Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States

Luis Buñuel—the great Spanish Mexican film director—brought to the big screen the lives of homeless, derelict kids in Los Olvidados (The Forgotten). The movie was released in the US as The Young and the Damned. Buñuel might have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and made a picture about the kind of young, damned, and forgotten Latinos in Los Angeles who rarely if ever show up in Hollywood films.

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, a new book by UC Berkeley Professor of Sociology, Stephanie L. Canizales, might have provided Buñuel with dozens of poignant stories about real jovenes (youth) living on the edge and far removed from the American Dream.

Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, which translates into English as “without parents, nor papers,” is an excellent source book for social workers, political scientists, and socially conscious activists. It’s subtitled “Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States.” Sadly, some of the individuals that Canizales tracks across a bleak urban landscape can’t survive and don’t ever come of age.

The Mexican, Guatemalan, and El Salvadoran teens and twenty-somethings—whom the author interviewed in L.A.—face many of the same emotional and psychological issues faced by white, middle-class kids. Like their suburban counterparts, the undocumented refugees from poverty, civil wars, and gangs are often lonely, lost, isolated and suicidal—only more so.   

Without their parents and without papers to provide a modicum of protection against cops and immigration agents, they’re vulnerable to arrests, incarceration ,and deportation. They’re also poor, hungry, and often unhoused. When they work, they work in low-paying jobs. None are as successful as Fernando Valenzuela, the Mexican-born pitcher for the Dodgers who grew up in a poor family in Sonora, the youngest of 12 children and who became a highly paid all-star

For more than six years, beginning in 2012—when Barack Obama was president—Professor Canizales listened to and recorded the stories of disadvantaged youth. She also observed their lives up close.

In Sin Padres, Ni Papeles the forgotten kids of L.A. talk candidly about their feelings, their struggles to survive in an urban jungle, and their pursuit of more comfortable and more secure lives than those they endure on the streets, in jobs at the bottom of social ladder, and in communities with easy access to illegal drugs and alcohol.           

At critical junctures in her narrative, Canizales uses Spanish words—desahogo, (unburdening), metas (goals), and perdición (eternal damnation) that enable her to tell stories from inside cultures and communities that are often invisible, but that contribute significantly to the California economy.

Los Angeles citizens who live in mansions in Malibu and Pacific Palisades might read this book and discover truths about their city.

In the chapter titled “Perdition,” the author writes about Esteban, a 28-year-old Mayan in L.A., who uses a scarf to hang himself from a hook in his bedroom. A window faces a community garden where indigenous Maya youth cultivate plots of land “to soothe their emotional distress.” 

Canizales wonders if seeing the garden “would have made a difference” and perhaps persuaded Esteban not to take his own life.

In 2023, she contributed a compelling op-ed piece to the L.A. Times about the child labor epidemic in the U.S. and our failed immigration policy. Now, she might write a popular book for a wide audience about the same subject.