Narratives of migrating childhoods: the orphans of whatever we call democracy

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary findings from ethnographic research conducted in a migrant refugee house in Mexico City. The study focuses on how migrant children construct and narrate their own identities in contexts of forced mobility. Through the use of participatory workshops and in-depth interviews, my study reveals how their experiences demonstrate the persistence and sophistication of what Benítez Rojo (1989) calls the rudimentary Columbus machine, now manifested in the intersection between exclusionary legal frameworks and conservative discourses that legitimize the systematic violation of rights. The analysis focuses on the narratives of children’s, mainly from Ecuador and Honduras, documenting their trajectories through what has been identified as a triple mechanism of oppression: foreignization, externalized securitization and the state of emergency. The children's accounts, which include experiences of kidnapping by cartels and strategies such as "pretending to be Mexican, hooding, not speaking", reveal how the initial colonial machinery works. This research, framed by inter-American studies and Ricoeurian hermeneutics, shows that childrens develop strategies of survival and resistance in the face of this contemporary machinery, which places them in a legal limbo between international protection and national migration control policies. Their stories transcend traditional notions of 'victim' or 'irregular migrant' and reveal a complex understanding of the power structures that position them, as one refugee manager puts it, as 'orphans of the state’. The testimonies collected show that the current migration crisis is not a failure of the system, but its calculated functioning