Anthropology Professor To UN: Immigrant Youth Need Support

In a world with more refugees than ever before, the number of displaced children is also growing rapidly, with ramifications that University of Cincinnati anthropology professor Leila Rodriguez will explore Dec. 2 at the United Nations Women’s Conference in New York City. The theme of this year’s conference is “Families in a Changing World.”

Rodriguez, a native of Costa Rica, focuses her research on young Central American migrants who travel to the United States unaccompanied. Specifically, her UN talk will address issues of gender, family dynamics and violence.

“Gender matters in the origin contexts because of the way that the families are structured,” she said. “The majority of these kids don’t come from traditional family structures. They lived with single moms, or they are raised by grandparents. Many did not have a father in the house—their father may have been in the United States.”

Confronted with uncertainty, poverty and even violence at home, both girls and boys opt to migrate. However, when it comes to violence on the way to the U.S., gender matters, Rodriguez said. While males may face mugging and kidnapping by  gangs or drug cartels, females face the additional threat of sexual assault and rape. 

Rodriguez’s passion for exploring the complex dynamics of migration stems from her own life story. She migrated to the United States when she was 10 and her mother enrolled in graduate school at Penn State. 

“I suddenly realized that I was different,” she said. “Although I was very young, I started to be curious. Why do some immigrants try so hard to be Americanized? Why do other immigrants reject integrating into American society?”

When she returned to Costa Rica at age 15, she saw the flip side of the immigrant experience. “There was park in the middle of the downtown of my city that was full of Nicaraguan immigrants, and I felt like I couldn’t go to the park,” she said. “I started to see both sides of the issue. I know what it’s like to be an immigrant, and I know what it’s like to get a lot of immigrants in your city.”

As she pursued her own academic journey in anthropology, she realized that the human condition has always involved migration. “We move to survive. We can adapt anywhere—the Arctic, the tropics and the desert,” Rodriguez said. Migrating, adapting and moving are all inherent in human nature. “This is who we are as a species.”

She looked for ways to support her focus on the migration of unaccompanied minors and the cultural shifts they faced. At the College of Arts and Sciences, she recently became involved in The Cincinnati Project, an initiative that helps connect faculty with the community. 

Through The Cincinnati Project, she connected with the Su Casa Hispanic Center, a nonprofit organization that provides services including ESL classes, free legal aid and free computer classes to local Latino migrants. 

Su Casa wanted to know more about their clients and to learn what young migrants needed most, which dovetailed with the information Rodriguez sought. 

For her research with Su Casa, Rodriguez focuses specifically on unaccompanied minors from Central America: El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. She learned that since 2014, the number of unaccompanied minor immigrants, many of them females under 15, increased significantly. While they flee gang violence and poverty, if they are apprehended on the Mexico-United States border, they often land in detention centers.

“They are not criminals, but some are kept in high-security centers,” Rodriguez said.

She learned that once released from detention centers, young migrants are sponsored by relatives in the United States where they await immigration court hearings. Some seek asylum. All face challenges adapting and surviving in a new world surrounded by new, and sometimes not welcoming, neighbors, she said, noting the passage of the Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump as examples of the rise of nationalism and concerns about refugees and immigration.

In addition to sharing her finding with the UN Women audience, Rodriguez continues to work with other academics, community organizations and community members. Through reports created for nonprofits and ongoing community outreach efforts, her research can help provide the data needed to advocate for immigrant youth, she said.

Most importantly, she said, she wants young immigrants themselves to know the importance of education. 

“I want them to understand that staying in school is important,” she said. 

“They may think that because they are working in a factory making minimum wage and buying a cellphone, that they made it—but they can have a better life.”