents of these marginal workers experiencing verbal and sometimes physical abuse at the hands of their employers, who are contemptuous of labor laws and regulations. They frequently lack protective equipment and can be terminated if they voice complaints. What’s more, they are frequently victims of wage theft, underpayment, and threats to call federal immigration officials in case of disobedience.
Exploitation remains the rule, and this reality bears devastating implications for impoverished immigrant families. Insufficient food, clothing, housing, health care, and even debts to those who helped them cross the border create both crushing financial burdens and incalculable emotional stress—and all the while, the constant threat of detention or deportation looms over them.
The bulk of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles involves the deeply personal stories of the young people whom Canizales came to know over the course of the six years she spent researching the book. She becomes deeply immersed in the lives of these immigrants, whom she meets in community centers, evening English classes, church settings, fast food restaurants, and similar locations. Her subjects express suffering and sorrow, but also hope and resilience. So many examples of the monumental obstacles these young people face appear in these pages: Benicio, from Guatemala, recounts his bewilderment when he first tried to navigate the complex city bus system after arriving in LA; Adan, from El Salvador, speaks of his severe loneliness and depression; Esmeralda, also from Guatemala, recalls having to fend off sexual advances from her brother-in-law.
One of the most compelling features of Canizales’s book is the Methodological Reflections Appendix, which details how painfully personal the project was for her as a first-generation American of Salvadoran descent. She became involved and invested in the lives of these young immigrants, who became much more than mere research subjects to her; their harrowing stories of pre-migration, migration, and settlement, she writes, are permanently imprinted on her consciousness. She recounts feeling anxious and fatigued throughout the course of conducting her research. She also discusses the challenge of navigating uncomfortable dynamics with male subjects who made sexual advances toward her in the course of their work together, and writes of losing sleep while processing intense feelings about the prevalence of sexual violence toward immigrant women. Once, overcome with emotion while driving after an interview with a subject who described being the victim of sexual abuse, she pulled over on the side of the road and vomited.
Canizales’s candor in describing her anger and sadness is more than a matter of enormously moving writing—it is a praise-worthy act of scholarly courage. In today’s academy, social science research that deals honestly with the researcher’s own feelings is often treated as highly suspect and marginalized, depending on the institution and department from which it emerges. Far too many young scholars and students are taught that emotion has no place in “serious” research. In my own scholarly work, which has involved interviewing artists of color across generations and listening to their stories of encountering racism, sexism, and exclusion, I have had to continually reject my academic peers’ advice to remain more “objective” and less “committed.” I’m gratified to see a younger scholar moving forward in a tradition of scholarship that allows the researcher to, in her own words, “lean into being human.”
In the months and years ahead, millions of undocumented immigrants, including Canizales’s subjects, will suffer under the threat of a mass deportation campaign spearheaded by President Donald Trump’s racist conspiracy-mongering “border czar,” Tom Homan, and his deputy chief of policy, Stephen Miller, who is alleged to have said he would “be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.” While not all of the more than seventy-seven million people who voted for Trump in 2024 share these views, some of the harshest anti-immigration rhetoric is now emerging from Americans whose own recent ancestors, like mine, were immigrants themselves.
My own family came away from the experience of immigrating to the United States with a different perspective: My father came to the U.S. as a political refugee having lost his entire family at Auschwitz, and fostered a fierce commitment to all marginalized and threatened immigrants. That is the foundation of my personal resistance and my empathy with Canizales's subjects and all the others now facing imminent danger.
Hate is a powerful weapon in American politics, and Trump has a unique capacity to exploit it. But there will be nationwide resistance to his agenda on every front. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles reminds us that we are always talking about real human beings, real feelings, real pains, and real hopes and aspirations. We can never lose sight of that immutable truth.