Ten years ago thousands of men, women, and children from El Salvador fled to Honduras to escape government repression and violence. They gathered together into a refugee camp, Colomoncagua. What began as a disorganized collection of individuals would develop into a near-utopian community of 8,400 people. The refugees arrived as illiterate and frightened peasants with little experience with democratic institutions; within a few years they transformed the camp into an economically active, democratic, and participatory society. Steve and Beth Cagan tell the story of the refugees' harrowing flight, their determination to make a better life for themselves, and their brave decision to return to El Salvador. We learn of the refugees' successful efforts at developing education, occupational training, improved nutrition, health care, gender equality, and participatory democracyÐÐdespite extreme poverty and confinement and repression from the Honduran government. But even as they were creating a new life for themselves, the refugees were longing for their homeland, El Salvador. After long and complex negotiations with the governments of Honduras and El Salvador, the refugees repatriated, literally picking up their community and crossing over the border. There, in early 1990, they established a new city named for one of the slain Jesuit priests, Dr. Segundo Montes, where they hope to maintain their communitarian style of work and organization. This compelling story is illustrated with over one hundred superb photographs of the refugees and their community. The pictures and text work together, inspiring us to believe that people can sustain hope and can work to improve the conditions of their lives even in the worst circumstances.

During the civil war that wracked El Salvador from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, the Salvadoran military tried to stamp out dissidence and insurgency through an aggressive campaign of crop-burning, kidnapping, rape, killing, torture, and gruesome bodily mutilations. Even as human rights violations drew world attention, repression and war displaced more than a quarter of El Salvador’s population, both inside the country and beyond its borders. Beyond Displacement examines how the peasant campesinos of war-torn northern El Salvador responded to violence by taking to the hills. Molly Todd demonstrates that their flight was not hasty and chaotic, but was a deliberate strategy that grew out of a longer history of collective organization, mobilization, and self-defense.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone), shortlisted for the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells—in their own words—the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of migrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s narrators bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border. This collection includes the story of Adrián, from Guatemala City, whose mother was shot to death before his eyes. He refused to join a gang, rode across Mexico atop cargo trains, crossed the US border as a minor, and was handcuffed and thrown into ICE detention on his eighteenth birthday. We hear the story of Rosa, a Salvadoran mother fighting to save her life as well as her daughter’s after death squads threatened her family. Together they trekked through the jungles on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, where masked men assaulted them. We also meet Gabriel, who after surviving sexual abuse starting at the age of eight fled to the United States, and through study, legal support and work, is now attending UC Berkeley.

Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. The 52 state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers working in universities, research centres, think tanks, NGOs and international organizations, provide a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. The chapters vividly illustrate the vibrant and engaging debates that characterize this rapidly expanding field of research and practice.

Tells the story of the 20th-century Central American migration, and how domestic and foreign policy interests shaped the asylum policies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

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.

"The US government has deported people to face abuse and even death in El Salvador. The US is not solely responsible--Salvadoran gangs who prey on deportees and Salvadoran authorities who harm deportees or who do little or nothing to protect them bear direct responsibility--but in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm's way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely."--Publisher website, viewed February 14, 2020.

This text gives a detailed account of the inner workings of the networks by which immigrants leave their homes in Central America to start new lives in the Mission District of San Francisco.