Amelia Frank Vitale
is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University.
An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Dr. Frank-Vitale
has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they
develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions
on movement. Her book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds,
examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature
of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of
mobility control - and the creative ways people challenge them - across scale and space.
Lauren Heidbrink
is a Professor of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She is a legal
anthropologist who focuses on the anthropology of childhood and migration in Central America.
Her first book, Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests,
examines the experiences of migrant children in U.S. federal facilities for unaccompanied children and
following release. Her second book Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation traces the impacts
of the securitization of development on Indigenous Guatemalan youth following deportation from the U.S.
and Mexico.
Dr. Heidbrink is co-founder and editor of Youth Circulations, a nexus for research, art and activism
examining the real and imagined circulations of global youth. She is cofounder and editor of Pressing
Issues in Latin America. She serves on the Editorial Board for NYU Press’ Critical Perspectives on Youth
Series, Board President of Colectivo Vida Digna-Guatemala, and on the steering committee for Anthropologist
Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees. She frequently serves as a country conditions expert in U.S.
immigration proceedings.
Luis Guaman
is a senior majoring in Political Science at Princeton University. He is interested in examining the
political implications of the Latine immigrant experience in the United States. He is currently applying
for doctoral programs in Political Science, aspiring to become a professor who pursues rigorous
interdisciplinary scholarship and mentors the next generation of academics.
