Susan Bibler Coutin

In Exiled Home, Susan Bibler Coutin recounts the experiences of Salvadoran children who migrated with their families to the United States during the 1980–1992 civil war. Because of their youth and the violence they left behind, as well as their uncertain legal status in the United States, many grew up with distant memories of El Salvador and a profound sense of disjuncture in their adopted homeland. Through interviews in both countries, Coutin examines how they sought to understand and overcome the trauma of war and displacement through such strategies as recording community histories, advocating for undocumented immigrants, forging new relationships with the Salvadoran state, and, for those deported from the United States, reconstructing their lives in El Salvador. In focusing on the case of Salvadoran youth, Coutin’s nuanced analysis shows how the violence associated with migration can be countered through practices that recuperate historical memory while also reclaiming national membership.

Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence

Exiled Home

Barbara Yngvesson

Documenting Impossible Realities explores the limitations of conventional accounts through which belonging is documented, focusing on the experiences of adoptees, deportees, migrants, and other exilic populations. Susan Bibler Coutin and Barbara Yngvesson speak to the current historical moment in which the dichotomy between an "above ground" inhabited by dominant groups and an "underground" to which unauthorized immigrants, political exiles, and transnational adoptees are relegated cannot be sustained. This dichotomy was made possible by the illusion that some people do not belong, that some forms of kin are not real, or that certain ways of knowing do not count. To examine accounts that challenge such illusions, Coutin and Yngvesson focus on the spaces between groups, where difference is constituted and where the potential for new forms of relationship may be realized. By juxtaposing and moving between entangled realities and modes of expression, Documenting Impossible Realities conveys the emotional experience of oscillating between being here and gone, legitimate and treated as counterfeit.

Susan Bibler Coutin

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