By Laura Huttunen

This article suggests a conceptual framework to think about migrant disappearances. It argues that juxtaposing them with disappearances in other contexts, such as armed conflicts and totalitarian regimes, makes it possible to understand the specificities of each context. The suggested conceptual framework approaches missing and disappeared people as members of families and local communities, but also as subjects of state power and systems of governance across the globe. Migrant disappearances are framed within the tightening border regimes between the Global North and the Global South, and huge global inequalities. The article maps the specificities of migrant disappearances and the challenges of the reconnecting work of search and forensic identification in the context of irregular or undocumented migration. It argues that migrant disappearances often result from migrants being exposed to dangerous circumstances and being left unprotected by any state. The uncertainties and agonies as well as practical and judicial problems faced by families and communities left behind are foregrounded. Moreover, it argues for attention to be paid to various forms of symbolic ‘reappearances’, such as memorial practices and political activism. It also argues that there is a need for more empirical data and theoretical understanding of the complexities of migrant disappearances and reappearances across the globe, both at a global systemic level and in the multiple localities touched by disappeared community members.

Journal of Disappearance Studies, 1(1), 75-93. Retrieved Oct 6, 2025,

Edited by Alejandra J Josiowicz, Irasema Coronado 

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.

Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes—educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the “best interest of the child”—this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children’s experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants.

This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 255p.