‘How Can I Have a Future?’: The Temporal Violence of Deportation

Abstract

Based upon multi-sited research with Indigenous youth (13 to17 years old) deported from the United States and Mexico to Guatemala, this article situates young people’s mobility within multiple historical and ongoing displacements of Indigenous peoples. Longitudinal research with youth reveals that they move in multiple directions, often with great uncertainty, across geopolitical borders and that their mobility carries temporal meaning. Upon deportation, youth confront immediate, material consequences, as well as the inability to fulfill social obligations and rites of passage and the foreclosure of opportunities for long-term mobility. In other words, deportation inflicts not only physical violence but also temporal violence on Indigenous youth compelling them to live in the here and now. Moving across temporalities, I likewise argue that the migration of Indigenous youth must be understood as at once relational and contextual, developing as a social value and economic necessity among Maya families over time. These temporal insights importantly unsettle often-spatialized conceptualizations of migration as a series of linear stages of premigration, migration, settlement and post-deportation that simultaneously privilege settler-colonial jurisprudence and understandings of time.

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