Home Is There: Borderlands, Belonging, and the Stories We Tell

What does it mean to call a place home? What does it mean to belong? Immigrant families and youth in the United States exist in a precarious zone of indistinction, in an imaginary space, sin tierra en cuál sembrar nuestras raices. This is what living in the borderlands feels like. It is like living in a house without foundation. Confined by shifting walls and borders, immigrant families exist and live in a mythological land of the here and there. Como dice la India Maria, somos ni de aqui ni de alla. This is our home, and it has been fabricated for us. It is a wavering zone that has been intentionally constructed to make the other feel unwelcomed. The chapter discusses the ways in which immigrant youth and their families experience and imagine home and interrogate how and why certain home realities are neglected, unrecognized, or silenced. Drawing from autoethnography, conversational interviews with immigrant children and their parents, and Border Crit Theory, the chapter questions fixed notions of home and advocate for the creation of more fluid, transformative, and inclusive spaces of belonging.